Halifax Citadel and Grand-Pré

(Note: this post is a day late, due to weak Internet.)

We visited two National Historic Sites in the last two days. Here are some of my pictures. Be sure to take a look at Susie & Denny’s blog for more pictures and a description of the Citadel, so I won’t need to repeat it.

Denny took a liking to this young woman, but she told him she was married to a young soldier (not really).

Here are some views of the city from atop the Citadel.

Today we visited Grand-Pré (French for great meadow), a site commemorating the Acadian settlement from 1682 to 1755, and the British deportation of the Acadians. Thousands of Acadians refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the British crown. The families were forced out of their homes and sent into exile, scattered to numerous locations, including several places in the U.S. as well as a return to France.

The Acadians built dykes to hold back the high tides along the Minas Basin near the Bay of Fundy. They devised a clever way to drain water from the fields and prevent incoming salt water by using wooden valves in sluices.

This hand-carved sluice was made from a hollowed-out white pine tree and dates from 1686.

Their homes, churches and other structures were burned by the British to prevent their return. At this site there were about 150 houses and 150 barns and other buildings. Some have been reconstructed in locations determined by air photo analysis, geophysical surveys and excavations on the fields. Archaeologists have unearthed pottery and other artifacts from this period.

This statue of Evangeline, heroine of Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” was commissioned by the Dominion Atlantic Railway.

This beautiful church is a reconstruction of one that might have stood here.

The entire interior of the church is beautiful, but this stained glass window is my favorite part.

The tour was very interesting and provides “the rest of the story” from what we learned about the Acadians from the Louisiana point of view, where many of these people ended up.

Later, Don had a yearning for another lobster. So we drove the short distance to Peggy’s Cove. Here are the Before pictures.

And After.

I even got a few bites to supplement my fish and chips. Yummy!

Here’s Peggy’s Point Lighthouse in the fog.

On the way home we stopped to see the Swissair Flight 111 Memorial. It remembers the 229 men, women and children who died in the plane crash about 12 km off this point on September 2, 1998.

It also recognizes those who provided assistance in the recovery operations and gave comfort to the families and friends.