Wolfville now has a new notoriety for me. Sure, it will forever be known as the place where I went to university, but Wolfville is the only place in the entire Annapolis Valley that we could find real Lattes; and, we drove all the way to Wolfville to experience said sumptuous latte (or three) and wander around the university town.
Not a lot has changed since I went there in the 80s. There are some new buildings and such, but the same university is still the same and the coffee shop regulars are still drinking coffee at the coffee shop. The Anvil is still there (probably under a different name) and Rick is still selling music paraphernalia at the Market. Of course we had to go in and chat with Rick for a while, it was a hot day and his little shop was sweltering.
After all this we headed to Grande Pre.
Grande Pre has a sad history. Grande Pre means great meadows in French and this is an apt description for the fertile land and dikes that the French settlers build in the 1600s along the fertile shores.
In the 1755 the British wanted to reclaim the lands and expelled thousands of Acadian people to Louisiana. This is the connection between the Acadian people of Canada and Cajun people of the U.S. The expulsion was the basis for the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline, in which two newlyweds are separated when the Acadian men and women were separated during the expulsion. It follows their lives apart until she finds him by chance on his deathbed.
Grande Pre was beautiful, though not as beautiful as it has been in the past, Nova Scotia is experiencing severe drought conditions so it is hard to keep a lot of vegetation alive. The site itself is really a pilgrimage point for a lot of Cajuns from the U.S. looking for their roots. I think the bulk of the tourists there on this day were there for that reason.
