Nova Scotia Adventure!: Day 8

We fortunately woke up to a beautiful, sunny day! David made me a delicious breakfast, and then we hit the road headed toward the Bottle House and Gardens, far to the western side of the island - the opposite direction from yesterday, but also over an hour.

The Bottle House and Gardens were owned by Edouard Arsenault, and in 1980, as a hobby, he started cementing bottles together into the form of a house. There was no recycling then so he gathered bottles from the dump, and eventually neighbors gave him their used bottles. There are over 25,000 bottles used in all of his creations, until he died just four years later.

The "Chapel"

Pews in the chapel

The gardens there are also beautiful!

This lighthouse is a replica of an actual lighthouse that we also visited.

Edouard was also the last resident keeper of the local lighthouse (the replica is above). The actual lighthouse is just down the road, so we went there too.

This is the easy-to-miss road to the lighthouse.

View looking left

View looking right

This video is looking around the lighthouse area.

Next, we decided to go to the Canadian Potato Museum (yes, actually. And to think a few years back we went to the Louvre!) Anyway, it was actually kind of interesting! There were two sides, one was local history and the other was all about potatoes and how they were introduced in various countries. One interesting fact...... Thomas Jefferson had eaten French fries while he was living in France. When he became president, he had his chef prepare potatoes the way they do in France! Thank you Jefferson!

This was some of the old farm equipment used in the area.

David took this picture cause he used to have the hockey game at the top of the display!

In the part of the museum about the local area, they had a section about local doctors and medicine. This is an iron lung. Polio patients spent their lives in these. Now that polio is making a comeback, we may sadly see more of them.

This was part of the museum about potatoes.

The museum of course had a cafe, where they served.......potatoes! Here's part of the menu!

My lunch - comfort food!

Dave had the potato soup.

We then went to the Shellfish Museum, but when we got there, we found out it wasn't yet open for the season. But I took a picture of the view behind the museum.

We decided that we haven't eaten enough oysters for this visit, and although we're going to a restaurant tonight, we decided to have a late afternoon "snack", so we went to the restaurant that supposedly had the best oysters, The Sea Rocket Oyster House. David had them raw and I had baked oysters - half Rockefeller and half Champagne Cream! They did not disappoint!

Oysters right at the bar!

My non-alcoholic (but delicious) drink!

HALF of David's oysters

My food, taken after I'd already eaten two.

After this "snack" we went to our rental to relax for a while. There was a softball game going on outside our windows in the park. Then we went to dinner at Lobster on the Wharf, which is right on the water. It wasn't too crowded, but it's right next to where the cruise ships dock, so it must get pretty busy then. We had a great meal and then headed home to pack as we're moving on tomorrow!