Joggins Fossil Cliffs and Old Town Lunenburg

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Joggins Fossil Cliffs

   Hold a piece of rock from the beach at Joggins and you may be holding a fern that grew three hundred million years ago. The cliffs along this stretch of the Bay of Fundy expose rocks laid down in the Coal Age, the Carboniferous period, when this part of Nova Scotia lay near the equator and was covered in tropical swamp forest. Layer after layer of sandstone, shale and coal runs along the shore for kilometres, and in them are the fossilised trunks of giant trees still standing upright, with the remains of the animals that lived among them. UNESCO listed the site in 2008.

   Read the complete Joggins Fossil Cliffs write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Joggins Fossil Cliffs is where the day begins. Next is Landscape of Grand Pré.

2. 2. Landscape of Grand Pré

   The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world, and at Grand Pré the sea comes in and out of the Minas Basin with a rush that can move the waterline across mudflats the size of a small town. Behind that shifting edge lies a broad, flat, green meadow that was not always land. The Acadians, French settlers who arrived in the seventeenth century, built earthen dykes with wooden sluice gates called aboiteaux to keep the tide out and turn salt marsh into rich farmland. The work took generations, and the dykes still protect fields today.

   Read the complete Landscape of Grand Pré write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Landscape of Grand Pré comes up about 262 km into the recorded legs. Next is Old Town Lunenburg.

3. 3. Old Town Lunenburg

   Colour is the first thing that hits you in Lunenburg: wooden houses in mustard, barn red, teal and white, climbing the slope from the harbour in tidy rows. The town sits on Nova Scotia's South Shore, on a peninsula facing the Atlantic, and it is one of the best-preserved examples of a planned British colonial town in North America. It was founded in 1753, and the grid of streets laid out then is still the grid you walk now. The first settlers were largely Protestants from German-speaking lands, along with some Swiss and French, which is why you still hear names like Zwicker and Rhuland.

   Read the complete Old Town Lunenburg write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 375 km into the recorded legs you reach Old Town Lunenburg. Next is back through Landscape of Grand Pré.

4. 4. back through Landscape of Grand Pré

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Landscape of Grand Pré write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Landscape of Grand Pré, late in the day. Next is Joggins Fossil Cliffs.

5. 5. Joggins Fossil Cliffs

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Joggins Fossil Cliffs write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Joggins Fossil Cliffs. That is the ride.