Date traveled: August 3, 2016
Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia is essentially just the lighthouse and stories of people drowning or almost-drowning because they can’t resist stepping in off the rocks. With so many people around, and so close to the shore, it seems safe enough. We picture dangerous areas as dark and remote, not places we can recognize from a million postcards and photographs hanging up in meeting rooms of government office buildings.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of an iconic lighthouse from Canada, there’s a good chance this was it. What those pictures don’t tend to capture is that the lighthouse is completely surrounded by hyper-commercialized madness that reminded me of Niagara Falls. Like Niagara Falls, the views are nice, but only if you look straight ahead and don’t have your sight impeded. You might want to cover your ears too, or get close enough to the waves that they drown everything else out.
There were other nice views without the parades of people on the Nova Scotia coastline, so I wouldn’t recommend Peggy’s Cove in particular unless you like your natural scenery with an unbelievable amount of chaos in a small space. There was even a woman singing with an accordion at the base of the lighthouse and a guy playing bagpipes, and I think both were raking in a fair number of American bills.
Speaking of coves, Smuggler’s Cove on the other side of the peninsula was pretty cool. We scaled some rocks to get on this small stone beach and went for a quick swim. It made me really miss beach-climbing, which I used to do in Victoria and Ucluelet when I lived around there. I like pulled my bare feet over the edges of rocks and algae, finding the shapes I could step safely on without cutting myself or slipping to my peril.
When looking to find photos I took of this place, I had just assumed that google had kept them, transferring them directly from my phone to the cloud like so many other things, but there was a missing spot on my drive where those photos used to be. I could probably change my settings and stop what I imagine as a random deletion of things, but I don’t know how much it actually means to me. These photos I found from a Facebook post I made shortly after the trip and are the only ones I have. Not that I feel like I need many more, but I definitely had some stealth ones of the tourists and performers catering to the tourists, and the commercialized structures surrounding the lighthouse, which is what I found most interesting about the place, in all honesty, as nice as it in many ways was.
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