I can’t remember exactly how the little town of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, right on the Bay of Fundy, made it onto our Atlantic Canada itinerary, but I’m glad it did. We loved the town, and it served as a perfect introduction to Nova Scotia for us. We spent three nights here, so we had two full days, but on one of those days we drove over to Joggins Fossil Cliffs…leaving us with one day plus a couple of evenings to explore Parrsboro. Here’s the run down of what we did and of what we wished we’d had time for.
Fundy Geological Museum
This small but nicely done museum is a great introduction to the Bay of Fundy and the geological history of the area. Fundy is a hotbed of fossil finds, and you can see some of the oldest dinosaur bones in Canada right here. There are a number of interactive displays to hold young kids’ attention (including a dinosaur fossil dig area) and enough in depth information to keep older kids and parents engaged as well.
Allow maybe an hour to tour the museum. Admission is $9 for adults or $19.25 for two parents and all children. The museum is part of the Nova Scotia Museum, a system with 28 sites all over the province. We knew we’d be hitting quite a few of them, so we went ahead and bought a membership for just under $100 (Canadian), and we definitely got our money’s worth from it.
They also offer guided beach walks in the area. We didn’t do one since we had a tour at Joggins Fossil Cliffs planned, but this would be an excellent alternative (or addition, if you can’t get enough fossil hunting).
Partridge Island Hike
It was surprisingly tricky to find official hikes in the area. Although, of course, there’s always the opportunity to just ramble aimlessly along a beach (as we did at the beach by our campground). But we did do the Partridge Island hike right near downtown.
It was a little tricky to figure out where to park here; there’s a “road” that goes over the rocky beach, and we did see people driving on it….but there was also a sign there warning that it wasn’t a maintained road and that maybe we should just turn around. So we did, and we parked in the lot at the adjacent Ottawa House Museum instead. Which meant we had a little bit of extra hike across the beach, but that was not such a bad thing:
I guess it’s called an island because it’s separated by this strip of beach….but I don’t think the passage is ever completely underwater. The hike itself is 3 km/2 miles. The first part takes you steeply uphill through the woods, with occasional lookouts over the surrounding area. Then you go much less steeply downhill and eventually make it to an observation tower for great views of the Bay of Fundy:
So all in all it was a short but challenging little hike with a nice payoff in the observation tower.
Ottawa House Museum
This museum tells the story of life in the Parrsboro area over the course of more than 200 years. They also sell ice cream.
Sadly, ice cream is all we had time for here. We had the dogs with us on our Partridge Island hike, and it was a little warm that day, so we didn’t want to leave them in the car long enough for us to see the whole museum. We thought we’d make it back before we left the area but it never quite happened.
Harbour View Restaurant
We ate here our first night in town. We’d been driving all day, and we didn’t have much in the way of food in the trailer since we’d been trying to use most things up before crossing the border….so it was wonderful to find such a nice little place right on the water. Nothing fancy, but the food was good, the service was friendly, and the prices were reasonable. Dave and Milo tried their first poutine here! And there were giant chairs right by the ocean outside for Abe to hang out on when he finished eating and got a little restless.
Places we didn’t go!
*Ward Falls: I love a good waterfall hike, but this one was closed when we were there. Word is it’s open again now!
*Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy: exhibits about tidal energy. We felt like we had to pick between this and the geological center due to time constraints, but we were bummed not to make it here.
*Ship’s Company Theatre: professional summer theater right in Parrsboro! The season hadn’t started yet when we were here in June.
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I’m not as much into fossils as I was as a child, but this sounds like a fun area and worth a longer stay. But so many places are, and there is only so much time.
Glad to know there was ice cream1
So much ice cream, so little time :). Yeah, Parrsboro isn’t somewhere we would have sought out if it hadn’t happened to have the right location to be our first stop, so it was a lovely sort of accidental discovery.