There’s a ton to see in Nova Scotia, and planning a trip can be overwhelming–even if you have three weeks to fit everything in like we did. So I based a lot of our stops on the same thing I would when planning a trip in the US: proximity to national park sites. So I picked Highbury Gardens RV Park because it’s just a few minutes away from Grand-Pré National Historic Site, and it turned out to be well situated to see some other cool stuff, too.
Highbury Gardens is officially in Canaan, Nova Scotia, but it’s close to both the relatively big (it has a Wal-mart!) Kentville and the college town of Wolfville. W/E and full hook-up sites are available, and rates range from $44 to $50CDN. We only had a 2 1/2 drive to get here from our previous stop in Parrsboro. A somewhat frustrating thing we found about driving in Nova Scotia is that the fastest route often seems to include driving nearly to Halifax and then away from it again…..Parrsboro is on the Bay of Fundy and so is this part of Nova Scotia, yet we had to drive nearly to the other side of the province to get there; there are roads that don’t take you so far south, but our GPS was quite insistent that those ways would take longer even though they look shorter on the map.
At any rate, we got here and checked in, and they gave us two different open sites to pick from. So we did, got set up, and headed out to dinner in Kentville (in retrospect, I wish we’d taken the opportunity to check out Wolfville instead). When we got back, the campground owner was parked by our site. “This site gets some water puddling when it rains,” he told us. Massive understatement. It rained that night–a good bit of rain, but not anything torrential–and we woke up to our stabilizer jacks and trailer tires sitting in six inches of standing water. We couldn’t leave the trailer without wading through a small pond.
Our site in happier times:
I will say, however, that the vast majority of sites in the campground appeared to drain just fine in the rain. I think the guy realized after he gave us our site that he probably shouldn’t have, but by then we were all unhitched and it was a little too late to do much about it. So the flooded site had a negative impact on our personal stay here, but as long as you’re aware of the forecast and make sure to ask for a site without drainage problems, you should be in good shape. Had it not been raining, our site would have been lovely, as you can see in the picture above.
Highbury Gardens has all your basic amenities: there’s a small playground, a pool, a laundry room (we used it, and it was fine), clean but dated bathhouse with pay showers (common in Nova Scotia, from what we saw). There are a good many seasonal sites, and all seemed to be well kept up. There’s a nature trail towards the back of the property where we were able to walk the dogs when we finally got a break in the rain on our second morning.
I only took three pictures (see: constant rain). Here is the third one:
The location is convenient to a lot of different destinations. We visited Grand-Prè and Ross Farm while we were here, both under half an hour away, but you could also easily do day trips from here to Halifax or Annapolis Royal or Lunenburg (all just over an hour away). And of course your very close to the Bay of Fundy (Blomidon Provincial Park is one destination on the bay, about 30 minutes away, but I’m sure there are other great places to see it, too).
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