Travel dates: June 25, 2018
I love a good historic site (or even a mediocre historic site), but after you’ve done about a million of them in the US they can start to be a little repetitive. “Oh, look–a Civil War battle happened here, too.” I’m okay with repetition, but novelty is nice, too…and that’s what we found at the Canadian historic sites we visited. I mean, if you’re Canadian and grew up learning Canadian history, then you probably have to go to a different country for novelty. Like we did!
Novelty is maybe not the best word for history detailed at Grand-prè National Historic Site (also a UNESCO World Heritage Site), as it details a very dark incident from Canadian history: the forced expulsion of the Acadian people from their ancestral homeland. If Americans have any knowledge of this, it’s likely because of Longfellow’s famous poem, “Evangeline,” a retelling of the events from the viewpoint of a fictional heroine. But no one really reads Longfellow anymore, except the Paul Revere poem, so we didn’t know much about it ourselves. (I had to give a presentation on Longfellow once in grad school, and it was quite a slog. Generally the way things work with writers who have long since fallen out of critical favor is that you can find someone or other who’s trying to redeem them and make them out to somehow be more complex and subversive than they’ve generally been thought to be. Not so Longfellow. No one wants to reclaim that guy; the best I could find was the occasional critic saying he did some moderately interesting things with meter).
Anyway, Longfellow is enjoying a bit of immortality at Grand-prè, and a statue of Evangeline figures prominently here:
Grand-prè was our first historic site in Canada, and we were impressed. With what we saw, at least; it was rainy and cold the day we went, so we weren’t able to get to a lot of the outdoor stuff. There are extensive grounds where you can see things like the historic dikes and…..yeah, actually I’m not sure what else because we didn’t get to see them. But my point is, there’s a ton to do here, and you could easily spend a full day if you want to get to everything.
But it might be raining, or you might be there in June like we were. The Visitor Centre is open from mid May through early October, but we found that you have far more options when it comes to planned activities and guided walks and all that in July and August than in the shoulder seasons. So for the first week or so of our Nova Scotia visit we often were sharing the sites we saw with school groups on field trips and pretty much no one else.
We did spent a couple of very interesting hours checking out the well done inside sights, though. First we toured the museum in the Visitor Centre, after picking up Abe’s Xplorers book (the Canadian equivalent to Junior Rangers in the US). We did things a little out of order and saw museum before the film, but it would have been better to do the film first. The film is a great introduction to the site’s history and the theater is very, very cool; it’s supposed to look like the inside of a ship (don’t tell your kids that in advance; part of the Xplorers book is figuring it out). There are a number of hands-on activities for kids in the museum.
Then we ventured out into the drizzly cold rain for the short walk to the chapel. We were surprised to find that this was pretty much another museum, with lots of kid focused activities. Like dress up! They’re super into dressing up at Canadian historic sites.
The chapel is a lovely space, with this (modern) stained glass tribute to the displaced Acadians:
We ran into school groups here, and probably more people than usual because everyone was escaping the rain, so we didn’t stay terribly long.
And then we headed back to the campground for lunch! I think, of all the places we visited in Nova Scotia, I’d go back and give more time to Grand-prè if I could, because it was such a well-done historic site, and so interesting, and we missed so much of it. So next time we go in July on a sunny day!
Tips for visiting:
*admission is $7.80CDN for adults, $6.55 for seniors, and free for kids 17 and under
*we bought a Parks Canada pass when they were having a sale on them in December, and it was definitely worth it for us. Look into it if you’re planning to visit multiple sites
*one difference we noticed between Canadian and US National Park sites is that there are often more “extras” to pay for in Canada. Ranger talks are generally free in the US, but you often pay a small fee for them in Canada. That said, the cost is always quite reasonable and we found all the programs high quality (we didn’t do any at Grand-prè specifically, but they offer a number of different ones in season)
*the Xplorers books are nicely done and well worth your time if you have younger kids; we did find that they skewed a little younger than US Junior Ranger books, generally speaking….I’d say kids between 4 and 10 or so would enjoy them the most
*we stayed right down the road at Highbury Gardens RV Park, but this would be an easy day trip from a lot of places, like Halifax or Annapolis Royal.
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