Winters and Summers in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Royal

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  04.28.08 | 10:53 AM ET

In anyone else’s hands, Annapolis Royal: Enchanted Valley would likely be just another roundup of “cute” shops in a “quaint” historic town. But when Noah Richler (son of Mordecai, and with at least some of his father’s enormous talent) is the writer, it becomes a meditation on the turning of the seasons. “Summer plays tricks on Canadian visitors,” he writes, and it has “done so since the nation’s very start. ... How cruel it must have seemed to the Frenchmen in the New World that a place so utterly idyllic in summer would prove so difficult to endure come winter.”

For Richler, the Annapolis Valley is “Eastern Canada at its most fecund,” while the local Farmers’ Market is “the region’s delirious expression of seasonal bounty.” And, in an article aimed squarely at the summer antiquing crowd, he takes the time to note that the town should be visited in winter, too, in order to “see it against the green of forest, blue of sky and white of snow that have been this land’s true winter colours since time immemorial.”

Tags: North America, Canada

Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


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