For Mothers’ Day, Laurel sent Heather a gift certificate for Blomidon Nurseries.
This gave us an excuse to drive up to Wolfville. We exchanged the certificate for strawberry plants.
Afterwards, we went over to the ArtCan Cafe in Canning, for an early afternoon tea.
The richness of the agriculture is always a surprise on the dykelands of Kings County.
To enhance the experience, we returned home on Highway #221, instead of Highway #101. In Kings County, you really get a sense of the width of the Valley, as well as the focus on the orchards. There is a noticeable change in scale and topography, as you cross the Annapolis County line.
A few days earlier, we attended a talk at the MacDonald Museum by Steve Skafte.
His focus was more historical ‘The River was once a Road: Abandoned Roads of Nova Scotia’.
The discussion afterwards with the audience was more about land ownership and rights of way; less about the richness of the landscape, its ecology and geography.
This week, I enjoyed useful discussions with Ed Symons and Edward Wedler on the tools of AI and Community Mapping. The challenge as one enters my next decade (#8) is to keep current with the tools and the technology. My interest has always been the ‘application’.
Subsequently, I decided to step back from the 50th anniversary presentation to AAGP. However, I do believe that the story of the Mountain and the Valley can be defined by artists, writers, musicians and scientists who chose to live a rural lifestyle. That is worth sharing with the larger world.
Postscript
John Wightman sent me a wonderful image of the meanders of the Annapolis River below Bridgetown (taken by photographer Travis Z. Baker).
Acknowledgements
Thank you for conversations with Ed Symons and Edward Wedler on the intricacies of AI tools, and their application to my blog posts.
Ernest Blair Experiment 