K & L's Travel Blog

26 September 2025

I had read about the “Bay to Bay Trail” that runs between Mahone Bay and Lunenburg and was looking forward to walking about 5 miles of it to a restaurant called “The Hungry Traveler.” I was to meet Kitty there for breakfast before we visited Lunenburg. I set off early through our neighborhood, past the requisite scarecrows, up a slight hill before turning onto the trail towards Lunenburg.

The trail of crushed gravel was built on an old railway bed and is part of the Rum Runners Trail that starts in Halifax and runs down the South Shore. At first the straight & level gravel trail felt unnatural. I remembered the Austrian architect Hundertwasser’s saying “A straight line is godless.” But all I had to do was to look to either side where the wetlands provided lush natural scenes of ferns, spruce and pines, black, swampy soil and the sound of running water. It had rained the night before so there was that wash of temporary relief from the extreme drought. I came upon a porcupine in the trail, but remembered from my childhood in Florida that they are not normally aggressive animals, so I told it I just wanted to pass, and it let me by without incident. It was actually pretty cute. And the trail turned out to be beautiful.

I met Kitty as planned at “The Hungry Traveler.” This road-side restaurant is quite close to where we stayed in 2011 and had garnished excellent reviews. They had been planning a move to a downtown Lunenburg location for months and were making the final move in two days. They were auctioning porch furniture (online) as we waited for our meal. But we still enjoyed our breakfasts and our easy conversation with the one of the proprietors. They observed Halal, and it was my first time trying beef bacon. It was excellent. 

Lunenburg was much as I’d remembered with colorful, historical houses and shops on the shores of a lovely harbor. We started this time at the top of the hill at the imposing Lunenburg Academy, once a Victorian-era private school and now a center for various local foundations. It was adjacent to the old cemetery, which had graves dating back to the 1700’s. 

We tracked behind a city walking tour group as we made our down through the historical neighborhood towards the water. It felt as though there were churches on every corner. I’d not seen a chimney on a church before, but then it made perfect sense given when it was built and the winters they endure.

The traffic is intense and reminds us of home with its complication of lost tourists. We walk up and down and across, exhausting ourselves on the hills. We stop in a local distillery we had been to years ago and picked up a small bottle of their Pear Eau de Vie. Lunenburg is wonderfully colorful and well-preserved. No wonder it’s a World Heritage Site!

We return that night to Mahone Bay for another stunning sunset that doesn’t seem to quit.