I’m back from a trip to the Motherland: Nova Scotia. This Canadian province was one of the 4 originals in the Confederation of Canada on July 1st, 1867. It is also my recent ancestral home. Though I’d been a number of times to visit my grandmothers and see where my parents grew up, there was much of the province I had never got to experience, until now.

For the second summer in a row I did a stay-cation. Rest assured, Nova Scotia is quite different, almost pseudo-foreign, to the place where I am living now and it certainly was as expensive as travelling abroad, but there are advantages to travelling in your own backyard:

• the currency is the same
• you don’t need a passport or visa
• the language is familiar
  and
• you get to see your country through tourist eyes thus developing a new appreciation for it.

Any other advantages you’d like to add to the list?

Stay tuned in the coming week as I regale you with stories of lavender treasures found, local food ingredients I can’t wait to ‘alchemize’ into healthy vegetarian treats and reviews of the many hikes I got to experience. Oh yes, there was chocolate too – lots of it and scrumptious!

Watch this space…