A month into the first ever full shut down of the world, my kids, husband and I were getting used to the reality of being in lockdown. No going to school, no going into the office and grocery shopping in person was like venturing out into the unknown. We were walking our dog at the crack of dawn and day drinking by lunch. Life was like some dystopian Dickens novel set in present day.
Since the small leather studio I worked part-time at in exchange for using their equipment to produce my products was closed, I was home with not enough supplies to produce anything of consequence. In between supervising online school and making elaborate meals for every meal, with an afternoon glass of Chablis in hand, I opened up my iPad and started to look at real estate listings in Nova Scotia.
It wasn’t random that Nova Scotia was the target of my real estate musings, my husband and I had done a road trip, sans kids, a couple of summers back through New England and the Maritimes. It was fabulous to pack light and take to the road in our little two seater convertible. Our itinerary included driving down through Vermont, New Hampshire, up the coast of Maine and the ferry to Nova Scotia before heading back towards Toronto through New Brunswick and Quebec (a drive I now know so well). When we arrived in Lunenburg along the “Light House Route” we fell in love with the quaintness and beauty of the small town recognized by Unesco as a heritage site. While we took in the sights, we also poked around in the real estate offices to see how much a little fishing cottage by the sea would set us back. There were so many cute victorian era homes but many of them needed some work. But, the seed was planted and while on our long drive home to Ontario, we mused about what it would be like to have a place in Nova Scotia. We definitely had to bring the kids out to see more of this side of Canada. How great would it be to do it from our own little place by the sea!
As I perused the listings of homes by the ocean, I started to compile a list of musts. It must be ocean front. It must be at least a few acres. It must be not more than an hour and half from the airport. What started as a house hunt ended in a property hunt. We came to realize that our priority wasn’t the house but the setting.
I plugged in the requirements into the real estate listings site and sifted through the listings it suggested. The list was quite long. I narrowed it down to about six. They were all within a short distance of Lunenburg and well with in our conservative price range. After a false start with an agent out of Halifax, we met Mike from Chester. Now, remember it was April of 2020. We were in lock down and couldn’t go into homes for sale. What was even more of an issue was that we couldn’t even go down to Nova Scotia to look at vacant land. The governments of the Maritimes in an effort to mitigate spread of the virus from the more populated parts of Canada, shut its borders to any outsiders, even from other parts of Canada let alone anyone from outside of the country. So, Mike our agent with our list of potential properties, headed out for a little weekend drive with his wife. Apparently, he had promised his wife lunch at the lovely Rosebay Bistro (now one of our favourite places in the area but I’m getting ahead of myself) if she would come along to visit the properties on our list on our behalf.
“I found your Nova Scotia place!” Mike exclaimed over the phone the following Monday. He gave me the low down of each property and it’s pros and cons but there was one that stood out. His wife, whom we’d never spoken to before, looked at the view of the bay from the bench and said “This is their place”.