After Ariel and I had an incredible time celebrating our 10 year anniversary in St. Lucia, it was time for another trip with the family we created together.

After some… challenges… with getting the littlest member of our traveling party to get into our adventuring rhythms, we decided we wanted somewhere that was a relatively short flight from New Jersey, ideally within 2 hours.

Being that it was the summer, and we’d done several tropical-style trips in a row, I thought it would be a nice change of pace to head somewhere a little more… Canadian. Ariel and I had a great time on our several trips to Canada (including Vancouver, the Canadian Rockies, and Montreal) and we had a really fun trip to Toronto with Jacob when he was a year and a half old, so we figured let’s do something similar with his little brother.

Growing up near New York City means bagels have been a staple of our weekend brunches, and what would a bagel be without some cream cheese and lox to go along with it? Since we’d already been to Toronto and Montreal recently, and the West Coast was too far, I thought it would be fun to head to the birthplace of “Nova Lox” aka the smoked salmon that has been on too many of my bagels to count.

As a bonus neither of us had ever been there, which meant we could each cross another Canadian province off our list, now that my 50 state adventure was over, hitting all the provinces seems like a solid sidequest.

So we packed everyone up and headed up to Nova Scotia, in search of smoked salmon.

I immediately noticed something was a little off when we went to the supermarket shortly after landing and there was no smoked fish to be seen any of the appetizing counters. At every restaurant we went to, there was no smoked fish to be had either. Turns out… “nova salmon” has nothing to do with where the fish comes from, it refers to the method of preparation!

Apparently salmon generally comes from either the Pacific Ocean or near Norway. In the pre-refrigeration days, when they imported fish to New York City, often from Norway, it would first arrive in Nova Scotia. They would then brine it or smoke it or find other ways to preserve it so that it would not rot by the time it arrived at the fish market.

The word “lox” itself comes from the Yiddish word “lachs” which has its roots in German and the Scandinavian languages. In Norway, the word “gravlax” means – you guessed it – “cured salmon” with the “lax” portion referring to the salmon.

But the fish itself comes from nowhere near Nova Scotia, so the only place to get it would be at one of the old factories where they used to do it (or the handful that still do). There are a few restaurants in Halifax that serve a smoked fish of some kind, and we did end up getting a really terrific Halifax-style bagel with lox at Izzy’s Bagels. But that’s much more likely to have been influenced by New York than the other way around.

So that was kind of a big fail. I’m not saying that was the ONLY reason we wanted to go there (that would be insane) but it was something I was pretty hyped for. The food we did have was generally quite good though.

We also got to see the world’s largest tides at the Bay of Fundy… where the difference between high tide and low tide is 50 feet! And when it’s low tide you can walk on what is normally the ocean floor. This was really cool but very slippery and not really suitable for Ethan or any other 3-ish year old.

In general this trip was pretty tough, which is why I hadn’t written anything about it until now. Ariel tried to design a trip that would be really older-toddler-friendly but Ethan just really wasn’t into very much of it. I’d like to do a write up about it at some point, but for now “Nova Scotia” is probably going to be shorthand for a busted trip. As in “I don’t want another Nova Scotia on our hands!”

Which isn’t really fair to Nova Scotia, but it’s how it went for us…

Currently we are on another major trip – this time in Israel – and it seems like maybe we’ve regained our footing somewhat. We’ll see. But I hope to have more time/energy to write about our adventures over here over the next few days.

But… yeah… “Nova smoked salmon” is apparently not actually from “Nova” at all! So at least I learned something new.