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To escape the Texas heat for their summer vacation, Carol and Virgil Yarborough originally planned to travel from Austin to Alaska. Instead, they ended up at Trout Point Lodge in Yarmouth County, N.S. - not as far north but just as remote.

"It's not what you'd see anywhere else. It's very unique to the place," Carol said.

Almost everyone who arrives at Trout Point, in the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, comments on two things: the drive to get there from the ferry or the airport and how much they're looking forward to the food.

Since opening in 2000, the lodge has been included in numerous "best of" lists, including this year's nod by online Condé Nast magazine Concierge.com that deemed it the second-best place in the world to go for a cookery vacation. (First place went to the Giuliano Hazan cooking school just outside Verona, Italy.)

The Yarboroughs are regular visitors to Louisiana, and Carol grew up eating gumbo and jambalaya made by a favourite aunt. But until reading about Trout Point Lodge, owned by three transplanted Americans who now consider Nova Scotia their home, neither realized that the Cajun food they loved has its roots in Nova Scotia.

"To be real honest, I've never thought about Cajun foods coming from this part of the world, so that intrigued us and made it more interesting for us to do," Virgil said. "We enjoy cooking and we enjoy learning new techniques and different kinds of food, so that sold us on it, for sure."

The lodge offers three seafood cooking school weekends during the summer. At the end of the day, visitors eat meals they've watched being prepared or helped cook themselves.

A recent school included students from Idaho, Washington, Michigan, Texas, Vermont, New York and Toronto. On their first evening, the students dined on roasted eggplant soup, swordfish caught off Yarmouth that morning, and potatoes and peas grown in the lodge's garden, followed by a fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate banana bread pudding.

Vaughn Perret, one of the lodge's owners, showed his guests how to prepare a reduction made from nothing but bananas and butter that he served with the fish.

"I'd never had swordfish, and I really did not know what to expect. And I probably was not that excited about it, but I thought it was delicious," Carol Yarborough said.

Whether you'd describe the lodge's rooms as comfortable or luxurious would depend on your standards, but there is no disputing that they're quiet. There are no telephones or televisions, and cellphones don't work this far in the woods. Sitting and watching the Tusket River flow slowly by, the silence is so profound that the chattering of a squirrel or chirping of a bird qualifies as a loud noise.

Beside the river are two cedar saunas the size and shape of casks used by wineries. The cedar aroma is so strong that it overwhelms the aroma of charcoal from the lodge, where dinner is being prepared. Next to the saunas is a sunken hot tub, for which river water is heated by a fire built in a compartment adjacent to the tub.

After breakfast on the second day, the students piled into vehicles for a field trip to a lobster pound and an oyster farm.

At Sea Kist Lobster, a shipment of crustaceans bound for Ukraine was being packed. The facility constantly pumps water from the Bay of Fundy through its storage tanks, where almost 60,000 kilograms of lobster are stored for up to six months before being shipped. Scott Mitchell of Sea Kist contradicted conventional wisdom by explaining that lobsters stored this way are actually more tasty than lobster right off the boat.

"The whole time they're in the cages, they're purging waste, so after a few months the meat tastes better," he said.

At nearby Eel Lake, Nolan D'Eon's aquaculture operation has more than a million oysters in the water. Oysters take about three years to reach market size, and D'Eon sold 200,000 last year, some to the Delta hotels in Halifax and the rest to an oyster house in Toronto and three Ontario casinos.

"There are three grades of oyster: commercial, standard and choice. If you can grow all choice beautiful oysters, it pays," D'Eon said as he removed an oyster from a cage, pried it open and handed it to a man from Washington, who happily slurped it down.

Natural oysters also grow in Eel Lake.

"You can't go swimming here - unless you wear steel-soled boots," D'Eon joked. "There are so many oysters on the bottom, you're guaranteed to cut your feet."

Back at the lodge for a lunch of green salad, porcini mushroom soup and chocolate gourmandaise, chef Perret was getting ready for the afternoon session on non-heat seafood cuisine, with lessons on salt curing, cold smoking and acid cooking.

During the preparation of ceviche, the students were amazed to see how quickly shrimp changed colour when dipped in citrus juice, indicating that the acid had begun to "cook" them.

Five years ago, almost everyone who came to stay at the lodge was American. Today, a third of the visitors are from Nova Scotia or elsewhere in Canada. No matter where they come from, they're interested in food, albeit with varying levels of knowledge.

"People who are just learning about food, newlyweds who want to find something in common that they can both share, or sometimes fairly sophisticated people, even chefs, people who travel around the food-learning-vacation circuit, and there is such a thing," Perret said. "They go from one to the other, and they're tough - they're serious critics."

For more information, call (902) 761-2142 or visit http://www.troutpoint.com.