Google Street View Tour of "Haven"

The SyFy TV show "Haven" was filmed using a variety of real-world locations around what is known as Nova Scotia's "South Shore."  A lot of the street scenes and store-front shots were done in the towns of Chester and Lunenburg, but there were many other locations used as well.  Below are links to Google Street View scenes showing a number of these "real-world" locations which stood in for the fictional town of Haven.

For some background on why I put this together, info on Google Street View, and general random thoughts please check out this post.

Changes since this was first published: Time marches on.  It's hard to wrap my head around it, but Haven ended filming around the end of 2014.  Google has updated many of the Street Views from October 2016 for Lunenberg and Chester.  As expected the Haven Herald signage is gone (you have to use the widget to look at historical views to see it). The 2016 shot of the Pew Arena shows a nearly empty parking lot, no RVs or anything parked there.  Nicki's Inn in Chester is up for sale.  The building next to the Chester Playhouse is painted green now.

Update for May 2018: In addition to the Street View scenes, I have added links to some user-submitted 360 degree panoramas for a few locations.

Update for December 2018: There are new (August 2018) views of the Grey Gull.  Note, I am intentionally leaving my link below to the 2014 version as it still shows the "Grey Gull" signage, but once there you can use the date widget to look at the new images.  As we knew, the signage is removed, the house looks empty and it seems like it will perpetually be up for sale.  Also the shots of the Cape Rouge in Bridgewater are now from August 2018.

Update for June 2022: Google Street View has added a little side road that runs right in front of the house used as The Rev's house in Season 1, Episode 2.  I am replacing the link and part of the description for "Hubbard's House Old Post Road" below.  The Grey Gull house has a chain link fence around it - based on the Street View image date it has been there since last year some time.  Apparently the new owners were having trouble with trespassers.  It's a shame - I've still never made it to Nova Scotia but I had long hoped to visit one day, and part of my plan would be to drive out to the Grey Gull and try to snap a few photos.

Lunenburg

Lunenburg is home to a couple of landmarks which are important to Haven, and has provided street scenes for numerous episodes.  The Lunenburg waterfront is featured prominently and frequently throughout the show as "the" Haven waterfront.  Although waterfront and aerial shots of other towns are sometimes used, Lunenburg is used for more of these than the others - especially as the backdrop for scenes of Audrey standing out on a dock.  The building used as the Haven Police Station is in Lunenburg as well as a church seen in the opening credits.

Lunenburg - Town Hall Blocks

There are city blocks in front of and behind the Lunenburg Town Hall which are pretty interesting and contain a number of locations from Haven, some of which are seen repeatedly:

• Lunenburg Town Hall Gazebo - This gazebo is seen in various episodes. 
• Lunenburg Town Hall (Haven Police Station) - Lunenburg's Town Hall served as the exterior for shots of the Haven Police Station.  The interior of the police station was a set located elsewhere.  This building is right next to the gazebo.  In between them is a monument to Lunenburg residents who served during the first world war.  The monument can sometimes be seen on the show but never well enough to read.  Note, in real life the arch over the door is very bright (almost white) and reads Lunenburg Town Hall, while the "Haven Police Station" has a red brick arch and a grey marble slab.  The Haven PD also has flagpoles out front.  At various times, shots of the building with the obvious Lunenburg signage and missing the flagpoles ended up in the show, usually aerial shots of the building.
• Lunenburg Courthouse (Haven Courthouse) - this is the north entrance to the same building as the Town Hall.  Seen in the episode where Duke is in court and attacked by lady justice, possibly others. 
• Lunenburg Town Hall Park Panorama - User submitted 360 panorama taken right next to the Town Hall in the park near the Gazebo and memorials.
• Lunenburg Park East End Panorama - User submitted panorama at the east end of the park.
• Homework assignment - I'm not providing a link for this, but try to navigate on your own - Use Street View to travel east on Townsend St. a few "clicks".  You should see the back side of the gazebo and a park area with grass and some benches.  This area was featured in the episode with the fireman whose trouble caused him to make other people spontaneously combust.
• St. John's Anglican Church - a couple of blocks west of the Town Hall, this church shows up in a variety of episodes (it's kind of hard to NOT show it sometimes), easily spotted in aerial shots of the town, but most famously it is the "burning church" in the opening credits.  The church actually did burn some years ago.  It was very hard to find a suitable Google Street View shot of this due to the surrounding foliage, but there are LOTS of nice photos of this church available.
• St. John's Panorama - User submitted panorama in front of the church.  There's another nice one inside the church...
• Intersection of Cornwallis and Lincoln - While there are far too many "random" street scenes from places in the area to include them all, I wanted to put this one in because it is featured numerous times during season 1 episode 1 (i.e. the pilot episode).  The view my link brings up is facing north- the scene where Vince and  Dave first introduce themselves to Audrey happens on the right-hand corner while on the left is the antique shop featured in the episode.  Also if you go back and watch the episode you will see a shot of the Bronco driving down Lincoln.
• King St. Mural - Head east down Lincoln St. until you come to King St. and turn north (back towards the Town Hall) and you will see this mural on the side of a building - it shows up in one or more episodes.  Look north on King St. to the intersection with Cumberland, you will see a TD Canada Trust bank with some green signage on it.  That building was used as the Haven Post Office in at least one episode.

Other Lunenburg Locations

• Waterfront (Bluenose Drive) - The Lunenburg waterfront is such a key piece of Haven, yet hard to display with Street View.  That's because we usually see it from the water side.  The particular spot I have linked is right where there is a pier used in some scenes.
• Lunenburg Angled Dock - Duke's dock - this is the dock where Duke's boat (the Cape Rouge) is located during the show.  Several things to note - the boat was not kept here year round, it was only here during filming.  In real life it sank (I think after season 4) and they only used old footage of the exteriors after that - the interiors were a set in Chester.  The linked Street View Image is from August 2012 with a ship that is probably Duke's - there are a number of later shots but they are missing the ship.  NEW LINK: Better View Of Duke's Boat from August 2012 (while filming for season 3 was taking place).  Not sure how I didn't think of this one sooner - it's from just down the street looking back at the dock.
• Duke's Dock Panorama - If I'm not sorely mistaken this user submitted 360 shot was taken on the dock where the Cape Rouge was moored during the show.
• Lunenburg Dock - they actually got a Street View camera out at the end of one of the docks looking back toward town, and I think this very dock was used in some scenes.
• Tannery Road Park - The Street View image may not look like much but zoom in and you will see this little spit of muddy land with the remains of a dock on it - this is where Audrey goes when she needs some alone time, and I think where the Colorado Kid was found.  I was able to verify this is the right location by looking at the buildings you can see behind Audrey and some of the other characters - if you spin the street view around you will see a little house with a red garage or mini-barn next to it.  The red barn is clearly seen in several episodes of the show.  The little house that is currently there is NOT what was there when the show was first filming - it was apparently torn down and rebuilt.
• Out Past Audrey's Dock Panorama - this is a user submitted shot taken out past the old dock, when the water is low.
• Lunenburg Academy - This very cool looking building is seen pretty clearly in the background of one episode, and is one of the most easily recognizable landmarks in the frequent aerial shots of Lunenburg used for Haven.
• Lunenburg Battery Point Lighthouse - NOTE: there are no publicly accessible roads leading to the lighthouse, so there are no Street View scenes.  There are a lot of photos of this lighthouse online, so this link is now a Google Image Search.  There are two lighthouses used in the show - the other being at Peggy's Cove.  This one at Battery Point is the one you see in the main credits, and it was used as the "Heart of Haven", where there was a cave underneath with a magical door leading to the Void...Of course it is destroyed at the end of Season 4, but somehow still shows up in aerial shots of "Haven".
• Intersection of Cornwallis and Fox - I picked a location for the view just a little south of the intersection.  This is where Jordan and the Guard confronted Nathan, Duke and Jennifer as they returned to Haven in Season 4, Episode 1.  The steeple of the church (Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church) is ripped off by a tornado in the sequence.  This is a lengthy scene in the show offering lots of viewpoints and vantages that you can compare with the Google Street View scene. 
• Kaulback Block - The "Mermaid Building" - during the opening credits there's a brief shot of the camera panning along a second-story row of windows with almost ghostly images of mermaids reflected in them.  If you have Netflix or some other way to pause it will be easier to confirm.  This is the building.

Chester

As with Lunenburg, various places in Chester were used for Haven scenes, and there are a number of points of interest grouped together around a couple of specific areas.  Chester is home to the Haven Herald offices, a couple of blocks on Pleasant St. were used tons of times in the show, and the local hockey and curling arena was home to a number of indoor sets used throughout the series.

Chester - Queen St.

• Mecklenburgh Inn - The Mecklenburgh Inn was Audrey's home base early in the show (before she started living above the Grey Gull) and was also used in numerous street scenes.  In season 1 episode 2 when the giant brass ball is rolling down the road, it is shown going by the Mecklenburgh Inn.  Just south of here is Chester's post office which occasionally shows up on screen as well.
• Queen St. Cluster - Ok, I just didn't know what to call this spot, but it's got a lot going on here.  When you click the link to bring up the Street View you should be looking at the building which served as "The Haven Herald" newspaper office dead-on.  If you go up the street north or south a click and look back you can see the sign hanging from the eaves, and if you zoom in you can still see the logo painted on the glass.  The link currently should bring up a Street View version from 2014 when the show was still being filmed - the signage has since been removed, and there is a 2016 version you can bring up that shows it is gone.  Spin the view 180 degrees - the house on the opposite side of the street shows up in a LOT of episodes due to the proximity to the Herald.  Look at the yellow building just south of and next to the Herald (Street View shows it with a sign that says "ABLE Engineering Services") - that building was used as Haven Joe's Bakery.  But in some episodes you see it with the ABLE signage...Go up the street north of the Herald and look back and you will see it is actually a "L" shaped building with a little parking lot - the entrance to the building buried back there in the corner of the "L" was the exterior of the "Gun & Rose" restaurant where Jordan was a waitress.  Finally - note this building has a red roof.  The L-shape and the red roof make this building really stand out in aerial shots, once you know it's there, you can't miss it!
• South Queen St. Monument - Go south on Queen St. - WAY south until the road dead-ends at the waterfront and turns into South St. - and you will see a neat little black monument.  Almost this exact shot is used in season 1 episode 2 when the giant ball is rolling along.  

Chester - Pleasant St. 

• Pleasant St. Cluster - another spot where there is just too much going on!  The view brought up in this link is pointing at a space between two buildings which are frequently seen on the show.  The one on the left - the Chester Playhouse - will be very familiar to the fans.  In the Christmas episode where the town gets stuck in a snow globe this building serves as the Haven movie theater.  During season 5, Mara stabs a woman in the eye with a pencil on the sidewalk right in front of the building.  Spin the Street View 180 degrees and behind you is the Kiwi cafe - which is seen in a number of episodes, but in particular was Big Benjy's Ice Cream in Season 1, Episode 4.   You see all these buildings in the episode with the people in bear suits walking around. 
• Nicki's Inn - Just west along Pleasant St. is Nicki's Inn, which appeared early in the series as "The Rust Bucket", which was partly destroyed by the giant rolling ball.  It also appeared as the "Black House Coffee" shop in Season 4, Episode 2 (where Jennifer bought coffee and found a number of burned bodies).  If you have trouble visualizing it as the coffee shop, they used the entrance in the alley to the right of the front of the inn.  Fans of the series who have followed Twitter and Instagram posts and interviews with the cast and crew may recognize this as the establishment run by Nicki Butler.  She was apparently loved by many involved with the show as well as being a local icon, and passed away unexpectedly back in 2015.  The establishment is now closed and the building was for sale as of late 2016.  Right across the street is a building that appeared as a restaurant during the show (The Irreverent Oyster).  Go up Pleasant St about a block further west and look back towards Nicki's - this is the scene in the final episode of season 1 when the ground opens up and swallows Max Hansen.

Other Chester Locations

• Chester Yacht Club Gazebo - that's probably not the right name, but it's the gazebo NEXT TO the Yacht Club.  It is used in a LOT of episodes.  It was the location of the Farmer's Market in Season 1 Episode 4.
• Chester Yacht Club Gazebo Panorama - User submitted 360 view inside the gazebo.
• Homework assignment - just west of the gazebo is a funny looking swimming pool (The Lido Pool) - do you recognize it?  To see it you may have to go south down Peninsula Rd. a half-dozen "clicks" and look back towards the northwest.  
• Church Park / Pew Arena - This is not a terribly interesting picture, yet in it you are seeing a place where the cast and crew spent a LOT of time - inside that building were housed a number of sets used in the series, including the interior of the Haven Police Station, interior of Duke's Boat, and interior of Audrey's apartment over the Grey Gull.  If you switch to the overhead Google Map view and use the "earth" view which shows the satellite photo you will notice this is a complex of buildings and there are tennis courts - these courts are featured in at least one episode, Season 1 Episode 5 where a woman's trouble causes men to age and die rapidly - a man dies right on the tennis courts there.  Just north and a little west is a large expanse with a couple of schools.  The Arena was also recently used for sets for the Lifetime movie "Sea Change".  UPDATE FOR 2024 (I know, the show has been over for 9 years!!!) - Was just checking and found that Google now displays a series of Street View images that way up into the parking lot and much closer to the area, such as this view here.
• MAJOR Homework Assignment - if you go west along Pig Loop Road looking at the huge space outside the arena, as you come to the corner, you can see a green Pontiac van shoved in the corner.  It's a little hard to see through the foliage and chain link fence, but it looks kind of beat up.  I'm 95% certain this is the van seen flipping over and tumbling down the road just over 21 minutes into season 5 episode 1.  Hopefully Google will keep this one archived - it's from August 2014.  Now, use the little widget to change to the version from August 2012.  If you look through the fence you will see a "Haven" ambulance.  And if you keep the date set to August 2012 and work your way back east towards the entrance, and keep looking towards that corner, behind the ambulance you will see...THE BRONCO.  BAM!
• Chester Middle School - It was hard to find a good Street View shot for this, as it's a bit back on the property where the Google car probably couldn't go, but this is the "blue school building" seen in a number of episodes.
• Chester St. Augustine's Parish - When the "Darkside Seekers" come to Haven, they set up their night shot at the beginning of the episode in front of this church.  Spin the camera 180 degrees and look at the yellow house on the opposite corner - they entered this house and encountered the "Rougarou."  A number of shots were done in that episode taken from various angles up and down the street by the church.
• East Chester Community Centre - Used as the "Dixie Boy Truck Stop" in multiple episodes. 

Hubbards

• Hubbards Shore Club - The Shore Club was featured in the episode when Nathan and Duke time traveled to the 1950's.  I believe the interior of the Shore Club was actually used on the show.
• Hubbards St. Luke's Anglican Church - This is The Reverend Driscoll's church on Haven.  It is featured in a lot of shows.  The giant rolling ball started out as a statue on the lawn here.  One of the things I love about Haven is how they tied together all these locations spread around multiple towns but made them feel like a single town. 
• Hubbards Bishop's Park Gazebo - Gazebo number 3!  Used in several episodes, just down the street from the Rev's church.  The scene in Season 4, Episode 2 where Duke tells Jennifer the story about a kid who broke his arm sledding when they were younger (the story is about Nathan) takes place here.
• Hubbards House, Old Post Road - This house was used as The Reverend Driscoll's home.  I am 90% certain they actually used the interior of this house.  The house is up on a hill which, when looking out through the front windows, would have a view of the Rev's church (St. Luke's).  Watch the episode (season 1 episode 2 I think) and you will see what I'm talking about.
• Hubbards St. Mark's Anglican Church - used as the outskirts of Haven in more than one episode.  Now spin the camera 180 degrees - in the current Street View image at the time I am writing this, which is shown with an image date of August 2014, there are HAVEN POLICE CARS parked across from the church!  COOL!  The blue Chevy Tahoe there is Dwight's vehicle on the show as well.  I *think* these cars were parked here for filming scenes for season 5, episode 14 (first episode of season 5b or season 6 or whatever we're calling it).
• Hubbards House at Tilley's Cove - The Grey Gull.  There are several decent shots of the building from the road, just walk the camera up and down.  Also, use the little widget (in the upper left on my browser) that lets you view historical images from previous years.  The "current" images right now are from August 2014.  However there are a number of really nice shots from April 2012 when the Grey Gull sign was up, and there was less foliage covering the building.  There are also some shots from 2009 prior to the start of filming the show, when the building doesn't have the sign - or windows or doors apparently.  In photos I've seen elsewhere since these Street View images were done, the signage has been removed.  June 2022 Note: There are new images of the house which has been painted, has perhaps new siding and roof, and is now surrounded by a black chain link fence and clearly marked "Private Property".  I had wondered how long people would be able to continue wandering down to the house to take pictures...
• The Grey Gull Panorama - User submitted panorama taken at the porch corner by the water, ground floor.

Other Areas Of Interest

• Peggy's Cove Lighthouse - Another lighthouse used in the series, in Season 1 Episode 5, where a woman's trouble causes men to age rapidly and die.
• Mahone Bay Centre - This building appears in numerous episodes as the Haven Medical Center.  Note that early in the show the building was doctored up with signage that said Haven Medical Center, a flagpole with a US flag, etc.  But similar to the issue with the Lunenburg town hall, later aerial shots of this building are missing the Haven-related signage.  
• Mahone Bay Street Scene - This is one of the many street scenes from all over the South Shore area to be featured in Haven - in particular this one is seen in the episode where Audrey relives the same day repeatedly and various people are getting run over ("Audrey Parker's Day Off")...Be sure to zoom the view out all the way and pan around, and you may recognize more scenes.
• Robinson's Corner Farm - this is the home of "The Barn", the supernatural construct that plays such a big role in the show but which is seen only a few times considering.  It's located pretty far back on the property off the road, and presented a challenge to find a good Street View angle.  In Season 2 Episode 3 when the "real" Audrey Parker finds the barn, it is shown onscreen flipped left-to-right, but definitely still the same building.
• Halifax Dingle Tower - Dingle Tower in Halifax was used as the Armory in the final episodes of Haven.
• Halifax Boondocks Diner - The Boondocks Diner is where Nathan and the "copy" of Audrey (created by Croatoan to trick Nathan) were eating at the opening of Season 5B Episode 13.  The diner in the show was also called Boondocks, but they hung a "Cleaves Mills" sign out front - nice Stephen King reference...
• Bridgeport Cape Rouge - The Cape Rouge belonged to Duke Crocker, serving as both his home and an important part of his business as a smuggler.  During the winter months when the show was not being filmed, the boat was docked here in Bridgeport (during filming it was docked at the "angled dock" in Lunenburg, liste above).  Note - the boat partially sank in March of 2014 but it was apparently raised, since the linked Street View image was captured in September 2014.  If you have any doubt this is the Cape Rouge (that was actually the original name of the boat), check out this article about the sinking.  There's a series of 10 photos - number 7 is a good shot for comparison the the vessel pictured in Street View.  This site featuring the work of Katherine Bickford has a few photos of several ships lined up along the wharf in Bridgeport; the third ship (in the back of the line) is the Ryan Atlantic II, otherwise known as the Cape Rouge.
• Corner of Montague & Prince - OK, if there is a "Most Obscure Location" on this page, I think this is it.  Take a look at this building.  If you don't recognize it, take a look at these pictures: http://www.farfarawaysite.com/section/haven/gallery1/gallery1/gallery4/gallery.htm, and then come back to the Street View scene.  Spin the camera around.  Those promo shots for the first season were done right in that building in the linked Street View scene.  It used to drive me crazy wondering where they were done.  I was absolutely convinced they were done in Chester, but turns out it was right there in Lunenburg. This building was used for some early promo shots of the three main actors.  Unfortunately the site I used to point to for those shots is gone.

Conclusion...

And that's all I have for now folks.  If you know of a location that was significant to the show and that you'd like me to add, please let me know.  I'd like to give a special thanks to Pauline P. whose Haven Photo Project  got me to thinking I should share these links, and who kindly helped with a few locations that had eluded me.  Also I would like to to thank Michelle Diesbourg for some locations as well as additional detail about how some were used.

Notes on the Google Street View Tour of "Haven"

A while back my wife introduced me to a TV show called “Haven” which aired on the SyFy channel.  Haven is about a fictional town in Maine where a portion of the residents suffer from supernatural curses called “the Troubles”.  Through the experiences of FBI agent Audrey Parker, we learn about the town and its people, what the Troubles are, where they come from, and how Audrey is connected to the town.

Instead of being filmed on a studio back lot somewhere, Haven’s outdoor scenes - streets, storefronts, houses & yards, etc. were filmed in the real world, specifically in and around several communities that are part of Nova Scotia’s South Shore.  Chester and Lunenburg provided most of the principal and recurring locations, but there were also places around Hubbards, Mahone Bay, Robinson’s Corner, and more in between.  These locations not only made Haven seem more real, but they have a charm that is captivating in its own right, and (no doubt like many other people) I wanted to learn more about the area, and perhaps to visit some day.

Since these are real places, (the exteriors of) most of them have been cataloged by Google’s Street View.  Street view is an adjunct function of Google Maps and Google Earth, which allows you to zoom down to a specific map location, bring up a 360 degree panoramic view, pan around (and up and down), and “walk” the view up and down the street or road.  Google has a fleet of vehicles (mostly cars, but in some cases bicycles or other) that drive around, with special cameras and GPS trackers, imaging as much of the world as can be seen from the road.

I have found a number of places that were used in Haven - some of which were used repeatedly and frequently in street scenes, aerial views and the like, and a few that were used less often but still significant.  I collected links to these scenes, which when clicked should open your browser and go straight to a particular Street View (including the direction and zoom level I had set when I made the link).  

To get the most fun out of this you will need to familiarize yourself a bit with Google Maps and Street View - and the easiest way to do that is to just play around with it a bit.  Click one of the links.  Pan around (click and hold left mouse button on main picture and drag around and up and down), zoom in and out (scroll the mouse wheel while pointing at main picture), “walk” up and down the road (when the mouse cursor is “on the road” look for the circle with an arrow and click to move).  Look for the “film strip” below the main image and click on Street View links provided by other people or images they’ve posted.  Above all, have fun - this is all virtual, just explore and enjoy!

Some semi-random thoughts:

• IMPORTANT - do not travel to the South Shore of Nova Scotia hoping to meet the cast or crew, or to see an episode of Haven being filmed.  The show has ended, filming ended around the end of 2014, and the final episodes aired in 2015.  If you want to go and walk some of the sidewalks your favorite characters walked, or if you just fell in love with the area and want to experience it for yourself, by all means make the trip.  But nothing you see on this site (or any other) should be construed to mean that there is still any active filming of Haven occurring - there’s not. In one or two places the Street View images linked from my blog may still show Haven-related signage, but in real life and in the present day, it's all gone.
• Likewise, if you travel to Nova Scotia do not be disappointed if the real world locations don’t look exactly like the Google Street View photos.   Just like any photographs, these represent a point in time - a specific time on a specific day in a specific year.  (Street View photos show you the “image date” when they were taken so you can see how old they are.)  Over time, Google "re-images" sites, and they (usually) keep (some of) the archived, older versions of how locations looked available. When I find a site and create the HTML link for it, it records not only the location and such, it should point to a SPECIFIC version (date/time) of the scene. So if the version available on Google Street View when I made the link was from August 2014, that's what you're (hopefully) going to see when you click the link - even if Google has since created new images.
• The older versions of locations can usually be accessed with a little on-screen "widget" that sits in the upper left (it shows the month and year the current image was created). Click on it to access other views - older ones and maybe newer ones too. This may allow you to see some shots taken during the time the show was being filmed, so you may see "Haven" signage on some buildings, the paint jobs on buildings (and cracks in the street and so on) will match what you see on the show, etc. Also because the Street View cars are in motion when the images are taken, the views are rarely in exactly the same spot - so sometimes you get "better" views in different years.
• The streets themselves are pretty much public, and there are various parks and gazebos that you can access.  However, some locations are private property - just because they’re visible from the road doesn’t open them to tourist traffic.  For example, the "Grey Gull" house is privately owned, “the Barn” is on private property, and so forth. For some of those you may only be able to take pictures from the road.  If you travel to the South Shore, enjoy the publicly available locations, but don’t trespass.
• When finished, the show will have aired 78 episodes.  The show featured many locations around the NS southern coast.  An exhaustive list of locations is beyond my ability to provide, and would probably be too much anyway.  That being said, just by learning the layout of a few places, you’ll soon be recognizing scenery in a LOT of shows.  These locations got used over and over, maybe just from slightly different angles.  It starts to feel like a familiar place.
• Or perhaps I should say familiar places - knowing that some scenes are shot in Lunenburg and some in Chester, and more important WHICH are shot in which places, can kind of throw off the continuity.  This is especially true when you see an aerial shot of Lunenburg followed by a storefront on a street in Chester, or a shot of the school in Chester followed by a street scene in Mahone Bay.  Speaking of aerial shots, you will perhaps have already noticed that Lunenburg and Chester look quite different from the air, and yet both are depicted as “Haven” (I think maybe Mahone Bay aerial shots are used as well).  Whether this will affect your ability to enjoy re-watching the show is something I can’t control or predict - but if you are worried about it, this kind of Google “pixel peeping” is probably not for you.
• At the risk of stating the obvious, Google Street View cameras are VERY different from television film or video cameras, and the filming is done under entirely different conditions.  The Street View cameras tend to use fairly wide-angles, while a lot of the TV shots are done from a distance and at a very high zoom.  TV shots are done when the lighting is “just right” as well (or lighting may be manipulated artificially), whereas Google Street Views are mostly on relatively clear days and when things are pretty evenly lit.  In other words, what you see on Google Street View may only bear a passing resemblance to what you see on the show, and you may have to use a little imagination to figure out how things fit.

A Long, Sordid Tale

I have a story to tell.  It was years in the making.  Hopefully it won't take that long to tell.  I can't promise you'll enjoy it, but it has a (sort of) happy ending and there are some lessons in it, if you make it to the end.

Did I ever mention I helped start the first Internet service in Camden County, GA?  Back in the day there was no local dialup service, so me and some friends at the computer store where I worked got a wild hair to bring Internet to our area, and we did it (with some funding from a partner and a lot of help from a provider in a non-competing area).  After two years we had 2000-plus paying customers!  We also had a pant-load of debt, and we were really lucky to get bought out before we got into real trouble.  I walked away from that experience with no debt, and a crash course in how the Internet works which served to get me my present job as a network engineer with a big company.

Our local phone company is TDS Telecom.  TDS mainly serves Wisconsin, but they have gotten into a number of other markets, and they had bought the local mom & pop phone company here in the early 1980's.  A few years after I had moved on to my new career, they began offering DSL service.  I live a few miles outside of town in a sparsely populated area, so I knew it would take a while to reach my neighborhood, but eventually I got 1.5 mbps service - yay!  It was incredible!  After a year or two they bumped the speed to 5 mbps.  Life was great.  Then they began offering 10 mbps and I was in heaven.

Around that time the first set top streaming boxes were starting to hit the market.  I was an early adopter of the Boxee Box - a little box design by D-Link, running Boxee software (which was a fork of XMBC).  There was a decent amount of content and it was fun to play around with.  One of the apps for the Boxee was MLB.TV, which I was really excited about.  I signed up and started watching baseball on it.

But it wasn't long before I started noticing problems.  The games would stutter and buffer a lot.  The MLB app on the Boxee supported automatic quality adjustments, and the picture would get really bad, and the constant buffering made it really hard to enjoy a game.  Oddly enough it seemed the service was fine on the weekends, especially in the mornings, but in the evenings on weekdays it was terrible.

I did some speed tests and found that my evening speed was pretty bad - almost always below 5 mbps, sometimes dropping down to 1 or 2 mbps.  The MLB.TV FAQ said I needed a pretty solid 4 mbps to watch a game, so that seemed to be my issue.  I called TDS tech support and told them I was having some speed issues.  They checked my line, "reset my port", pronounced it all clean...but I kept having issues.

Over a period of some six months, I dorked around with everything I could.  I got a new router.  I ran a clean phone line from the box outside the house straight to my modem, no splices.  I ran wired ethernet to the living room for the Boxee.  And when 15 mbps service became available I signed up for that.   Oh yeah, I also called tech support a half dozen more times - checked my line, reset my port, etc.  But no matter what I tried it just didn't improve.

Finally I called tech support and insisted they escalate to the next level of support.  After a long wait, a nice lady came on the line to explain that my problem was oversubscription.  Basically TDS had sold more service than the equipment serving my area could support.  She said they had to order a new switch, and that currently it was scheduled to take about 3 months to fix.  She assured me that there was a running ticket on this problem and that I should just wait it out.

So I did.  I waited 3 months, and then I waited an extra month for good measure.  And when it still hadn't gotten better, I called back.  At first, the tech tried to tell me TDS would never give out information about their installation schedules, but when I insisted on talking to a supervisor, I got an answer - it would be another 3 months, there had been a backlog of some kind, the switches were all custom built, whatever.

I waited 4 months again, and it still wasn't any better so I called back.  And the answer was, again, about 3 months.  Given that TDS had no competition for high speed Internet in the area, I had no real choice but to wait it out.  Another 4 months went by, and still things didn't improve.  It was now 12 months since I'd been told about the oversubscription, more like 18 since I'd been calling in about the problem, and it looked like it would never get better.

Around this time I was talking to a friend at work who suggested I contact the Public Service Commission.  I decided that before doing so, I would call TDS one more time, but I would tell them that I was GOING to call the PSC.  And this time, I got a little different response.  A supervisor offered to give me the name and phone number of a guy I'll just call "Chuck" (not his real name), who was in charge of scheduling all the big installation work for our area.  "Chuck" would be able to at least tell me the real scoop on the schedule.

The first time I got to talk to Chuck, I was sure this was a quality guy who would get things straightened out.  He told me the current switch was only capable of handling a couple of DS3s (45 mbps connections) and couldn't be upgraded.  However, they were building an entirely new switch and when it was in, they would have a couple of gigabit uplinks - something like 20 times the available bandwidth.  He couldn't give me a date but thought it would be ... about 3 months.  Oh well, I thought, at least now I know what's going on.

It turned out to be more like 6 months, but the new switch got installed, and one day a technician showed up to let me know they were moving my connection to the new switch.  Once it was done, I checked the speed...and I was now getting a whopping 5 mbps.  What happened to my 15 mbps service?  Well, the new switch was a mile further away, and the way DSL works is very distance-dependent.  The good news was that the speed no longer dropped out in the evenings, but I was barely getting the kind of speed you need for good streaming.

And that was a real problem, because by then I had chosen to become a "cord-cutter." I had canceled my DiSH Network service - no sense paying $100 a month for a bunch of channels I didn't want to watch - and I had gotten a Roku box to replace the Boxee, and well, 5 mbps was just barely getting the job done.  That mattered because as a network guy, I wanted to use my Internet service for more than one thing at a time, not to mention I was now in a long-distance relationship and had become very dependent on Skype.

Chuck told me he was very sorry, this was not the solution he had envisioned.  He told me there was still a chance he could get a new switch put in to replace the one closer to my house, and that he would try, but it was going to take a while and this time he was not willing to give me a projected date.  I thanked him for everything he had done, and gave up...for a while.

About 6 months along, I decided to check in with Chuck and see if there had been any news on the new switch.  And I was astonished to hear that he had actually already gotten it done!  However, he cautioned that it would be a while before they could cut anyone over to it.  There was some story about new software at TDS for managing customer orders and it was going to be, you guessed it, about 3 months before he could move me to the faster connection.  By now I understood that "about 3 months" was TDS code for "no freaking clue", but it looked like there was light at the end of the tunnel.

I waited 5 months this time before bothering Chuck again.  I was really getting tired of this.  My struggle to simply be able to order, pay for, and enjoy the service TDS was advertising had been going on for YEARS.  I wrote my frustrations into a note for Chuck, doing my best not to burn bridges but letting him know I felt I was getting jerked around.  I don't know if that made any difference, but a few days later, something happened.

I came home from work to find my dial-tone cut off.  I actually wrote another blog post about this so I won't detail it all here, but the next day my DSL went offline as well, and it was a couple of days before it got sorted out.  They had cut me over to the new switch but hadn't bothered to configure service on the line.

With this fixed, I now had pretty good speed - somewhere around 12 mbps, which is decent for DSL.  I was happy for a few months, until the dropouts started.  This was a new problem.  I could surf, or watch TV, for minutes or maybe even an hour or two at a time, and then...dead air.  The DSL lite on my modem was never going out, but I couldn't get any data in or out.  Resetting the modem would immediately fix the problem, or sometimes it would resolve itself without me doing anything, but it wouldn't stay on for good.

I was quite certain I wasn't having a problem with local equipment in the house, and when I called TDS tech support, I tried to convince them that they didn't need to send a technician.  However something at TDS had changed - they now had their phones being answered by an off-shore outfit, maybe in Jamaica judging from the accents.  These techs simply wouldn't even consider looking at anything until someone was dispatched to the house.  I got an agreement from tech support that their field technician would only look at the line outside the house, and would not enter the premises, and I let them schedule the visit.

When I got home from work the next day, the field tech was there.  My girlfriend was there talking to the guy out in front of the house, and he informed me he had gone into the house and replaced my modem!  It turned out my girlfriend thought I expected this and would be OK with it.  The tech said my old modem was no longer supported, he had failed to find a problem hooking up to the line outside the house, and so assumed the problem must be inside.  I tried to explain that in order to see the problem he would have had to stay connected outside for up to an hour, but no dice - and he was not giving my old modem back.  I'm not a physical kind of guy but I had a fleeting thought of wrestling the old modem from his grasp.

He had replaced my old "modem" with a new wireless plus 4-port ethernet router.  He had pulled my old router out - because he didn't have any idea how to set all my stuff back up - and left me with nothing working at all except his new router.  I was furious.  I spent the next couple of hours disabling the wireless on the new router, disabling DHCP, putting it in bridge mode, and getting my own router back online.  And within an hour, the connection was dropping again.

Just to make sure it wasn't my equipment in the house, I removed my router, re-enabled wireless and DHCP on the router they had provided, and basically made everything just like a standard customer.  I made another call to the Caribbean tech support people, insisted they escalate to the next tier, and got a guy who could actually troubleshoot.  He quickly diagnosed a DHCP problem causing their system to give me addresses that had already been given to other customers, and he got it fixed.  This should have happened on the first call, and my equipment should never have been touched.

Still, I left the phone company's router (an Actiontec V1000H) in place as my primary router for the time being.  My girlfriend was visiting for an extended stay, and every time I tore everything out and reconfigured things it would keep her from being able to watch TV or use her computer on the Internet, so I decided to wait until her visit was over. It turned out to be a good thing - because within a few weeks, the connection was dropping out again, and I was able to point out to TDS that none of my own equipment was at fault.  These dropouts were different - with the DHCP problem, the dropouts lasted for quite a while, but with these new ones, the connection would come back quickly.  They would sometimes come in waves of several dropouts in a row within a few minutes, then things would settle down.

Looking at the router's status page I could see that we were getting numerous retrains, a symptom that the combination of errors and weak signal-to-noise ratios were causing the router to renegotiate the speed.  When rebooted, the router would sync up at about 12-13 mbps, but after a set of these retrains it would drop down to about 6 mbps.  Another call to tech support, another site visit - I stayed home for this one to make sure they didn't enter the house or touch my equipment.  The field tech replaced the box on the outside of the house, checked some things at a junction box at the street, made a couple of trips down the road to the switch...but when he was done, he said he didn't think it was any better and wanted to get a more experienced technician to come out the following day.

I couldn't stay home again, so I left my girlfriend in charge and went to work.  It's too bad, really - I have no idea what this guy did, but whatever it was worked wonders.  Ever since he left, I have had a solid 15 mbps connection (I NEVER got 15 before) and it never drops out.

I had one final issue with all these changes.  I recently bought a new printer, and my desktop computer uses mDNS protocol to discover printers on the network, and it wasn't working.  It turns out the Actiontec doesn't pass mDNS (or at least I couldn't find an option anywhere in the configuration to allow it).  Once again I disabled all features of the Actiontec router (turned off WiFi, turned off DHCP) and put it in bridge mode, and I hooked up my trusty Asus router.  The printer problem was solved.

As I have thought through this entire affair in the process of writing it out, I have tried very hard to come up with some lessons learned.  The one clear thing in all of this is that when things aren't working, you have to be persistent.  It may not be possible to force a provider to do their job and make things right, but you can bug the crap out of them until they do.  My biggest regret was allowing them to put me off for months at a time with their repeated promises that they were fixing things.  I really should have called the Public Service Commission, and early in the process.   If I had had the option of switching to another Internet provider I'd have done so years ago, but I didn't have that choice.  It's taken years to get things right, and it's difficult to say I'm satisfied given the painful process.  But I have what I'm paying for, and I suppose that's better than where I was.

Now...TDS is starting to run fiber to the area, and will soon offer 50 mbps service.  I wonder if I will have the guts to sign up for it?