I had a very late and slow start to my day today. Dale got up to go and fetch the rental car. Although they did pick him up they drove him quite a way to get the car, and then he had to find his way back. I wasn’t with him so he had a hard time following the map app on his phone and driving. But I digress, back to me and my morning. After Dale left I went back to sleep for a while and then I watched a little TV. Just before noon I decided to get up and get ready. It was still rather foggy and overcast outside so I put on jeans and a sweatshirt. However, that didn’t feel right, so I went through several changes until I finally decided. Then I sat down and waited for Dale.

I didn’t have to wait long. When he got back we had lunch and Dale entertained me with the tale of having the guys from the Enterprise office in Lower Sackville driving him to Halifax to get a car. One of them had only been in Canada since 2011 but he had already toured all of the Maritimes and had visited Alberta, BC and the Yukon. Dale rather sheepishly admitted to him that this was our first trip back east. Lunch was wonderful. We headed out to the car and I got the route to the Halifax Farmers Market on my phone. It was as easy drive, although we did make a full right when the GPS lady told us to take a slight right. However, she recovered and still got us there. The market is a smaller version of Granville Island. It has a lot of food vendors and artisans. We strolled around, didn’t buy anything as it was just the first day of our trip. Then we got in the car and drove a couple of blocks to the harbour area.

We parked and walked to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. It was fascinating, with displays that included local shipwrecks, the Halifax explosion, the Cunard Line and the Titanic. I learned a lot. I didn’t know that Samuel Cunard was from Nova Scotia. And I am embarrassed to say although I knew of the explosion in the Halifax harbour I didn’t know a lot of the details. It was the largest manmade explosion until the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Two square miles were flattened and what little was left standing soon burned down. A piece of the rudder of the ship that exploded, the Mont Blanc, was found 5 kilometres away. I also didn’t know that the British Army attacked and captured an American ship during the war of 1812. Yup, the HMS Shannon took on the USS Chesapeake and prevailed. If you like ships and history, the museum is worth a trip.

When we got out of the museum we headed down the boardwalk to the harbour. I needed a bottle of water so I could take some pills, my knee was aching from all the walking we had done, even though I had rested it a lot by sitting in planes the day before. I convinced Dale to share a beavertail with me. We took it and the bottle of water and sat at a table. There were a couple of starlings hanging around. They are small enough that they don’t bother me just sitting there. But a couple of pigeons and a seagull soon arrived and that was our cue to leave. I never hang around long enough for them to attack me and peck my eyes out. So far, my quick exits have worked.

We decided to drive up to the Citadel as we were in the neighbourhood. One good thing about taking holidays in late May – early June is that none of the tourist spots are busy. We walked all over the Citadel and then headed home. We thought it would be nice to have dinner in one of the little towns between Halifax and our inn. However, most of those towns have only fast food joints and so we just kept driving. We drove through Bedford then went past Lower Sackville to Middle Sackville. My map app showed there wasn’t much that way so we drove through Middle Sackville back to Lower Sackville and headed home. We decided to drive past our inn and see what Waverley had to offer, as it turned out, nothing, so we kept driving. We ended up in Dartmouth, just across the water from the Halifax harbour. We got our bearings and headed home. But before we gave up totally we tried going north. We didn’t find dinner but we did learn that the Lake Fletcher fire department is having a pancake breakfast tomorrow so we’re going to crash it. Woohoo, pancakes tomorrow! We had dinner at the restaurant in our inn.