Bountiful Day

The breakfast at St. Mary’s lodge was sliced meats, bread and fruit. Very healthy and very tasty. It was a couple of hours scenic coastal drive from Sherbrooke to Halifax and as the rain had lessen we enjoyed it all the more. Back in Halifax we had a really cheap, good quality lunch at Perks café, near the waterfront. Highly recommend their low fat brownies. Halifax looked even better today as there were blue parts of sky and once we even saw the sun. We could do all the things we had intended to do on our first day. We started with St. Peter’s, the Church which has a piece of iron window frame embedded in it from the 1917 explosion. It looked quite peculiar sticking out of the wall above the entrance door.

Did some window shopping in an interesting women’s clothes shop called Peep Show. I was disappointed. I don’t want to give the impression that Halifax is a depressing place because it’s not, but the next place we drove to was a cemetery. Not content with checking the passenger lists from Titanic, we went to see the gravesite. Around half the graves were unnamed and it was very sad that people whose families were not well off only had a very basic headstone giving the name and date.

After the gravesite we spent an hour or so in Pier 21, a museum about immigration into Canada. Halifax and pier 21 in particular was the port of call for several million immigrants in the 20th century. There were lots of audio and video recordings of immigrants and customs officials reliving their experiences, from World War II refugee children, to war brides and Eastern Europeans in the 50s. The museum has a brilliant 3D holographic film presentation of the history of pier 21, worth the entrance fee itself. Sarah cried when one British lady (a war bride) recalled saying goodbye to her father at Waterloo and how she never saw him again.

We then braved Halifax rush-hour, it was quite bad, and drove to the nearby seaside town of Lunenburg. It took us about an hour and another half hour to find check-in for our hotel as it was in the pub beneath the hotel itself. The rooms didn’t have numbers, but instead had nautical names. We were staying at the Brigatine Inn and were in Bounty of mutiny fame (I told Sarah she better remember who is boss). In each room they have a description of the significance of the room name to Lunenburg. It turns out that the boat used in the film, Mutiny on the Bounty was built in Lunenburg.