Saturday, September 12th, 2011: Halifax, Nova Scotia
Bob: Our day in Halifax turned out to be bright, sunny, and warm, a combination that we thoroughly enjoyed because it had not happened during the cruise until that point. Captain Nash tucked the ship into an industrial dockyard as we arrived at 8:01 a.m. (Union rules would have cost the ship another $19,000 if it had arrived smack on 8:00, so the Captain dallied for a minute on the approach!) Two other cruise ships had already occupied the usual cruise ship piers, 21 and 22, I think, and they could just walk off the ships and into town, but we had to make do with a shuttle bus over there. The shuttle bus system as run by the Canadians was, however, quite efficient and had the capacity to handle the surge of folks disembarking from the Crown Princess. |
Monika: We passed the first lighthouse guiding us into Halifax harbor when the at sunrise. The captain had to dock at the commercial dockyard, since the two docks available at the cruise ship terminal were already taken by a Royal Caribbean and a Holland American (one of those 'DAM' ships) ship. |
Bob: Where we did have a crush of folks, however, was on our morning excursion out to Peggy's Cove, a scenic little fishing village on the Atlantic coast west-southwest of Halifax. Peggy's Cove is located on a peninsula or arm of Mary's Bay, as I recall, and is quite small. Although the village had as many as 300 inhabitants in its heyday, the village was currently down to 50 or 60 inhabitants, and those folks must have felt absolutely invaded as the tour buses from three cruise ships and several overland tours all converged in the small village that morning. The highlight of Peggy's Cove is the historic and quite pretty lighthouse out on the rocks at the end of the peninsula. The rocks are the typical, glacially-carved rocks of that area, but since they are absolutely bare the scouring is much more apparent. We also saw at least 10-15 glacial "erratics", boulders that were just randomly dropped in place as the glaciers finally retreated, scattered along the peninsula. The smooth, gray rocks combined with the blue waves of the ocean gave the cove and its classic white lighthouse a picturesque appearance. |
Monika: We had booked an excursion to Peggy's Cove, a must see. Well it seemed that every excursion booked on any of the three ships also stopped at Peggy's Cove, a little fishing village overrun by tourists. Its main claim to fame was a picturesque lighthouse set upon glacial rocks. So we joined the throng of tourists and took the obligatory lighthouse pictures. |
Bob: The houses and commercial buildings were also well-preserved examples of the wood houses of an old fishing village. The buildings along the fishing pier that lay just inside the bay from the headland were reflected quite nicely in the calm waters of the inner harbor. Although some of the residents still fish, the lobster season had not yet begun so the main activity we saw was the tourist excursion boats chugging out for a spin around the harbor. The lobster pots were, however, piled high on the shore just waiting for the start of the season, which they call "dumping day" because that is the day all the pots are dumped into the ocean! "Peggy", by the way, may or may not have been a real person in the history of the cove, but like most names it just stuck. But apocryphal or not, Peggy is immortalized in a stone sculpture that lies in the backyard of an artist's house at one end of the village. You have to give the guy credit, he started carving on this huge granite outcropping at his wife's behest at age 70. Unfortunately, it was not quite complete when he died at age 76, but honestly when I looked at it the only thing I noticed was a lack of fine detail in the final panel of figures on the left. The theme of the huge bass-relief, depicting fishermen and their families, is quite powerful and impressive. |
Monika: From the lighthouse we wandered up the one and only street, past a picturesque (everything was picturesque in Peggy's Cove!) fishing harbor and lobster traps waiting to be set out in the ocean. Across from the visitor's center was a huge carving of fishermen and their families carved into the granite rock side. Quite impressive. Bob was still under the weather, but I needed to walk someplace where there were few people. So he sat down on a bench by the visitor's center and I walked out to the seashore, admiring the sun playing in the water among the stones. Finally a peaceful scene without people. |
Bob: For the return trip to Halifax, our bus driver routed us further West along the sea shore past a memorial to the Swiss Air plane crash in 1998, I think it was, and then northward to an interstate highway or motorway that got us quickly back to Halifax. Since we were hungry and the camera needed to be charged again (we had neglected to bring the spare battery with on this trip--a little mistake but a big nuisance!), we reboarded the Crown Princess for lunch. That afternoon we returned to the city where we took the Gray Line Hop On Hop Off tour buses around town. I was surprised to find that the HoHo bus system in Halifax consists of three different loops, a 1-hour pink loop and two shorter half-hour loops. We first took the one-hour loop that roughly circled the outskirts of the old downtown area of Halifax. |
Monika: Back at the ship we had lunch and then set off to see the city. The Ho-Ho (Hop on - Hop off) bus seemed to be about the right speed for us. They were pink since part of the fair went to breast cancer research, so we did some good too. Since they had three different routes, we took the long one hour loop first and enjoyed getting re-acquainted with the city. It went past the pretty old houses and the botanical garden which I remembered fondly from our last visit. |
Bob: Then we took the second loop that focused on the inner part of the city, including the citadel up on the hill overlooking the harbor. The citadel was built to protect the town in the early 1800s but never had serious use as no one ever attempted to invade Halifax, not even the Americans who so frequently invaded Canada in the Bad Old Days. One noticeable landmark was the clock tower at the edge of the citadel, placed there so that the soldiers at the fort would be more likely to be on time! A clock face adorns all four sides of the white tower, but curiously enough each of the clock faces is a different diameter! |
Monika: The second loop went past the primary landmarks of Halifax, the citadel up on the hill overlooking the town and the clock tower donated by a prince who wanted to make sure that the soldiers had no excuse not to get back to the barracks on time. |
Bob: We had intended to take the third HoHo bus loop, the one that paralleled the waterfront, but that just never happened. The main reason was that we found out the entire seaside boardwalk or promenade area offered free Wifi, and we had providentially brought along our laptop that afternoon. So we set up shop in the warm breezes with a gorgeous view out over the harbor and were soon so engrossed in answering the accumulated messages from our friends and family, as well as uploading pictures of Iceland onto my facebook page, that we just ran out of time for the last HoHo loop. Instead, once we had done all the electronic tasks, we just walked along the boardwalk and enjoyed the ships coming and going out in the harbor as we returned to the shuttle bus stop. |
Monika: We skipped the final loop and instead wandered down to the boardwalk on the waterfront. Bob had brought the computer since we remembered that they had WiFi at the waterfront. He settled down to answering e-mail and upload pictures to facebook, while I enjoyed watching the different boats going up and down the channel that separated Halifax and the southern part of Nova Scotia from the northern part. There were ferries, sailboats, container ships, and finally the Holland American ship left its berth and started towards its next destination. |
Bob: By then, of course, we were too late for our 6:00 p.m. dinner with Liz, Peter, Laurie, and Janet, so Monika had some pizza, I had a small hamburger, and we split an order of fries. Although we generally like to enjoy the nice dining-room cuisine, especially on a quality cruise line like Princess, it was fun to try their fast-food offerings for once and we found out that they really do make excellent pizza, burgers, fries, and the like. As the ship steamed slowly out of Halifax harbor that evening, we tried to take pictures of the lighthouse, ships being loaded at the container docks, and the lights shining across the water from Dartmouth, the city located across the harbor from Halifax. Then we returned to our cabin to finish reading Butcher's collection of Harry Dresden short stories as we had to return it to the ship's library the next day. |
Monika: We finally made our way back to the ship as it was getting late. We did miss dinner and just had some comfort food (pizza, hamburgers, and french fries). We watched a bagpiper and drummer serenading us farewell. It was getting dark as we sailed away under a full moon: tres romantique! |
| 3Previous Day |
| Next Day4 |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Drive in England | Map of Transatlantic Cruise | Epilog |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||