Nova Scotia: Halifax

After Cape Breton, I spent two nights and a full day in Halifax.  The city was a little bigger than I might have liked, but maybe it just seemed that way because so many of the streets were too narrow for the amount of traffic on them.  Overall, I liked the city.  There seemed to be a lot to do and lots of different places to live, once you include the suburbs.

The Historic Properties

An old church.  The first Anglican cathedral in the Americas. 

The Queen's Pew

I spent the early part of the day just walking around town.  Some of it is quite old, and is even referred to as the "Historic Properties."  Some of those are buildings that have been preserved from a couple hundred years ago, and are now modern offices or shops, but retain their old character at least on the outside.

Other parts of downtown Halifax are just old without being specifically dedicated as such.  It's pretty hilly there, a big like San Francisco, and of course it's on the water like that town.

A highlight for me was the Old Burying Ground, with gravestones dating to the mid-1700s.  If you read the previous entry about the cemetery in Portland, Maine, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say the two locales are very similar.  The dates, the shape of the gravestones, the art carved on the stones, the kind of stone used, etc.  The Old Burying Ground was the first of the old cemeteries that I got to see, so I was extra excited about that one.  (Huh, I just learned from spellcheck that there is no "a" in cemetery.  And that spellcheck flags the word "spellcheck" as being misspelled.)

Carving commonly found on mid-18th century east coast headstones.

A very unusual copper plate in the middle of the headstone. 

In later years, copper covers and backs were added to many stones that were deteriorating in the weather and pollution.

One of the city's biggest draws is the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.  It's most noteworthy collections are a couple of old boats you can tour, some remnants of the Titanic, and lots of treasures recovered from shipwrecks.  I don't know if the museum houses the largest collection of shipwrecked items in the world, but the collection is big.

Not part of the museum -- it just happened to be sailing past.

Is that real?!?!

The museum's special exhibit this year is about gays and lesbians in the navy and on other sea-going vessels.  Most of the exhibit was about gay life on cruise ships, but a significant chunk was about gays in the military too.  Being gay-friendly, it pleased me to see an exhibit like that.  And of course the photos of men in drag aboard ships made me chuckle.

More than one person told me I had to see all the lighthouses along the coast.  Sadly, I didn't have time to travel around the southern coast of NS, but I did make it to see one of the more famous lighthouses, about 45 minutes outside of Halifax.  The Peggy's Cove Lighthouse, which is perched on top of some rocks and looks really cool.

Unbeknownst to me, Peggy's Cove was celebrating its 200th birthday that day, so it was crawling with people and with far more cars than real spaces to park them.  I call it a "city" but it really was more like the town of Sweet Haven, from Popeye, except a little more modern, than a city.  Overall, too many other people there that day, but worth the trip to see the lighthouse on its unusual setting.

The next day on my way out of NS, I stopped at the Springhill Miner's Museum.  It's not in Halifax, or even nearby, but it was my last stop in that province and was pretty cool.  It's a museum housed in the old buildings of a coal mine and in the mines themselves -- at least the parts that haven't filled up with water.  So the visit began with a tour of where all the miners prepare for their days (dressing, equipping their stuff, etc.) then moved to the mechanical items that hauled the coal bins out of the mine, and finally into the mine itself.  Until this visit, I didn't know that any mines just went right down into the ground.  I thought they all went into mountains, but apparently, veins of coal can be found under flat ground too.

Dressed to impress.

Inside the mine.