We are spending about three weeks circumnavigating Nova Scotia – or, more precisely, about three-quarters of the way around.
Our first stop was Halifax. As we planned our trip, we saw that there was a festival in Halifax on Natal Day weekend – the celebration of the founding of the province – and we timed our arrival to take part in the festivities.
We quickly learned a couple of things.
First, folks didn’t seem to care much about Natal Day. Yes, there were fireworks over the water on Saturday night. But our greetings of “Happy Natal Day” to bartenders and the like were met with blank stares.
Second, the festival was not what we expected. We thought the Halifax Busker’s Festival meant that we’d be going from stage to stage, hearing undiscovered singers and guitar players or keyboardists. We thought we’d see the next Tracey Chapman, or experience scenes from the movie “Once.”
We have a dream of taking Prufrock to cool music festivals wherever we can find them. We thought this might be the first one.
But the buskers here weren’t musicians. They were magicians and strongmen and performers with hoops. Totally fine and cool – but not what we envisioned. And honestly not worth building this part of our trip around.
But we did get to see a lot of Halifax over two days, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.
The downtown waterfront is nicely developed. It stretches about 4 kilometers (when in Rome, use metric), with many piers built out with modern commercial buildings, artwork, restaurants and high-end shops. And it was really bustling because of Natal Day and the festival – despite what I wrote above.
On our first night, we got some street food (poutine with fried fish for me) and walked around – and left before the fireworks. Honestly, fireworks are always overrated.
The closest place we could find to stay was a public campground – Laurie Provincial Park – which was a 35-minute drive from central Halifax. That’s a little longer than we like and meant that we really couldn’t go back and forth much.
The park was great – on the edge of a large clear lake, Grand Lake, that we only briefly dipped our toes into. Wish we had more time in its waters.
We made the most of our next full day in Halifax and Dartmouth. Unhitched, we drove back to the waterfront, and made our first stop the Halifax Seaport Farmer’s Market. It was charming – but didn’t quite have the dinner foods we wanted. We bought some fresh green beans and fueled up with an acai bowl.
Then came one of our great runventures. We wanted to do a long run and explore the region on foot. Driving in, we saw that one of the main bridges was closed to vehicular traffic for an event and knew that would make it more pleasant for us to run from Halifax to Dartmouth, over the Angus Macdonald Bridge, saving a toll of a loonie and a quarter.
There were more buskers in Dartmouth, which we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
We went over and back, up to the Citadel, an historic military site, and through the public gardens. We were “paused” seeing sites for more than an hour on our 9 mile run.
Things we began to absorb: The Haligonian history (you wouldn’t guess that’s what they call people from Halifax, would you?) of kicking out the French Arcadians is a little grim. There was a major disaster in 1917 where an explosion on a munitions ship killed an estimated 1,800 in Halifax. It is called the largest man-made detonation until the atomic bomb.
The British works – the Citadel, etc. – are impressive– but there was never any attack on Halifax.
We finished the day with pizza and beer – tired. We strongly recommend the brews from Garrison. As we relaxed – a wedding at a waterfront museum ended, and the entire wedding party marched past – for photos on the waterfront.
It’s gratifying to know you picked the right spot.
