A Few Days in Halifax

The ferry brought us back from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, and we made our way to Halifax for a few days of museums and music. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic was good, with many small sailing boats, an interesting display on treasure hunters (they get 90% of the non-artifact treasure they find and the government gets 10), and an exhibit on the Halifax explosion , but was far out done by Pier 21, Canada's Immigration Museum. We had a great tour guide who told us alot about the history of the immigration site but more interestingly told a few touching stories about immigrants who had passed through the port on the way into Canada and come back years later to visit and tell their stories...a must see for this city.

We've had a couple nights of great music in local pubs, and spent one night with a musician we had first seen in Celtic colours. We got to hear inside stories of life growing up in Cape Breton, as well as stories about Irish stick fighting. That was a really great night!

Of course...can't be here without having some lobster!

Cameron, about to eat him some lobster... Unless the lobster eats him first!!! No it won't as it has been boiled to death.

We had decided to move on from Halifax to head to Yarmouth, where, aside from having once in a lifetime flooding, there was meant to be a Nova Scotia music festival going on. Before heading out of town though we popped by a Honda dealership to check out what used Fits they had. This was just a precautionary measure as we were starting to think about getting a new car on our return from Asia as the Derbster was exhibiting some troubling behaviour. At that point we learned that though there were a few used Fits available, the brand new 2010 Fits were actually going on sale by $2500 in order to make room for the 2011 models. Whether Derby decided that he had accomplished his task of getting us across the country and we now had a good alternative, or whether he was pissed off at us for looking at new cars (he was standing right there) (or whether it is just a car, and not actually a thinking being, and broke down randomly) about an hour out of Halifax Derby called it a day on us. We are not too sure what exactly went wrong (though it seemed oddly similar to our previous distributor issue) and we decided not to find out, finally letting the little guy have a break (hence Meg's eulogy for the little fellow on other posts).

After being hauled back into Halifax with a friendly tow truck driver from Bridgewater we spent the last few days trying to get a new car figured out (who we will introduce in a future post, when we actually get him). This has seen us walking through rather inclement whether several hours each day to figure out amongst other things, what car to buy, how to insure the car, how to register the car, how to get rid of Derby and how to carry our bikes on our new car. We are pretty sure we will have it all worked out tomorrow afternoon and be back on the road. Which is good news since we mean to be in Portland, Maine on Thursday night.

I think the funnest part of the last few days was spending a few hours in the provincial legislature while it was in session. We got to hear the opposition party ask about 200 questions about the closing down of an all girls religious school in Cape Breton, while the ruling party answered the same way 200 times. I think at one point the opposition may have asked, "Will the

eduation minister once and for all admit that her party will not buy the school, does not care about these girls future, and that it actually hates these girls and probably hates all children in Nova Scotia?" (I just made that up, but that's pretty much what it was like, and the guy saying it was this Cape Bretoner who yelled every question).