Sheep Guarding Llama

I hope a lot of people are reading SGL this week while we are out of town. The updates must be much more interesting than usual since we are in an exotic land and no one is able to talk to us directly very much… although I am on email and instant messenger on and off throughout the day. Today will likely be the last update, though, while we are on vacation since we will be leaving Halifax tomorrow and we don’t think that we will have much chance of finding and kind of Internet access once we are out of the main city.

It is another totally overcast day in Nova Scotia again today. We haven’t seen a hint of the sun since we crossed into Canada three days ago. It is less foggy today, but the clouds hang low and storms are threatening. Last night, there was a really high wind making it hard to walk around town.

We started the day off by going to the Maritime Museum down on Water Street. We had hoped to start the day with a nice brunch, but nothing was open yet. So we started at the museum. We did about an hour at the museum and then left to get brunch across the street at Mother Tuckers. It was a really amazing brunch. They had four rooms of food to choose from. It was really a great brunch. Min really loved it and we ate until we were really stuffed. It turned out that one of the girls from the dinner theatre last night was eating in a room right next to ours so she came over to say hi to us.

We went out on the double decker bus tour of the city after brunch. The sun had finally come out and it was by far the brightest that it has been since we have arrived here. The tour was good. We got off at The Citidel and took a tour there. That was really interesting. We got to go through a lot of the structure and I managed to take a lot of pictures. We did some shopping at the Regimental store at The Citidel and I got a key chain of my family crest.

We got back on the tour bus and rode down to the Alexander Keith brewery. We took the tour there, it was realy good. The beer wasn’t bad either. You could tell that the people giving the tour were really enjoying themselves. It made the tour a lot of fun. We also had a lot of fun because we were getting to know other people who were taking different tours around the city. Apparently there aren’t really all that many tourist here because we were beginning to recognize quite a few people. Everyone is really friendly here and it is easy to strike up conversations with people.

After the brewery we returned to the Maritime Museum and did about another hour there. It was good but nothing to blow your socks off. Lots of stuff about the Titanic… blah blah blah. I am pretty tired of hearing never ending stuff about the Titanic. It has been beaten to death.

After the museum we headed across the street to McKelvie’s. We had a good dinner there (a bunch more tourist that we recognized ate there too.) Then we went over to Cow’s for some ice cream and for Min to do a little shopping. She got t-shirts and a fleece.

We were pretty tired after eating and shopping and touring all day so we went back over to the hotel. We were looking for something relaxing to do so I am updating the site and Min turned on Star Trek Enterprise. Neither of us have ever seen this show before so we were interested.

We are planning on going up to Cape Breton Island early in the morning so we need to get some relaxation in tonight. We are thinking about heading back a little early on Tuesday and crashing in Montreal on the way home since it is right on the northern route and we will have to go right by anyway. Since neither of us have ever seen Montreal, we thought that it would be nice to at least be there for one night. Plus it lets us get some sleep in during the drive. We won’t have Internet access on Nova Scotia after today. We might get lucky and get access in Montreal, but we won’t know until we get there.

HAPPY 26TH BIRTHDAY TO DOMINICA!!

We are very lucky that we were able to find a hotel that has good, fast Internet access available. That will make our stay a lot more comfortable. You don’t realize all of the things that you need to do that require you to be online until you don’t have that option. We have just set the laptop up on the desk in the room and leave it on all of the time so we really aren’t out of touch hardly at all. The cell works up here but costs a fortune. But we get email and my Jabber client is online so people can IM me if they need to do so. It also means that I will be able to update SGL while we are here. We are going to be staying in Halifax at the Four Points until Monday morning when we will be leaving to head up to northen Nova Scotia. I am trying to catch up with SGL as I have the opportunities. I fell way behind being in Ithaca and then driving up here.

Our first real vacation day. We ended up sleeping in rather late even considering that we slept so much yesterday. We didn’t get out of the hotel until around 11:00. We went down to the open market on the harbour and got ourselves some breakfast. It was good. Then we went exploring the harbour front with the stores open which was a bit more exciting than it had been last night after everyone had gone to bed.

We hopped on the ferry over to Dartmouth and went over to check out Halifax’s sister city across the bay. It was nice over there but not a whole lot going on so we didn’t stay long before heading back over to Halifax. The ferry is really cheap so it is nice. It is a good way to get to see the harbour up close.

We made sure to get down and do some souvenir shopping and we went out for Cows ice cream, my all time favourite. I haven’t been able to get Cows for about twelve years so I was really excited when I found their store here. We bought a bunch of Cows merchandise in their gift shop as well. Min was excited because she has heard me talk about Cows for years but has never been to one of the actual stores.

We purchased some tickets and did a land/water tour on the Gray Line. That took about an hour and was very enjoyable. We got to see a bit of the city and learned some more about it and where things are. The tour guide was really good and the bus/boat was piloted by Captian Kirk.

After our tour, we went to a dinner theatre that was right next door to the hotel to see the local production of “The Codfather”. It was a really silly show but we had a really good time. The food was good and the show was funny and the music was good. We got to sit with a table of 2 Ontario natives, 6 Haligonians and us as the token Americans, and from New York no less. It was a lot of fun and we had a really good time hanging out with all of the Canadians. We got to learn the local’s perspecive on living in and around Halifax.

We went out and did a little shopping after the show but headed back to be in the hotel a little before midnight. It feels weird being in a place that is ahead of the time back home. It is so seldom that that really happens to us who live on the east coast. For anyone who is interested, here is the Halifax Sheraton Four Points that we are staying at.

Okay, time to get off to bed so that we can get up early tomorrow and go touring the city in the double decker buses.

Happy 19th Birthday to Joe Tocco

More driving today. Tons more driving. We were still in Maine when we crossed over midnight. We crossed the border effortlessly into New Brunswick and the Atlantic Time Zone (GMT -4:00) at 2:30 EST. From now on, all times will be AST.

Super heavy fog in New Brunswick made for some horribly slow driving all morning. I was getting very sleepy after all of this driving. We reached Nova Scotia around 10:00 am. The weather got awesome once we arrived here. Cold, foggy and drizzly. Perfect for me.

Four more hours travel time to get over to the ocean and Halifax. We arrived early in the afternoon in the maritime’s largest city. We managed to wrangle reservations at the Sheraton Four-Point right on the harbour. We checked in and then walked uptown to get some food. We stopped at a traditional pub and got some fish and chips. After eating, though, we decided that we were just too tired and we headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.

We slept most of the afternoon and got up in the middle of the evening. We went down to the harbour front and walked for a while. It was a beautiful night. The weather up here is really amazing. We didn’t stay up for very long, we still don’t have enough sleep to recover from the drive so we went back to bed around 1:00 am.

[Looking Back – Added September 18, 2007: Right after crossing into Nova Scotia Dominica and I stopped at the large Nova Scotia Welcome Center.  We were there for probably half an hour.  At that point we had no reservations and no real plans for what we were going to do upon arriving in Halifax.  We hadn’t been completely confident that we were going to make it to Halifax.

We spoke to the nice people who worked at the Welcome Center and one of them called the Sheraton Four-Points for us and made a reservation for us at an incredible price.  It was something like $97 Canadian funds which, at the time, was only about $75 in US funds.

The Welcome Center is my last memory in Nova Scotia before arriving at the hotel.  I was delirious with lack of sleep by this point.] 

Today is the traveling day. All travel, all day. I got out of bed and got moving by 8:40 this morning. I picked Min up from the hotel at 9:10 and we headed on out. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep well last night at all so I only got two hours of sleep max. We have so much driving to do, it is insane.

Our first stop was Frankfort so that I could change into my suit and pick up my dress shoes that we had accidentally left there a few weeks ago. I showered and shaved and we quickly got back in the car and drove out to Albany. I had an interview in Albany at 2:00 (I thought that it was at 2:30 so we were running late.) That took about 3 1/2 hours out of the middle of the driving day. That didn’t help things.

We were on the road before 6:00 and headed towards Massachusetts. We drove all evening. We have the Camaro so Min can’t drive – so I am doing all of the driving. And boy is it a lot of driving. By midnight, and the end of this post, we were in central Maine, near Augusta. We still have a lot of driving left to do so there is practically nothing to write about today since we have just been sitting in the car all day.

Today was the day to run errands all over to get ready to head out of town tomorrow. There is a lot to get ready. Min had to work at the hotel last night and has to work again tonight so she has to do all of her packing today. We had to run up to Rochester to do some last minutes things like banking and paperwork at the car dealer (Holtz appears to be actually getting my refund back to me on some stuff… cross your fingers.)

Min spent most of the day packing while Andy and I spent much of the evening working on the Waste Watcher. Min headed off to work and I got to bed around 1:00 am.