Northeast Passage Part Four

Day Six.

On day six we went to Saint John's, New Brunswick, province of Canada, planet Earth, in the galaxy of the Milky Way.

Even now the visit seems like a dream. Mostly because there's not a whole lot there, there. It seemed like a pleasant enough small city. Nice place to raise a family or launch a Ponzi scheme. And that's pretty much all there was.

We walked along the waterfront and visited the little downtown, where in the first three blocks we saw, oh, fifteen or twenty Tim Horton's donut shops. Apparently Canadians like their donuts. Anyway, we decided to give one a try. We'd stopped a Tim Horton's some years ago in Ohio, back when they were still owned by Wendy's, and found the donuts not particularly good, but we thought it was possible they just had not transplanted well. We wanted to stalk the wily Tim Horton donut on its native turf. Sadly, even in a country which from all appearances could be a wholly owned subsidiary of Tim Horton's, Inc. the donuts we sampled didn't strike us as being anything more than average. Not bad, but once you've eaten the sinful sugar gut bombs that your average Vietnamese donut shop in Southern California turns out, its hard to go back to anything less. For the three of four hundred million Tim Horton's enthusiasts (this figure is calculated by taking the number of Tim Horton outlets observed in Saint John's alone, multiplying by 3 and then assuming that each outlet serves a minimum of 10 patrons per day, it's all very scientific) who will read this, I'm joking. I'm sure that Tim Horton's makes a very nice donut and someday I hope to find which one it is.

At this point in the trip we're actually finding ourselves a little fatigued. Oh sure, I can hear people saying well, how hard is it? Getting up in the morning and going to a sumptuous breakfast, served by extremely personable and eager wait staff. Followed by an equally sumptuous lunch and then an even more sumptuous dinner. It looks so easy to the uninitiated! Truthfully, we've been in a different port every day so far and it's a bit tiring. We were looking forward to relaxing and getting some days to just sit around, catch up on our reading and not actually see any sights. But because we're visiting locations neither of us have ever been before, we feel compelled to get up early each morning and get off the ship, walk around, sightsee and pour some money into the local economy. Fortunately there are a couple of sea days where we don't dock at all. They are coming up after Halifax and we're really looking forward to them.

Day Seven

Ahh, the day after day six. How we've been looking forward to it since it means 1) we've survived another day, and 2) we're in Halifax.

Halifax is significantly larger than Saint John's, but then again almost anything is. We took our one and only organized tour here, mainly because we discovered that the total of our on-board credits were accumulating faster then we could consume them in alcoholic beverages. We each recieved a $100 credit (on top of a whole bunch of other credits) because the hot water was not available on our deck for a period of 9 hours, during the day, when we weren't actively trying to take a shower. The horrible inconveniece was debilitating, awful, and injurious even unto my immortal soul and the sum of $100 was scarcely able to assuage our grief. But we took it.

So we took a tour. It was a nice little drive around the major sights of Halifax like parks, and honking big forts like the Citadel. The aforementioned Citadel is a major

fort that overlooked Halifax for several hundred years and it turned out to be quite a treat and we both enjoyed touring it. I could have spent quite a bit longer there as the military museum inside was particularily well done.

We both thought Halifax was nice and well worth a day visit. I'm not sure if there is much in the surrounding area to keep one busy but the landscapes were beautiful and I'd guess there are probably ample places to camp and enjoy the scenery and the wildlife. Mary, of course, believes that wildlife and living rough can be best appreciated on the Discovery Channel.

I did purchase a tie with a very nice tartan designed for Nova Scotia. It's one of the few tartans I've been able to buy because every time I see one I like, Mary (who is of bonafide Scots extraction, albeit circa 1692) hisses at me (merely of English extraction) to "put it back, you're not a McDonald." I think it unfair to base the wearing of the tartan on being a member in a Scottish clan, at least as far as I personally am concerned. Mary did think about prohibiting me from buying the Nova Scotia tartan on the basis that I wasn't from Nova Scotia but decided to relax her rules this once.