Peggy's Cove and Halifax

I rode around St. Margaret's Bay yesterday. This was a fun post in someone's front yard.


I spent some time in Peggy's Cove. It's a lovely village on a pretty bleak coastline full of granite outcroppings. There was a major plane crash, Swissair flight 111, off the coast in 1998. There is a memorial outside of town.


The town has some quaint houses.





I had a real Cornish pastie for lunch made by a real Cornishwoman. I haven't had one since I was in Cornwall in 1999. It was as yummy as I remembered.


Peggy's Cove has the most famous lighthouse in all of Nova Scotia. There was a girl playing bagpipes.


I continued on to Halifax and passed a park with a nice statue of Robbie Burns.


Today, I spent the day wandering Halifax. I went to the Maritime Museum where there was a nice exhibit on the Titanic disaster. Halifax is where most of the recovered dead are buried.

There was a display on pirates. This is a replica of the cage that a local pirate's body was hung in in Halifax harbor as a warning to other pirates.


There was a restored chandlery store from the early 20th century.


This gentleman explained how cod was salted, dried and later cooked.


This is what dried, salted cod looks like.


To cook it, it has to be soaked in water for several days to rehydrate it and dilute out the salt. Another visitor said that it is actually quite tasty though it smells pretty awful when being prepared.

After the museum, I wandered the docks. I talked to the captain of one of the harbor pilot boat captains.


Harbor pilots are responsible for bringing in and taking out ships over a certain size in their harbor. The harbor pilot boat ferries the pilot on and off the ships.

I had to try the food at The Bicycle Thief. It was fantastic!


This is a tour tug dressed up as Theodore Too, a Canadian children's show similar to Thomas the Tank Engine.


This was a commemoration of the the two waves of displacement of Acadians by the English showing where the French were sent.


I spent several hours in the Halifax Citadel.


They have a period garrison in residence dressed as they would have in 1869. The garrison consists of members of a Highland infantry regiment and an English artillery regiment. The park service hires college students who provide the period reenactments. They fire muskets, drill, fire a cannon, and play the bagpipes. It's very cool and has to be one of the best summer jobs ever.












The garrison is a star-shaped fort, common to the period. This is the trench between the two walls.


Instead of a medieval square or rectangular fort/castle such as the Tower of London, star-shaped forts are much better suited for repelling more modern cannon fire since they provide much better overlapping lines of fire. Despite English conflicts with the French and Americans, Halifax was never attacked.
-- Post From My iPhone

Location:Halifax, Nova Scotia