Our Excellent Eastern Canada Adventure – Part 1

All things considered, travelling across the country from Vancouver to Halifax isn’t such a big deal under normal circumstances. However, throw in an all nighter red-eye flight and it would make any flight all that more grueling. The start to our Eastern Canada Excellent Adventure with Liz and Peter began last night when we met at the Vancouver airport for our 11:30PM departure on our way to Halifax.
Flying over Nova Scotia this morning gave us a lot of hope for us seeing good weather on our trip as we were able to see out of our airline window all of the many lakes throughout Nova Scotia. When we landed we were pleasantly surprised to be greeted with sunny skies and at least 25 degree temperatures. All of us were wearing clothes expecting colder temperatures and while waiting at the car rental booth we all had the same thought that we need to get into some cooler clothes.

If you recall, the last time that the four of were in a rental car together we were driving in Tuscany in Italy on Our Excellent Italian Adventure. It was also memorable for the fact that we got horribly lost coming home from a visit to the west coast of Italy called Cinque Terre. Funny how history repeats itself as we were no more than an hour out of the Halifax airport in our rental car when we found ourself driving along some back roads doing our best to get back onto the correct highway to Halifax.

Nonetheless, we made it safely to our hotel without too many wrong turns.

Given that it was now about 1:30PM and we were all pretty famished as we hadn’t eaten any real food since the previous evening, we decided to drop our bags in our rooms, of course change into some lighter clothes and go get a bite to eat.

Right next to our hotel happened to be the Alexander Keith’s brewery and we all agreed that a nice lunch and a round of Alexander Keith’s India Pale Ales would do the trick to satisfy our hunger.

For most of my readers outside of Canada, Alexander Keith beers may not be too well known but we regularly see the commercials in Vancouver with it’s catch phrase “The pride of Nova Scotia”. We all agreed that the beers (and the lunch that accompanied them) were just the thing that we needed to inject some energy back into us. By this time all of us were still running a bit low on energy due to not getting more than a few hours sleep the night before but being in a new city on the first day of an Excellent Adventure is always a good motivator.

For the most part we really just spent some time around the harbour area near our hotel today and Barb, Liz and Peter took in a local city tour called the Harbour Hopper while I decided to pass on that and just spent some additional time exploring the city. That exploration really just lasted for about another hour as I was running out of steam.

We all met up around 7PM again for a good local seafood dinner at a place called Murphy’s Restaurant and after a short walk home all called it a night before it was even 9PM. For all of us a full night sleep was definitely needed and we would start again tomorrow morning with a fresh perspective of exploring more of Halifax over the next two days.

Baden