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| Day 25 - Halifax, NS | ||
 Well, it is another rainy day, but we are starting it with a day brightener.. |
 a pancake breakfast prepared by our Adventure Caravan's staff. Here Bob and Barry prepare the blueberry and banana-nut pancakes. Yummmy! |
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 Pat, Sue and Terry serve up our breakfast feast. |
 Last night we each delivered some fresh fruit to Sue Schmidt creating a "Friendship Fruit Salad". Here are the shared results in fruit cups waiting for us to enjoy. |
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 Susan Shallbetter left her umbrella at the Citadel yesterday and went back to retrieve it... |
 As she came out with the umbrella, she was followed by the 78th Highlanders Pipers in full uniform. What a site! |
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 Our next stop was the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. This was listed as a must-see attraction. |
 The first display you see as you enter the museum is this huge Fresnel lens (pronounced fruh-nell) from a decommissioned lighthouse. |
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 There were many magnificent models throughout the museum. This the HMS Victory, built in 1813, it was 226 ft long, held a crew of 850 men and had 100 cannons of various sizes. |
 The Dunottar Castle is a fine example of the gradual shift from sail to steam power. Launched in 1890, she was fitted with a triple expansion steam engine. Like many, her owners had reservations about the relatively new technology, so she was rigged as a three-masted schooner. |
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 The Halifax Wrecked Exhibit, recounts the devastating effects of the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbor, the most destructive man-made explosion before the atomic age. It is a horrific story and one that I had never heard. In a nutshell, two ships collided in Halifax harbor at 8:45 AM on the morning of December 6, 1917. One of the ships, the Mont-Blanc carried munitions for the war effort in France. |
 At 9:04 AM Mont-Blanc exploded with a force stronger than any manmade explosion before it. The steel hull burst sky-high, falling in a blizzard of red-hot, twisted projectiles on Dartmouth and Halifax. Some pieces were tiny; others were huge. Part of the anchor hit the ground more than 2.5 miles away on the far side of Northwest Arm. A gun barrel landed in Dartmouth more than 3 miles from the harbor. |
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 These are some of the fragments found more than 3.5 miles away from the blast. |
 These dolphins were all around the town celebrating the Canadian Navy Centennial. Each dolphin is painted by a different artist and all of them are great fun to see. |
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 This is the Small Craft Gallery, where 20 of over 70 small craft in the Museum's collection are on display. |
 This was a working vessel converted to fishing charter in the 1930's. It has graceful lines and it appealed to me. |
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 The CSS Acadia is owned by the museum and is part of their permanent exhibition. Acadia was launched in 1913. She was the first vessel specifically designed and built to survey Canada's northern waters, and her career took her from the dangerous, ice-infested waters of Hudson Bay to Nova Scotia's South Shore. In her early years, she was responsible for pioneering hydrographic research in Canada's Arctic waters. |
 At the end of her career, the Acadia was used to chart the coast of Newfoundland after it joined Confederation in 1949, creating entirely new charts and updating some that were nearly a century old. The chief Hydrographer was more important than the captain of the ship and had these exquisite quarters in the rear of the ship. The wood you see is mahogany. |
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 Each Hydrographer had their own cabin which was basic but very nicely appointed. There is a desk and chair out of sight to the right. |
 This is the bow of the boat where the common sailors bunked. Since there were more crew than there were bunks, the bunk beds needed to be shared. So the term "Hot Bunk" was coined. When a watch was over, the sailor sleeping in the bunk would get up to go on duty, and the other sailor would take the bunk. Thus, this second sailor would lie down on a "hot bunk". |
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 Our last stop was going to be a tour of the Alexander Keith's Nova Scotia Brewery. |
 It is one of the oldest working breweries in North America, located in a massive ironstone and granite building (c1820). However, with a cost of $18.50 per person to go on the tour, we decided to just have a couple of beers and appetizers in the brew house instead. |
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Click here for a Google map of above pictures. |
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