Halifax is a fantastic place. I say this with zero reservations. It manages to mix a certain big city-ness (eg it has a financial core of bank towers) with an intimacy only found in smaller towns. Downtown Halifax is like if you took West Queen West, the UofT campus and King and Bay and mushed them right next to each other, maybe.
But let me start somewhere else. We left on Sunday night, aiming to reach Quebec City by morning. There were six of us in one minivan, and four of us were capable enough drivers that we weren't worried about anyone burning out on the way there. It's about twenty-one hours from Toronto to Halifax, approx., and we split the travel there into stages. Ten hours to Quebec City. Six to Fredericton. Another five to Halifax.
Side-bar comment: Canada is really big. Like huge. I hesitate to say, for example, that there is literally nothing between Quebec City and Fredericton, for fear of aligning myself with age of discovery era arguments of terra nullis and etc, but really, Canada sometimes seems like a lot of nothing only broken occasionally by the odd urban aberration (see "garrison mentality").
So we drove all night and watched bleary-eyed as the sun rose over the Quebec country-side (it was more semi-industrial/suburban than rural but that is less romantic for my purposes). I didn't sleep much and I don't think anyone really did. We arrived at our motel, a generic road-side place a good distance outside the city proper, around nine and we all promptly crashed for a good few hours. We managed to get our act together eventually and we staggered into a crepe place in the old city where we took advantage of some all day breakfast (stagger's not the right word, because we first had to drive for ten minutes into the city and then wander around for fifteen minutes trying to make a decision but for all intents and purposes, it felt like we staggered in)
And another thing: arriving at a consensus between six people is difficult and often-times unrewarding. Because I was the most "Canadian," (read: whitest and also possessing an interest in and knowledge of Canadian history, I think?) itinerary planning generally fell on my shoulders. This had pros and cons. I admit I prefer my vactionary exercises to be more active than passive, and being in charge of planning allowed me a certain latitude to plan for stuff that I liked (eg. long walks, sightseeing, eating in non-chain restos, finding cheap/free ways to entertain ourselves) and to that end our trip was successful. I saw what I wanted to see, did what I wanted to do. If you don't like soaking up local ambiance, why don't you figure out what you want to do, you know?
What I found frustrating was when people who took no responsibility for planning ("Is the GPS programmed yet?" "Have you picked where we're eating yet?") also complained about what we were doing. I took an active role in planning primarily because no one else would. Did that allow my personal biases to shape our trip in significant ways? Maybe!
I feel like Richard Nixon suddenly. Who am I defending myself against? If the President does it, it's not illegal! Anytime you put yourself in that close contact for any extended period of time, minor grievances are bound to magnify themselves. I'm still working through some of them I guess.
So we spent Monday afternoon walking around old Quebec, which is beautiful and historical and etc. I love Quebec City but the language issue makes me feel uncomfortably imperial, ie forcing the locals to speak my language of choice rather than their own. But no matter, we didn't stay long in Quebec. We supped on poutine from an upscale looking but still affordable little restaurant tucked away along an alley. It was not as messy as I had hoped. Actually, it was fairly refined, with thin frites and oversized cheese curds that were too big too melt.
We returned to our motel and had a collective religious moment (or something) when we discovered Extreme Couponing on TV. What a show! (An ok joke I made, preserved for posterity: They should make a special crossover episode between Extreme Couponing and Hoarders).
But the most surprising development of the night was in our ability to rouse ourselves from our inertia, and head out again, into the night, for drinks. Past experience from our New York trip suggested that once we returned to our fort, our day would be done, based on the difficulty of affecting collective action among large groups. But leave our motel twice in one day we did. I picked a place using the internet on Rue St. Jean (iirc) outside the old city called Le Sacrilege, which was a bar with a good ambience (dark, but mellow, and not too loud which based on my reaction to it, is apparently all I've ever wanted in bar). They served no food, only salted cheese, which delivered what it promised: it was salted cheese.
We had a couple of drinks (another welcome change from New York: we were all of age to drink) and wandered out to find food. It was late though and things were closing and we ran into our old nemesis, the problem of affecting collective action, and so we dithered and dallied and no one could make any head way towards make a decision that everyone could agree on so eventually we ended up in a supermarket where those who needed them bought shrink wrapped sandwiches, and also we picked up material for assembling PB&J. I think we also stopped at a McDonald's too on the way back to our home-base. The night had started promisingly and ended poorly.
TUESDAY
Day Two saw us heading east towards Fredericton, a stop off destination picked based on convenience and geography, not on any overwhelming desire to visit New Brunswick's capital. Our hotel was located on the north side of the St. Lawrence, and so our GPS took us through the old city again, which is always nice to see, and then to the ferry, because no one had bothered to check the GPS's planned route. (The day before we watched a news report on a couple who had to be rescued from their car after their GPS had led them astray). Anyway, the drive to Fredericton was uneventful. There is a lot of nothing between the two cities, and the state of Maine just acts as a big roadblock really.
In Fredericton we stayed in a Howard Johnson, which was acceptable. I should say something about how we picked our accommodation. Obviously price was a factor, and I don't think we ever payed much more than $100 a night but even more important was exterior access to our room. As poor college-aged kids, our major cost-cutting move was to pack more than the designated occupancy limit into each room. $100 a night divided between six people becomes suddenly much more affordable. So being able to come and go as we pleased without arousing front desk suspicion or raised-eyebrows was a major selling point (In New York we stayed in a Best Western, and having to stagger ourselves every time we wanted to go out was kind of a hassle).
It was raining and fairly late in the day by the time we reached the Fred (actually, our entire time in NB, there and back, it was raining), so we resolved only to go out for food, and not spend anytime exploring the city. I picked the place using the East Coast guide book I took out from the library back home. The Lunar Rogue Pub is a pretty pubby pub, and I had my first fish and chips of the trip (not my last) and though the tartar sauce came in Kraft packets, the experience was not a bad one. Our waiter was nice, and offered not only to split our bills, but to split a certain order among a only a few of us. Unnecessarily nice waiters were something of a theme on the East Coast.
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday was our designated day for reaching Halifax, but I pushed for some sightseeing along the way. We set out for the Hopewell Rocks, the site of those distinctive Flowerpot Rocks that reveal themselves in low tide, which is located due south of Moncton . Our GPS gave us some screwy directions however, and sent us blindly into NB's back roads, until we ended up in logging camp where a road should have been. Anyway we found them eventually, and it was worth it. The park was still closed for the season, and it was cold and drizzly, but that only meant there were fewer people there to get in the way of our pictures. We timed it well too, arriving as the tide was at its furthest out. New Brunswick doesn't have like a whole lot going for it, but the Bay of Fundy is worth a visit.
After that we buckled down and got down to the business of reaching Halifax, our ostensible goal from the start. Our motel, a sprawling Days Inn, was actually in Dartmouth, not Halifax. Dartmouth is Halifax's scuzzier sister, from what I could gather, but I hesitate to judge to harshly because we made zero effort to find out if Dartmouth had a gentler side or what (Confirmation bias and etc).
That night we were pretty tired and also gravity was pretty strong, so we had KFC and I ate a gross amount of it. I think we watched Modern Family? Sitting in our hotel not doing anything became, predictably, something of our default position.
I'm going to finish this later because yowzah this is getting long.
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