Day 12: Halifax, 15°, ☁️☁️

Suicidal Deer!🤣

Sitting in a nice little ‘healthy type food’ pub enjoying a late afternoon snack. The car has been dropped off in town instead of the airport. The hotel manager where we are staying suggested to AT that we call Alamo to see if we could drop it here. We could! This change saved us 2-3 hours to drive out to the airport, find someone to deal with the insurance for the cracked windscreen and then take a city bus all the way back into town (taxi is $65, bus $4.50).

I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but 20 minutes after picking up our car a rock flew across from the oncoming lane and put a small ding in the windscreen. Over the next 2-3 days the injury stretched itself into a 6-8 inch crack. I put a claim in with my credit card insurance and they sent me the usual email asking for a pile of information in order to assess the claim. I thought it was pretty straightforward, but I guess they have their processes.🙄 When we dropped the car I was expecting them to put a nasty hold funds on my Visa, but the drop off was seamless and no hold was taken. Yet. He told me that this is a common car injury.😅 I guess we will see what happens. We put about 3,000 km on the vehicle. Lots more driving that I originally anticipated.

This morning, the good place we went for breakfast yesterday wasn’t open on a Monday morning so we made the decision to drive up the coast to where I picked up Annemarie yesterday. We went into a restaurant there and frankly the service was super slow and my tea tasted like coffee. After sitting up until after midnight last night to watch the Blue Jays win their game (yeah), bad tea didn’t exactly put me in a happy place. 🤨Fortunately Annemarie had my back, and she told me I should take my lovely tea thermos that my daughter Erin gave me over to the tea specialty place. They happily filled it up for me with their best selling black tea blueberry blend. It’s actually really good. So I drove away with a nice smile on my face.😊

We continued to drive along the coast road hoping to avoid the main highway. We stopped from time to time to check out the scenery. I’d say that we were pretty successful!

Just when we thought we’d had our fill of the colours and reflections, we’d find something jaw dropping and would stop again. I’m going to be making myself a pretty nice calendar for next year! I make one each year from our travels. This year I’ll need to pick carefully from our travel in SE Asia, my walk in the Pyrenees and finally this trip through the Maritimes. This is never an easy process!!🙃

We stopped to take photos of this sweet little community.

We eventually found the peninsula where the iconic Peggy’s Cove is located. I’ve heard about this place for years and I’d been wondering what it was all about. Before we could see it, however, we had to get past some long highway resurfacing projects. These really slowed us down, but eventually we were able pass through and continue on our way.

We finally arrived and it was essentially a lighthouse and a tiny village.

Very similar to the lighthouses we saw on Cape Breton and PEI. They were all very nice.

Understandably (I think) I’m asking myself what makes the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove so special? It’s not as old as the other two or as historically recognized. So I asked some nice Nova Scotians running a pewter gift store at Peggy’s Cove about the popularity of their lighthouse. They understood what I was asking, and explained that with over one million visitors each year, the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove is the most photographed lighthouse in Canada, some say in the world. They told me it’s because of its proximity to Halifax and therefore its accessibility. For example, there will be no less than 5 cruise ships in Halifax harbour tomorrow, and from those 5 ships they expect more than 50 buses to arrive at Peggy’s Cove. All there to see the lighthouse and the tiny community. A fair explanation, and now I understand.🙂

Later when we dropped off our car the operator at the rental shop told me that they regularly rent cars for people to drive out to Peggy’s Cove just for the day. Clearly the lighthouse has a lot of admiring fans! It just got me thinking, and I hope that my pondering didn’t upset anyone. It’s a very nice place.

The picturesque village of Peggy’s Cove. I can’t imagine too many people live here full time. Imagine 1,000,000 people looking at your house every year!! Not to mention all the traffic and noise…

Now back in our hotel room and I hope to be able to stay awake to watch the Jays play the Mariners with a 9pm start on the east coast. Pretty exciting! I really have jumped on this band wagon.🤣

That’s about it from here today. A full two days here in Halifax with variable weather.

Oh, and the title to today’s blog? We saw a road sign on the coast road that said, “Suicidal Deer”! I guess there have been some issues. We both had a good laugh!😂

Cheers!🍷

Geoff