Who Approved This??😂
The Seattle Mariners made it very tight, but thankfully the Blue Jays eased through in the end and move on to the World Series! 🥳🎉⚾️🏟️ Fortunately we will be home for the start of the series as these 12:30 AM nights are killing us!!😂
This morning we decided to walk the Halifax waterfront boardwalk. It started off nicely with just a few other morning walkers out enjoying the surprisingly warm morning air. I was down to a t-shirt.
If you have the chance to walk here, it’s well worth the time!
Up until this moment I’d forgotten about all the cruise ships due to dock in Halifax this morning. People poured of these ships and very quickly there was a considerable wall of humanity walking towards us!😬
We backtracked to try and get ahead of the crowd and gain access to the highly rated Maritime museum, but we were too late.🙁 I went back to the ticket office and asked if they would please validate our tickets for tomorrow so that we could see the exhibits after the thousands had departed. The ticket people seemed surprised to hear that there were so many cruise ships visiting for the day, and agreed to defer our tickets. I couldn’t help wondering who was responsible for approving so many cruise ships arriving into such a small community? Halifax is a pretty small city with just 470,000 people, about 100,000 larger than Victoria. I can’t imagine 5 cruise ships at our port.
Last year just three cruise ships arrived in Lisbon while we were there. That much larger city was overrun. So…we decided to do here what we did there.😅 We jumped onto one of the harbour ferries and crossed the harbour to Dartmouth and went for a walk along the waterfront there!
Back in Halifax we found the majority of the cruisers had returned to their ships for lunch. Really, most were gone.
After catching a short break to recharge after two very late nights, I decided to go for a walk to look for the memorial commemorating the December 6, 1917 Halifax harbour explosion.
Along the way I passed through the less affluent neighbourhood of North Halifax. It was certainly a bit run down, but it was a good opportunity to see another side of this generally nice city. Eventually I crossed into another area that appears to be I. The process of gentrification. Lots of nicely restored homes and young families. Nice to see though I wondered what pressure this might put on the area I’d just walked through.
Eventually I found the memorial which had been raised by the citizens and businesses of Halifax. Many aren’t aware of what happened here in December, 1917. I copied this from Wikipedia;
On the morning of 6 December 1917, the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanccollided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the harbour of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Mont-Blanc, laden with high explosives, caught fire and detonated, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest human-made explosionat the time.[1] It released the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT(12 TJ).
Also from Wikipedia:
Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wavesnapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out a community of Mi’kmaq who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.
I also read that one of the ship’s massive propellers and the attached drive shaft was found over 4 km from the blast site. Wow!
Perhaps you remember watching Heritage Minutes during TV commercials in the very early 1990’s? I do, and I remember the episode about Vince Coleman and how he sacrificed his own life to successfully stop a passenger train arriving into Halifax on that fateful day.
https://youtu.be/rw-FbwmzPKo?si=63-C7aSYVfVUc98K
I returned in time to walk out to dinner at a cozy downtown restaurant.
Tomorrow is our last full day in Halifax. We have a few plans for the morning. Hopefully a walk into another part of this pleasant city.
Cheers!
Geoff🍷
Distance Walker - Wandering & Wondering! 
Our old Weather Announcer on the Radio who gave up to date forecasts every morning when I was going to work would usually end his report – if the weather was going to be good – by saying ” A VERY USABLE DAY AHEAD”
Can’t say quite the same thing for the next few days in Victoria – it maybe a little damp (but usable for a couple returning home from a holiday!
Dad
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