Nova Scotia

Finally a slightly overdue post on our trip to Nova Scotia!

Although we got back to Scotland on Tuesday, the whole week seems to have disappeared in the blink of an eye and at feels like nothing has been achieved. I am behind reading blogs, behind on uploading photos and behind on sewing! I honestly think it's because I've spent most of the week washing clothes - where does it all come from? There's more than two suitcases worth, that's for sure!

Anyway, I am hoping that this update marks the start of some progress!

We flew off to Halifax on 6th April. It's a trip we have been wanting to make since we lived in Alberta between 2007-09, but because internal flights are expensive we decided to wait till we were back in the UK to do the trip, and then along came Theo, and a Afghanistan deployment, and it started slipping out of our grasp, but to cut a long story short, my parents offered to have the boy for a week, we booked the flights and off we went!

It is fascinating going back to a country after 3 years away and seeing what you have forgotten and what you have remembered through rose tinted glasses. The one thing that immediately became clear is that Nova Scotia is not Alberta! For those of you who don't know Canada well, Alberta has a lot of oil and gas and with it, a lot of employment, money and low taxes!

 That aside it was still the same country. Tim Horton's Boston Creams still taste amazing (particularly the first one after 3 years eaten in the sunshine on Halifax waterfront) and Canadian Superstore (or Atlantic Superstore as it is in the east) still stocks brilliant cheap kids clothes (just don't ask how much I spent!)

We had forgotten that spring comes late to Canada and that this does not just mean it is cold (we were ready for that!) but that the grass is brown and the trees are completely bare. In contrast coming back to Scotland has been an absolute explosion of greenery!

Halifax was absolutely fascinating. We hadn't planned to visit in the run up to the Titanic anniversary, but as it turned out it added a really interesting angle to an already interesting place. Not only was there all the Titanic stuff to see, but lots on the Halifax explosion (telling a friend about it yesterday, she said "but why doesn't everyone know about it?" - quite!) There was fascinating information in the museum about laying the transatlantic cables, Pier 21 which was the Canadian centre for immigration and the Swiss Air memorial. For a small city, Halifax has seen an incredible amount of sadness and we both found it very moving.

Of course any holiday is not complete for me without some photo opportunities and this time I bravely left my SLR camera at home and relied entirely on my new compact camera and I was not disappointed! In fact it was quite liberating to know that all the kit was thousands of miles away and there was no decisions to be made about which lens to use!





So, apart from the bare trees, it more than lived up to our expectations and we will definitely be going back. We already have the summer of 2015 penciled in, when Theo will be old enough to appreciate it and this time we'll factor in some ferries and Prince Edward Island too.

There are many more photos, but not enough time yet for post-production twiddling, so I may do another post later in the week...