Bits I Missed

A few things I forgot to report on our time in Nova Scotia.

We flew in on Condor Air from Hamburg. The airline is a cheap German carrier. Our car was loaded on the Atlantic Sail a day or two before and would take two weeks to get to Halifax, so we burned some time looking around north east Canada. We hadn’t been to this area of Canada, so it was a good excuse.

Condor’s flight to Halifax was quite standard, until about four metres off the ground, when we were supposed to land. Yes, supposed too.

We were on final, just flaring out and I looked out the window and thought, “bloody hell this ground is passing us quickly”. Around that time there was a huge roar and we tilted back up, pointed to the sky and vrroomm, up we went – a “go around”, it’s called).

The bit that scared me the most was the huge wobble we did, just as we started to climb. It went even quieter than it normally is in a plane on landing approach, (you’ve noticed that, haven’t you?), then the Captain came on the radio, calmly said in a number of languages, that the runway we had been allocated had a tailwind and we would have ended in the swamp, (his words), so he asked for an alternative runway.

In we came to land and because of the (now) crosswind, we swayed around like we had a bull by the tail. When that settled there was spontaneous applause from all the passengers. (Now Lynn knows why I applaud on every landing – every one!).

That was our welcome to Nova Scotia.

We got a hire car, which was a new Korean thing with bald tyres. I didn’t know they were bald until, driving through a storm on the highway, on cruise control, we hit a big patch or puddle of water. We did a very exciting slide across a couple of lanes of road.

I had a look later and all four tyres were down to the wear strips. Zero tread.

About 150km up the road, we dropped into a tyre shop and got four new tyres, paid by the car hire people (not without a bit of mucking about) then off we went.

There is a coastal road, in the Cape Breton National Park – The Cabot Trail. It’s really quite beautiful. Rugged coastline, plenty of signs indicating folklore history etc. The roads are in good nick and even though the accommodation was busting at the seams, the roads were not too heavily trafficked.

We spent a day in Halifax city to discover two things:

1. Survivors of the Titanic came into Halifax Harbour (and St Anthony’s in NF) after the sinking. The maritime museum has all sorts of stories, artifacts and pictures of the ship, the survivors and their stories.

2. In 1915 (about) there was a huge explosion when a ship with medical aid for Belgium collided in the harbour with a ship that had 2000 tonnes of high explosive. The explosion levelled some 1000 acres of city, and was a terrible event during the time of WW1.

That’s about it for now.