Accommodation: Four Points Halifax Hotel
Halifax is a beautiful city and our hotel is right in its heart… with many sites nearby, places to eat, and only steps away from the Atlantic ocean.
We were in Halifax in 2023 on a Viking cruise, but we didn’t have the opportunity to walk around the city. At that time, we opted to take an onshore excursion, that featured the sites we saw on our bus tour today.
The Fairlawn cemetery, our first stop, is the final resting place of over 100 victims of the Titanic disaster. What I didn’t know from our previous visit, is that the graves are arranged in the shape of a ship, tapering towards the “bow” and wider at the “stern”.
The coroner, who was tasked with the job of trying to identify the victims that were pulled from the icy waters, had an almost hopeless undertaking. Most of the victims did not have any identification on them. In order to attempt identification, he numbered the bodies as they came to the morgue, and then wrote down eye color, hair color, and tried to guess at ethnicity. Sometimes though, he made assumptions. A person with red hair was assumed to be Irish, but of course, that wasn’t always the case.
There are also graves from the 1917 Halifax explosion, the largest manmade explosion in history before the atomic bomb. It was caused by the collision of the French explosives-laden ship SS Mont-Blanc and the Norwegian ship SS Imo in Halifax Harbour, resulting in about 2,000 deaths, thousands injured, and widespread destruction of the city’s north end.
We boarded our bus again and enjoyed seeing the beautiful neighborhoods, as we passed through them on the way to the Citadel, a former British and Canadian military site.
At the Citadel, the Royal Artillery at noon each day, fires a cannon. We arrived just in time to hear the cannon fire, and even though we knew it was happening, we all jumped out of our skin. Wow… It was loud!!!
We enjoyed lunch at a local restaurant, dining on haddock which was delicious. We enjoyed talking with some of the folks on the tour and we had a lovely time.
After the tour, Allan and I walked the boardwalk and then went to the Alexander Keith brewery. Alexander immigrated from Scotland to Nova Scotia in 1817 and founded the brewery in 1820. He served as Mayor of Halifax from 1843–1844 and again from 1852–1853.
Unfortunately, all the tours for the brewery for today were sold out, but the man gave us two tickets to enjoy free beers at a restaurant around the corner from the brewery. The beers were very good… Nice and dark.
Allan and I went to dinner at a local restaurant and had the lobster dinner and then it was off to bed.
If you would like to know more about Halifax and what we saw today, please go to my 2023 Canada, Greenland, and Iceland blog post as I go into much more detail about the sites we saw today.
