August 26 – Halifax

This morning, we sailed into the port of Halifax. The skyline has changed quite a bit since last time we were here in 2010. The skyline is now filled with harbour front condominiums and tall office towers in the downtown. Gone are the historical old warehouses that lined the shore of the harbor.


Some in our cruise crew took a tour of historical Halifax where they saw the Titanic cemetery, the Citadel and the neighborhood which was decimated by the explosion of an ammunition boat during the First World War. Others took a tour out to the very scenic Peggy's Cove which they loved.

Because we have been to Halifax many times, we arranged to meet some friends with whom we played baseball in Ottawa.  They moved back to Nova Scotia to raise their families and to be with their friends. It must be at least 20 years since we've seen Alex and Mu, and 14 years since we've seen Moose and Karen. We meet for lunch at a pub called Dirty Nelly’s. It was a great occasion as the conversations flowed as if time had not passed. We talked about our families and friends that we knew when we all lived in Ottawa. The lunch passed way too quickly.


We walked to the boat using the new harbor front boardwalk. This looks like a great place for residents and tourists to go for restaurants and pubs. When we were here in 2010, the boardwalk was very small and centred around the casino.


Tonight, the show in a theatre was an encore presentation by the magician James Cielen. He performed a lot of new tricks using sleight of hand that kept us all amazed.

After the show the cruise director came out tell us about what would be happening tomorrow and mistakenly told us that we had to set our clocks back one hour to eastern daylight savings time. But it turns out that the change takes effect tomorrow night.

As I write this on the morning of 27th everybody’s scheduled is all screwed up. We tried to get into the formal dinning room for breakfast only find out it was closing. Others missed a lecture that they wanted to attend because it was over when they went to the theatre. This is just another Celebrity Eclipse aggravation.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 17 – Reykjavik

Image
The last few days, we have been exploring Reykjavik at a leisurely pace. We’ve had a wonderful time but tonight we move on. Reykjavík is the capital and largest city of Iceland. It is located in southwestern Iceland, on the southern shore of Faxaflói Bay. The city is the world's northernmost capital. It has a population of around 140,000 and its surrounding suburbs include another 80,000 people.   This makes up almost 70% of the entire population of the island nation. Reykjavík is believed to be the location of the first permanent settlement in Iceland, which, was established in the 9 th century by the Vikings. The city was officially founded in 1786 as a trading town and grew steadily, transforming itself into a national centre of commerce and governmental activities. In May 1940, following the German occupation of Denmark and Norway, four British warships approached Reykjavík and anchored in the harbour. Within a few hours, the allied occupation of Reykjavík was complete. Th...
Read more

August 16 – Embarkation

Image
Today we finally saw the sun.  It still cold but at least we are dry. It is wonderful to have the cruise crew back together again. Although we haven’t been together since March of last year, the conversation is so easy it might as well have been yesterday. We boarded the Celebrity Eclipse to start our cruise. We’ve been on this ship at least once, but I didn’t remember the layout. It became more familiar as the day went on. We found out that we’ve cruised with Celebrity enough days that we are now considered “elite” passengers. This gives us a couple of nice perks, such as a free wine tasting, the officer’s meet and greet and discounts for various items. The embarkation process is getting simpler each time we have a cruise. It seemed to flow without any hitches or hassles. Our stateroom is the standard size, but we did manage to unpack all our clothes in the closet space provided. Of course, we packed way too much. The view from our room is a sweeping vista of the surrounding mou...
Read more

August 30 – Hyannis

Image
Hyannis is known for the late President Kennedy’s family compound. There is a museum dedicated to the tragic family history of the Kennedys. The main street is a busy commercial area with many interesting shops and restaurants, with traffic jams to match.  Our annual family scavenger hunt was held today. Several years ago, Marg’s daughter Kari started this tradition by making a list of clues for which we had to travel into town and answer the questions. This year’s location is on Main Street in Hyannis Massachusetts. The local residents must have thought the seven levels of hell had descended on them. We ran thru the downtown, harassing the locals and merchants for answers to Kari’s questions. We were snapping pictures and videos to prove we had been to the locations that the clues pointed to. To a stranger it must have seemed to be total chaos. When we gathered to determined the final score, pedestrians must have thought a massive fight had erupted. Good natured accusations of...
Read more