Leaving a wet day in Winnipeg and heading for:
Halifax, Nova Scotia
It’s always difficult to determine what to call a travel day at the start of another adventure. Even more difficult when that travel day begins to feel more like 36 hours long. Such was the case June 9, 2009 as I started out on a UK adventure that would see me awake at about 4AM to catch an early morning Air Canada flight from Ottawa to Halifax, where I met up with fellow photographer, Ron Dunnington for a day of sightseeing and photography along the Nova Scotia coast, followed by a later rendezvous with my Offa’s Dyke hiking partner, Ron Joy from Newfoundland at his sister’s beautiful home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia where we ate a wonderful full course meal before heading out to the airport for the overnight flight to Heathrow Airport in London, England.
While in Halifax with photographer friend Ron, I did the driving and he did the guiding. Although I didn’t know where I was or where I was going most of the time, we did get to see a lot of lovely countryside and seashore in a short period of time. Ron was still recovering from some serious surgery earlier in the year so couldn’t walk too far or too fast and always welcomed a good rock to lean on.
The last time he and I had been out photographing together, we had been photographing damselflies in Toronto so it was nice to see him once again.
Peggy’s Cove and more recently the memorial site to remember the folks who lost their lives in a Swiss Air disaster off the shores of Nova Scotia are on every tourist’s itinerary and this day they were on mine too; Peggy’s Cove because I like to see the waves crashing on the rocks and the Swiss Air memorial because I knew many individuals, including Ron, who had worked countless hours responding to this nightmare of a disaster within Canadian offshore waters in sight of Peggy’s Cove.
Peggy’s Cove, although idyllic on a calm day, can turn quickly dangerous on rougher days. Each year, tourists are rescued from the waters surrounding Peggy’s Cove but often those rescue attempts are unsuccessful. This day was one of those idyllic days with relatively calm waters, blues skies and pleasant temperatures and vastly different from the last time I had visited Peggy’s Cove. On that occasion, I was one of the chaperones for a high school band group and gale force winds were driving giant flumes of spray high in the air.
Although Nova Scotia shoreline weather can be highly variable, we were spared any nasty surprises this time as we just enjoyed pointing our cameras and clicking whenever we wanted to.
