Necon—which we regulars call “Camp Necon”—is coming up. It’s my writer’s vacation retreat each most years, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I won’t be on any panels (I was scheduled for one, but it conflicted with my departing flight), but I’m gonna have a good time all the same.
A couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I went on a Maritime Canadian vacation. When we first planned it, we were only going to go to Halifax, where we both attended university, but I decided to turn it into a bit of a road trip adventure.
A rainstorm swept through Houston just before our flight, which delayed our departure. I was a little worried, since we had a tight connection in Detroit. Delta now lets you connect to their site in flight, even if you don’t buy WiFi, so I could check up on things. Unfortunately, the site wasn’t updated with our departure, so the alerts grew increasingly alarming: you’re going to miss your connection. Click here to make alternate arrangements. However, the alternate arrangements always involved new flights starting from Houston and we were well into the flight! As it turned out, we were only a few minutes late arriving, and our connecting gate was next to the one at which we arrived. One really nice thing about the Delta app is that you can follow your luggage, and we were able to confirm that our bags had made our connecting flight, too. Useful information, although it wouldn’t be so nice to see that your bags hadn’t made the connection, or were now en route to Katmandu.
Our first stop in Canada was Prince Edward Island. No, that’s not exactly true. Our first stop was at Tim Horton’s in the Halifax airport. We stayed over at the airport hotel and headed off to PEI the next morning. I haven’t been to the island in 40 years, give or take, and my daughter has never been. We crossed the Confederation Bridge for the first time ever on Monday morning and meandered our way to Cavendish, where we visited the Anne of Green Gables tourist attractions. There’s a small museum where we caught a short video about Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life. Then we went through the barn and toured the house that is set up to replicate the one Anne Shirley lived in. Apparently many international tourists come there thinking Anne was a real person. Across the road, there’s a site I’d never visited: the place where LMM grew up. Her mother died of TB when she was two, so she was raised by her grandparents. All that remains of the house now is the stone cellar and a water well, but there’s a bookstore nearby run by relatives. We were treated to a nice talk by a woman whose husband was the great-grandson of the people who raised LMM. She was old enough to have attended LMM’s funeral in 1942, though she didn’t say how old she was at the time.
After Cavendish we went to Charlottetown. If I’ve ever been there before, I don’t remember it. It reminds me a lot of Halifax, in condensed form. The waterfront even has many of the same businesses. Preparations were well under way for the July 1st (Canada Day) celebrations, and it’s the 150th anniversary of the conference that led to the formation of Canada. We walked all over, including a trip through Victoria Park.
The next day, we went to southern New Brunswick to spend a day visiting with my relatives. We had a lobster feast that evening, the first time my daughter’s ever had it. It rained hard during our drive back to Halifax on Wednesday afternoon. The rental car was prone to hydroplaning when there was standing water, so we took our time. We were in no rush, and the sun stayed up until after 9 pm.
When we got to the hotel, we were informed that there was a package for us in the room. The publicist for the Syfy series Haven, which films in nearby Chester, had delivered an amazing gift basket that contained Haven goodies along with chocolate and other delectables. I’m still working my way through it. There was also a DVD that contained an episode of the show and an hour-long behind the scenes feature, so we watched that during the evening. I wrote about our visit to the Haven set earlier: that took up our Thursday. We went to my daughter’s favorite pizza place when we got back into the city.
On Friday morning, I had a taped interview lined up with the German TV station VOX. They have a thing coming out this fall and had reached out to me a few weeks earlier. Rather than having them schlep all the way from NY to Texas, I suggested they come up to Halifax, which worked into their schedule. The interviewer and her videographer arrived on Thursday evening; unfortunately, their gear did not, so we had to push the interview until late in the morning. I spent nearly two hours with them, though the first 30 minutes mostly involved getting the lighting right in the hotel suite where they were set up.
Once that was finished, I walked down to the Public Gardens to meet up with my daughter. We toured the waterfront, had a beavertail (our first) and wound up at the farmer’s market, where we had my daughter’s favorite tamales. She met up with some friends and I had a beer and a salad at a sidewalk cafe on Quinpool, where my daughter joined me later.
All too soon, our Maritime adventure was over, and we headed back home on Saturday afternoon, after having a donair at King of Donair on Quinpool en route to the airport.
