Our flight was leaving at 6 am out of Halifax, so the day before we left our magical little house in LaHave and drove towards Halifax, making a stop to see historic Lunenburg.
Lunenburg was established in 1753 (OLD!) by the British. Old Town Lunenburg is a UNESCO World Heritage site as it is one of the best examples of the British settlements in North America. It's a port city that was famous for its schooner building.
We visited a free house-museum called Knaut-Rhuland House where they have preserved the furniture, decorations, household items just like it was in the 18th century. But it's not on the picture below. 😂
It's amazing that it is so well preserved. Walking along the streets of the old town reminded us a bit about Europe, more like Dartmouth England. The weather was quite gray too, but it was not freezing (this is JUNE!).
We had a lovely expensive lunch by the water and strolled along the beautiful buildings until we found an ice cream place... Again, this is not an ice cream place...this is meant to illustrate us strolling around.
And then we found this big Canadian Flag--I just think their flag is so pretty! Yeah...selfies looking down don't come out very flattering.
In the late afternoon, we drove to Halifax. We booked a hotel 20 minutes from the airport, so that it's not as horrible to wake up in the morning and drive. We showed up at this busy hotel and it turned out that they basically gave away the kind of room that I had booked (that would fit five people). And the hotel was fully booked! And there was no way to get a rollaway into the room. After a bunch of discussion and them apologizing, they said they would deeply discount the room and give us a blow up mattress, which was a good solution after all---we were going to sleep in the room just till around 3:30 am... So this inconvenience actually saved us money at the end;).
We left the kids at the hotel to watch a movie and went on a date to Halifax downtown. The kids were happy to just chill and we were happy to get out as a couple. We went to a nice Irish pub and had a very atmospheric meal:) It was lovely!
That evening it was kind of drizzly and not so warm, so we didn't spend much time outside. The waterfront was nice, but super busy with some Pig lickin' festival goers. One cool thing was this memorial arch called Last Steps, commemorating the place when thousands (350,000) of Canadian men and women boarded the ship to go fight in the WWI...60,000 never returned.
I am sure there is a lot more to see in Halifax but we were glad we spent majority of our Nova Scotia time in the countryside.
Our time in Canada was over but we were not quite done with our adventures!
We got up super early, drove to the airport through the crazy fog, returned out car rental, checked-in for our flight and stood in line for a long time to get through passport control. I guess, customs didn't open till like 5 or so and by that time there were lots of people trying to get through customs to board their early planes. One annoying thing that I, as a seasoned traveler, didn't think would be a problem was bringing fruits from Canada to the US. I mean, it's not like we are coming back from an island... it was strange and sad because I had to throw away a bunch of cherries, plums and apples that I was planning on eating on the plane "for breakfast".
Well, we boarded on time and were going through all the checks when they realized that the waterline was not functioning and so they didn't have enough water in the plane or something like that. It, first, turned into an hour delay....then an hour and a half...while we were still sitting by the gate. We started suspecting by then that we wouldn't be making our connection in Newark that was shortly after 8:30 am or something like that. While sitting on the plane, I managed to rebook us from that flight to the 10:30 am flight which we were going to make if only we left around 8. The problem was that after the water issue was fixed (which they had to wait for someone to fix it), there was some mix up with either luggage or passengers, so there was more delay. Basically, we finally took off but not early enough to make the rebooked 10:30 flight.
Once we got to Newark (right around 10:30), the gate was already closed for the flight to Raleigh. The gate agents just told us to go to the United Customer Service line and see what flight they could put us on. Well....we stood in line for over an hour and a half! The issue was that the day before, Newark airport had to close for a significant period of time because one plane blew two tires during emergency landing. So now all the people that were stranded the day before were also filling up the morning and afternoon flights that we were trying to catch. This was a Sunday and we really-really needed to get home by Monday morning. The agent was trying to get us on any airline, from any NY airport, but there was NOTHING for five people. And they didn't want to put us on stand-by because in this situation there is no way we could all get on the same flight.
So the only solution after, seriously, thirty minutes with the agent was us taking a train from Newark airport to DC, then a taxi to the airport and then fly home DC-RDU at 8 pm. They gave us a few food vouchers to tie us over, but we had to seriously RUN to the train station as the train was leaving within minutes. So we grabbed Burger King as fast as we could and sprinted...literally jumping into the train as the doors closed seconds after us. We took a deep breath of relief... and then got stopped by a conductor who was checking if we had our tickets. Well, we didn't technically, and our name was supposed to be in the system as the agent had just added us. But it wasn't. So they told us we had to get off at the next stop, buy actual tickets and then get on the next train. What?:) Anyway! After a bunch of back and forth and getting another conductor to work with us, we figured everything out and did find our name in the ticketing system. So we finally could relax and enjoy the three hour train ride to Washington DC.
One thing for sure--it was nice to be traveling with older kids. Mark looks extremely happy to be on this train after waking up at 3:30 am:)
We got to DC still in good spirits because the whole thing turned into this massive adventure:)
This is us at the Union Station in DC.
We somehow figured out how to get a taxi to fit us all in (as you can see our luggage was taken from us sometime in Canada, so at least we had only one suitcase to roll around). The taxi ride was around 30-40 minutes. We got to the airport and still had more trouble finding our reservations...it was a big merry-go-round as United had booked us onto an American airlines flight, but American airlines kept sending us to go talk to the United counter. And so it was back and forth until we said that was enough! :) We grabbed our dinner food (with the food vouchers from United) and finally got on the flight to Raleigh.
This picture was taken on our first plane Halifax to Newark...as Robert was very tired. But this is how we all felt when we FINALLY got home at 10 pm at night. It was a crazy-crazy day, but at least we were all together, got home safely and did think of it as an unexpected fun adventure. I am surprised actually that with all our travels this was the first time ever that such a crazy thing happened! Well, maybe we could only compare this experience to this one time when we got stuck across the Chunnel.
The end.
Lyana.
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