26 October 2013, Bar Harbor, Maine

Seasons Come and Seasons Go

By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

Winter is coming to the Maritimes and the New England coast. Yes, it’s just October 26, but the winds have become a bit stiffer and their direction has changed to come from the north.

In Bar Harbor today, some of the shops were preparing to close for the year after our ship departs tonight. It’s a great time to buy a lumberjack’s coat, although they do seem to grow them rather larger around here: I tried on a Triple-X jacket which fit me like a bearskin.

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Silver Whisper’s tenders compete for space with lobster traps in Bar Harbor. Photo by Corey Sandler

The talk around town was of the first seasonal accident: a rural Mainer was rushed to the hospital after getting his fingers between the piston and the mechanism of a log splitter. He seemed to be all right, although quite concerned about how he would continue his stockpiling of wood for the winter.

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The dock, above and below. Photos by Corey Sandler

The day dawned clear and cool, about 42 degrees. By afternoon, it was gray and windy.

By tomorrow, Bar harbor will be mostly empty of those of us who are not from around hey-ah.

All photos and text copyright by Corey Sandler. If you would like to purchase a photo, please contact me.

 

25 October, 2013: Halifax, Nova Scotia

High Skies in Halifax

By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

An incomparable autumn sky greeted us in Halifax.

The great port here—by some measures the second largest in the world, after Sydney (the one in Australia)—is lined with handsome architecture. Some of the buildings are great Victorian and Edwardian stone structures; more modern buildings are almost all lined with mirror glass to reflect the sky, the water, and the old buildings around them.

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Sky, clouds, and water in Halifax. Photos by Corey Sandler

A bit further into the city, at The Narrows, the architecture is a bit more uniform and relatively grim. This was the area that was leveled by the Halifax Explosion of 1917: considered to be the largest manmade explosion from the dawn of time to the atomic bomb. It was the result of a collision between two ships that were part of the gathering convoys bound to and from World War I Europe. One ship, the Mont Blanc, was packed with a witch’s brew of TNT, benzol, and picric acid.

In the explosion, about 1,951 people were killed—most of them spectators gathered along the waterfront. More than a thousand were blinded by flying glass.

It is, for me, impossible to look at today’s Halifax without hearing an echo of one of the worst moments of that war, nearly three thousand miles away from the front lines.

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All photos and text copyright by Corey Sandler. If you would like to purchase a photo, please contact me.

24 October 2013: Sydney, Nova Scotia

Old Times Not Forgotten

By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

To me, one of the appeals of Sydney, Nova Scotia is that it is mostly frozen in the 1950s, a simpler and more innocent time—at least in my memory.

It is one of the only places in North America where I could direct you to a cobbler to have your shoes resoled.

Or a seamstress or tailor..[whohit]-SYDNEY24Oct-[/whohit]

Or old Doc Archibald with his office in an old Victorian behind a white picket fence.

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The fiddle at the Sydney Cruise Terminal. Photos by Corey Sandler

From 1784 to 1820, Sydney was the capital of the British colony of Cape Breton Island. The colony was merged with neighboring Nova Scotia when the British decided to develop the abundant coal fields surrounding Sydney Harbor.

By the early twentieth century Sydney was home to one of the world’s largest steel plants, fed by the coal mines of the Dominion Coal Company.

By the late 1960s both coal and steel industries were failing, and were taken over by federal and provincial governments. That lasted until late in 2001 when they could not be sustained any further.

Today the economy is not exactly booming, although the region benefits greatly from the lure of the Louisbourg Fortress nearby, a faithful reconstruction of the great French citadel erected to fend off the British. That didn’t quite work, and the Brits eventually captured and then knocked down the thick stone walls. But in the 1960s, federal and provincial governments, along with private money paid for the reconstruction of the fortress.

It is an astounding site; I wrote about it in an earlier blog posting.

In another direction is Baddeck on the Bras d’Or (the Golden Arm), which most of the Anglophone locals insist on pronouncing something like “brass door.” This lovely Lakeland was the summer home of Alexander Graham Bell, and the museum erected there is an amazing peek into the mind of a true genius. Bell worked on the phone, of course; we’ll forgive him for that but consider also his accomplishments in aeronautics, metal detectors, sound recording, photoelectric cells, solar heating, and even air conditioning produced by directing fans across ice harvested from Lake Bras d’Or and stored in the basement of his estate.

On this visit, we stayed in town. I was conducting a digital photography workshop and I set myself the assignment of finding as many possible ways to capture images of the oversized fiddle that stands outside the cruise terminal. The fiddle is the symbol of the Nova Scotia ceilidh, a foot-tapping barn dance.

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All text and photos copyright 2013 by Corey Sandler. If you would like to purchase a copy, please contact me.