Don’t Eat the Peanut Butter

Halifax, Nova Scotia

We leave the vehicles on the lower deck of the big ferry from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. When we start the engine, five hours later, the mouse has ripped apart a big box of Kleenex. One of the traps, baited with peanut butter, has been eaten clean. The other one has a dead mouse. I toss the sad little body at 2:30 AM in the Sobey’s parking lot North Sidney where we spend the night after getting off the ferry at 2 AM.

It’s surprising that little one mouse could have created such anxiety and havoc with ruined clothing, drawers full of mouse poop and scurrying noises in the A/C vents all night. However, the peanut butter-baited traps are untouched today and we hear no more noises in the attic.

We visit the British Citadel in Halifax. They are busy doing close order drill in quilts. A soldier named Lambert gets yelled at a lot. It reminds me a little of my own experience as an enlisted man before I became an officer. Sometimes the drill instructor made me hold my right arm up while we did drill. “Dougherty, you say you want to be an officer? You wouldn’t make a good pimple on an Airman’s Ass!”, he shouts at me.

I ask a very stupid question of a man in a quilt with a bagpipe. “Are you an actor?”. Actually, I’d like to think it was not all that stupid. The British are notable tradition lovers.

After the Citadel we go to the Marine Museum. Many of the Titanic bodies ended up here in Halifax. I see a headline that tells about a “weird load” of Titanic bodies pulling into port. It reminds me of my favorite bumper sticker. “Caution! Weird Load!”

They had a another tremendous disaster here in 1917. A French munitions ship collided with another ship after a horn blowing argument over right of way. The ship began to burn and all the French crew rowed away in panic, leaving the ship to burn. The ship exploded, creating the biggest man-made blast to date. 2,000 citizens were killed outright and thousands were injured. Many were blinded by flying glass while looking at the burning ship.

Today we head down to Peggy's Cove and on to see Lunenburg.