Remembering the Titanic

Today is the day we planned to visit the Titanic exhibits at the  Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, NS and the graveyard where so many victims of that horrific accident are buried. We started the day with Carol working on one of her book projects and me learning more about the Arduino microcontroller and the Processing program that allows the Arduino to communicate with my computer. After breakfast we broke camp and headed for Halifax. Our GPS doesn't work here and neither do our telephones, so we had to revert back to navigating using road maps. Poor us!
Along the way we spotted a troop of cyclists in some sort of uniform. As we got closer we noted they were all wearing helmets and toting pistols. Looked like they were all Halifax police cadets and we noted that many were women.

Our police escort.

We parted company with our police escort and headed across one of two toll bridges (one Canadian dollar each way) into Halifax. Driving in, or even being in, a city is not one of my favorite things to do, but in this case getting to the museum was easy. Parking cost us three Canadian dollars and fifty cents for one hour and 20 minutes. The museum was great and we learned a lot about the human remains recovery operations and saw many wooden pieces of the Titanic that were found floating in the water, including one complete deck chair. A replica of the chair was built which you can lounge in. I took a photo of Carol against a backdrop of second-class passengers walking around the deck of the Titanic. Later we strolled along the wharf, had lunch in the RoadTrek and then headed for the Fairview Lawn Cemetery.

Note stacked deck chairs on right.

 

Carol catching the big wave.

A portion of the wharf at Halifax next to the parking lot for the museum.

Viewing the Titanitic grave sites at the cemetery is a sobering experience. Included among the dead is a two-year-old boy found floating in the water whose body was never claimed. In 2010, researchers finally identified the child. He was the youngest member of a family of eight. Everyone in that family perished when the Titanic sank. The other seven members were never found, explaining why no one claimed the body of the two-year-old boy.

The three rows of similar headstones mark graves for Titanic victims.

Grave site of the two-year-old boy. Unknown at the time of burial. His family name and history discovered in 2010.

Markers for unknown dead. Numbers were given to all bodies found. Some were identified before burial. These are still unclaimed and unidentified.

We decided to start our drive to Sydney, NS by driving along the eastern coastline of Nova Scotia. We were both amazed at how sparsely populated this province is. It was foggy and cloudy, but a beautiful drive. We stopped in Sheet Harbour where we found a room in a nice old motel that had Wi-Fi, our only way to communicate with the outside world. We had a delicious meal in their restaurant. Great fish chowder!

Sheet Harbour and the motel where we are staying.

The Sheet Harbour Restaurant

Tomorrow we drive to Sydney and board the ferry at 11 pm for a seven-hour ride to Newfoundland. We'll put on our scopolamine seasickness patches in the morning but hope for gentle seas during the night crossing.

Mileage: 125,880

Where we are: