Hi friends! I hope you have all had a good day. I was off today so I wandered around the house doing laundry, finding homes for some things J’s parents dropped off on the weekend, and some general cleaning – nothing exciting.
Now back to my weekend mini-trip. Yesterday’s post finished up with us having breakfast Saturday morning. Like I mentioned in that post we woke up to find the weather absolutely lovely, unlike the icky rain they had been calling for the night before
which made this girl pretty happy because I was really looking forward to a trip to the public gardens and down to the waterfront. Off we went to check out of the hotel, put our stuff in the car and hopped across the street to Halifax’s Public Gardens (which I hadn’t been to since 1992)
leave it to a girl from the country to go to the city only to be excited by a duck 
Does it concern anyone else that we need to not only be warned about this?
Once we’d had our fill of ducks and flowers, we took a stroll downhill to Halifax Harbour
When we reached the waterfront, we made the first purchase of the day…
Okay…well maybe not, but wouldn’t it have been awesome if we did? I love that there is like a built-in couch/lounge on the front for people to hang out on!
Of course the highlight for me was our visit to this little store:
I’m not really sure if Cows is strictly an Atlantic Canada thing, or if they are all over Canada, I’m thinking it’s just in the Atlantic Provinces but I certainly could be mistaken. Anyway, Cows has the best iced cream. Period. It’s crazy yummy! Aside from their awesome iced cream they sell all sorts of “Cows” products. Their big thing is to take any popular brands, stars, shows, etc. and cowify (I believe I just created a new word) them. Here are a few of my favourite “cow”ed items from this trip
They also had “Super Moorio Cart”, “Justin Beefer”, “Dundler Mooflen” and countless other t-shirts, mugs, hats, etc. I wish they would have had a Moomba or Moomoolemon magnet or coffee mug, I totally would have bought one of those. In the end the only thing we bought was – you guessed it, iced cream.
peanut butter cup cup for her, boring old Oreo for him.
Sidenote: when J saw this picture he said, “what am I a giant? What kind of dinosaur hands are those!?” I must admit, the way his hand is positioned he looks like he has some weird-looking thumb. I assure you, his thumb looks totally normal in real life. lol
While it took both of us all our strength to fight off the pigeons that wanted our iced cream oh so badly, we managed to eat our iced cream and escape unharmed before we were attacked. Honestly they reminded me so much of Ollie. They’d start walking towards you, we’d say “No” and push our foot out a little bit and they would quickly veer off in another direction as though that had been their plan all along. Two seconds later, they were back and we’d do it all again. That really is the was Ollie acts anytime you have anything that even remotely resembles food. :\
Then it was time. Time to conquer the hill back up to the car.
I don’t know if the photo really does it justice, it’s a fairly steep hill. Hiking up it (in jeans – what was I thinking??) reminded me of running. You see every race I’ve ever run has been in Halifax, and all of them included a trip down and then back up this hill. As nasty as it is to walk up it, it’s 100 times worse to run up it.
Once we made it to the top I asked J if he wanted to go up to Citadel Hill to take a look around since we were already there
To which he informed me he was done climbing hills for the day. I didn’t blame him, the sun was really beating down on us, it was hot and there was certainly no shade happening up there
Which made the hill itself a prime sunbathing spot. You can just barely see one lone dude laying out in the picture above. Historical Site be damned – he was working on his tan
The rest of the afternoon/evening was spent in cooler locales – shopping malls. And after being out in the sun all morning the air conditioned stores were more than welcome! Then it was back to the Valley and our kitties (who spent the weekend with my parents).
It was a short trip, but a really fun and relaxing one.
Calling all you runners…
I’m always envious of the race times of other people, I’ve never run an under 30 minute 5K, but of course I’ve always had to run up the hill pictured above. Would you say most of your races include a crazy hill like this or do I just always choose a crazy hilly route? Certainly I’ve run 5K’s in under 30 minutes at home, maybe I just need to run a race with a less killer hill?