Much of the day this muggy Friday, August 6th, will be spent preparing for the next leg of our Maritimes ’60th birthday celebration’ journey. Yes, VanRamblings will engage in the prosaic tasks of doing laundry, packing our bags, purchasing a bus ticket on Acadian Bus Lines, retrieving our bags from Howe Hall in the afternoon and lugging them to the bus depot (we’d take a taxi, but we’re cheap), finding a place for breakfast and a very late lunch (seems that the dining hall closed, as of Thursday afternoon), and bidding Halifax a fond farewell. We may even find some time in the course of our day to take the Dartmouth ferry, and do a bit of sightseeing.
VanRamblings has enjoyed the first part of our journey which, much to the chagrin of some of our closer correspondents, has proved to be a particularly laid back introduction to our Maritime summer vacation. You see, we’ve traveled to Halifax many times previously, so haven’t necessarily felt the need this time around to do the expected ‘touristy thing’. We’ve simply sat back and observed (this is what comes from possessing an undergraduate degree in sociology; who knows, there may be a monograph arising from all that we experience ‘observing’, as we are embraced by our Maritime hosts).
As on Wednesday, we once again spent time at the Public Gardens …
And, as promised, we finally took in a screening of Lisa Cholodenko’s Sundance indie smash sensation, The Kids Are All Right, a touching and warmly human-scale dramedy which, although not quite as engaging as Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give (released earlier this summer) proved transporting enough (Annette Bening surely must be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar come next January). And, of course, Mia Wasikowska, as Bening’s and Julianne Moore’s daughter was quite as lovely as always (hers was the best performance of 2008, as Sophie, in HBO’s In Treatment).
