Easy Trips

City weekends, surf and sand, mountain hikes – we’ve got it all for the perfect break.

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Hop up to HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, and beyond to get in a maritime mood.

Nova Scotia overflows with charm: lupine-studded fields, gingerbread-like houses, picture-perfect lighthouses and lightly lapping waves on sandy shores. With influences from the British, French, Germans and Swiss, Halifax, the provincial capital, is a great alternative to New England coastal towns during high season. In Halifax the air is crisp and clean, and green spaces abound. There’s plenty of nightlife too, thanks to the student population at several universities.

Halifax is home to several museums offering a sense of this region’s importance in history. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic provides a good overview.

After the Titanic sank, the bodies of victims not buried at sea were buried at three Halifax graveyards; at one of them, Fairview Lawn Cemetery, you can find the grave of J. Dawson, whose name was the inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack, in the 1997 film Titanic.

Stroll through some of the finest Victorian city gardens in North America at the Halifax Public Gardens, where you can catch impromptu concerts on summer Sunday afternoons. For the quintessential coastal Canadian experience, head southwest on the “Lighthouse Route,” aka Highway 3. You’ll spot lighthouses, glimpse forest coves with white sand beaches, and travel through old fishing-villages-turned-tourist-towns, such as Chester, Mahone Bay and Lunenburg; the latter is the region’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, where at sunset the town’s brightly painted old buildings glow behind the ship-filled port.

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