Rich Aucoin & Gypsophilia Pop Explosion Highlights

Halifax has a great fall music festival for discovering new music and seeing favourite local bands: Halifax Pop Explosion.

From Wednesday through Saturday night about the third week of October, bands play on the hour though the night at venues around the city.

As their ‘about’ page notes:

HPX is the Halifax Pop Explosion, an international music festival and conference that presents 200 bands in 20 venues over 5­ days to over 30,000 fans and industry delegates from around the world.

Awesome, right? And it’s been on since 1993. Yeah, Halifax!

A wristband gets you into any of the shows unless they’re at capacity, so it’s a great chance to flit from spot to spot and see a bunch of different performers in one night, or you can choose to hunker down in a venue to get a good spot to see an act you’re particularly keen on.

Highlights this week so far have included Rich Aucoin at the new Reflections Cabaret spot:

Rich always amazes us with his acrobatics and no fear of heights!

And I’ve been to a handful of his shows with the parachute, but this time he had 2!

Jeff's Vine loop:

Find Rich on Twitter: @richaucoin & Instagram.

And last night we saw Gypsophilia at St Matthew’s Church (front row seats in this amazing venue!):

The band was having an amazing time, just loving this great venue. 

I was sitting next to a 7 year old student of the violinist’s, up past his bedtime, which was pretty cute.

There were even handstands involved, are all Halifax musicians also gymnasts and daredevils?!

They gave out free copies of their album, Constellations, which was awesome! Unfortunately I didn’t get to the front in time to get a vinyl copy which I would have loved to give to my dad. We’ll enjoy the CD instead!

Find Gypsophilia on Twitter @gypsophiliaband. Highly recommended.

Wild Boar Poutine & the Tidal Bore in Moncton New Brunswick

Read about the start of our Moncton trip here.

On Sunday we were determined to explore the unusually-shaped, outdoor heated pool at the hotel. It was well worth it! 

Here’s Jeff’s take:

Rodd’s pool is bizarrely located outdoors and below ground level. While a great shelter from the wind and suitably obstructed from the surrounding parking lot, I can’t help but think of how nice this would be if it were at the far edge of the property overlooking the Moncton river. Nevertheless, the strange configuration does allow for direct sliding patio door access to the pool from several rooms on the lowest level, which would be awesome for families or groups of friends staying together.

The pool itself is a bizarre shape and incorporates a couple of very nice and fairly unique features from my pooling experience. First, the deep end of the pool slopes down from all sides to probably eight or nine feet deep (a welcome feature in this era of shallow pools) but has an eight to ten inch ledge only a few feet below the water (great height for kiddies) the entire way around so that you can walk the perimeter without getting out of the pool. If you follow this ledge to the far side of the deep end, you get the second excellent feature: an underwater bench that would be wonderful to lounge on with five or six of your closest friends.

The pool is heated and, although not particularly warm at the end of September, was just a perfect perfect temperature during our stay (and seemingly well-enjoyed by a mother and her young daughter who shared the space with us for some of the time)!

We were able to meet friends at the (now-quiet) Tide & Boar for brunch. Jeff just had to try the Boar Poutine, who could resist?! I went for the ham eggs Benedict, and the house salad is definitely an excellent side. A meal there would probably not be complete without a local/regional pint… so we shared two. We tried the Unibroue Maudite, and Trou du Diable's Mactavish.

We then rushed out with our local friends to catch the tidal bore and despite having checked the tide charts ahead of time (check them for yourself) we apparently missed the “wave” that signifies the change in the tide. Lara captured a bit of the river view post-bore:

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Tidal river, Moncton New Brunswick. Gorgeous fall day.

View on Instagram

Oh, ok, here’s what we should have seen! (2 minutes or so in it gets pretty good)

Before we left town we had to check out The Comic Hunter, which one our friends works at. Suffice it to say, it is one of the most comprehensive game and comic stores I have ever seen!

And on our way back to the hotel to pick up the car and hit the road to Halifax, we spotted this shiny car:

Pretty flashy way to wrap up the trip, wouldn’t you say?

Salty Cheese & Mort Subite in Moncton New Brunswick

Last year I won a night’s stay at a Rodd hotel because they liked this picture I tweeted during a social media contest they were running:

Congrats to @larakillian! She is a #RoddVacations contest winner. She took this great shot of a foggy Halifax Harbour pic.twitter.com/J4u2IOeou7
— Rodd Vacations (@RoddVacations) August 23, 2013

At the time I didn’t know they would pick which hotel I could have a free night’s stay at! It turned out to be Moncton, New Brunswick. Still, they gave me until mid-October 2014 to use it, so that was generous.

Moncton is about a 2.5 hour drive from Halifax. We lucked out with the loveliest fall weather! Foliage was looking good with lots of orange and yellow, plus a few bright spots of red. It might have been the peak for the year.

When we arrived in Moncton we got checked in and found our room. The hotel has an outstanding location right at the start of the Main Street and right on the river. The room we were given however, had 2 standard beds squeezed into barely enough room, a missing mini-bar fridge, and a view of a brick wall. A call to the front desk turned into a quick upgrade to a larger room with a king size bed, a larger bathroom, and a view of Main Street. We knew we’d be out of the room most of the time so the view wasn’t too important, and the room was quite comfortable. With a working fridge, which is a plus!

We headed off to meet friends at the Laundromat Espresso Bar, a funky neighbourhood cafe and watering hole with fridges full of bottles beer from all over. The favourite was the Mort Subite. A little sour and a lot fruity, very easy to drink.

And when we heard about the fromage sale (salty cheese), we had to give that a try.

Worth it - but good to share with friends and definitely not a daily treat!

→ (Read Lara’s Yelp review of the Laundromat Espresso Bar)

I had scoped out a downtown Thai/Vietnamese restaurant on Yelp, but our friends spoke highly of another Vietnamese option, Red Satay, down the street from the Laundromat Bar. Read Lara’s Yelp review of Red Satay. I’m glad we listened to them - on a quiet street with few people about we stepped into a small space crammed with tables and knew from the number of bodies in the room that this is a local gem.

→ (Read Lara’s Yelp review of Red Satay)

After getting stuffed with cheap fresh delicious Vietnamese food we headed back to the hotel to rest it off for a bit.

Once we’d recovered from dinner we headed out to see what the Saturday night life was like and see if we could find some live music.

We bypassed the popular and crowded Tide & Boar “gastropub” for the Old Triangle, which had a free cover band playing and was packed out. Jeff took this awesome Vine of the taps at the bar.

We enjoyed some sing-along songs, and had a drink or two. It was a great cross-section of the local community, all ages in there.

Read about the rest of our Moncton trip here: Wild Boar Poutine & the Tidal Bore in Moncton New Brunswick.

Annapolis Valley in Late Summer

We took advantage of a gorgeous late summer day to go blueberry picking in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia on the weekend. 

First stop was lunch at the Port Pub in Port Williams, where we tried a couple of their house brews. Can you guess what fruit was used to flavour my wheat?

After fueling up with beer and burgers (lamb, veggie) at the Port Williams' Port Pub on the river, we headed to Blueberry Acres:

The sun was shining, the air was gentle. We were there on a Sunday, so the bushes hadn't quite recovered (perhaps) from Saturday picking but it still took no time at all to fill our buckets...

Jeff took a Vine to sum up the experience:

12 pounds of fruit-picking later...

Jam, jam, pies, more jam? What to do with all this bounty?!

Dramatic Halifax Skyline

Clouds added lovely drama late afternoon looking at the Halifax skyline along the harbour as the ferry came along. 

It has been unseasonably humid for early September, this is weather we might have expected in August, but it makes things feel quite summery nonetheless!

Sumertime on the Halifax Harbour

A morning ferry ride this week:

The Halifax harbour is outstanding for boat-watching.

Ferries come and go:

Sailboats cruise by and the clouds were lovely today too.

Cuba - Intro

We had been looking for a week-ish-long jaunt option within a flight or two that would let us really get away without taking all day to travel there. One Saturday morning I picked up the travel section of the Globe and Mail and read a question to the concierge about how to see Cuba without staying on an all-inclusive resort. BOOM! The idea was born. A half dozen public library guidebooks and two sets of latin american Spanish language CDs later, we headed south.

Looking for some adventure, a totally different culture, possibly a good mojito or two, and a break from a very hectic fall, we headed for Cuba from November 5-12, 2013. We could not have anticipated what an unusual place Cuba is - if you venture off the resorts. We spent three nights in Habana vieja, a night in the French colonial town of Cienfuegos, two nights in the Spanish colonial sugar trading hilltop town of Trinidad, and a night in Varadero on the north coast before flying out.