8 Things I Love About Halifax

When I read news stories about our local council’s obsession with regulating pet behaviour, or the ongoing bickering about which schools to close, or Halifax’s crumbling hospitals, I sometimes stop and ask myself, “Why is it that I choose to live here, again?” Because – let’s be honest here – it is a choice, and there are certainly a lot of other places in the world that I’d be happy to relocate to, if push came to shove.

But moving house is a bit of a drag, not to mention expensive, so perhaps a more productive approach would be to think about some of the things I like about living in Halifax. It’s an exercise which actually requires a lot of effort on my part to be positive and see the sunny side of things. Particularly today, on yet another cold, dreary and drizzly Halifax “spring” day. But I am totally up for the challenge!

So here I go: my Top Eight Reasons Not to Move to New York City. Already that’s too negative. Eight Ways Halifax is better than Toronto. No? Okay, the Top Eight Things I Love About Halifax. There, I said it.

Everyone in Halifax has a favourite beach, and since you can drive to many of them in about the same amount of time it takes a Torontonian to get halfway home every day, I consider beach access one of the huge bonuses of living here. I personally love Martinique Beach on the Eastern Shore, because it’s rarely crowded (and even when it is, it’s big enough to allow lots of space for everybody), it has surfers for entertainment, incredible waves for boogie-boarding, and a gorgeous long curve of sandy beach for walking. Sure, you can drive to within a kilometer of this beach on a hot, sunny day and hit a wall of fog that’s as cold and dense as the ice-packs in your beer cooler, but hey, that’s part of the fun.

Steve-O-Reno’s Cappuccino. Specifically, the cappuccino made by the two lovely women – I think their names are Anne and Leah – who work at the drive-through “shack” on Robie Street on most weekday mornings. A Monday morning stop at the cap shack has a way of making the coming week seem a just little more bearable. Also, I’ve discovered that there is no life-crisis that this coffee cannot make better.

Since we’re talking food, sort of, and I am clearly not averse to making outright product endorsements, I also love the build-your-own salad bar at the downtown Pete’s Frootique. How much easier could healthy eating be? “None. None more easy,” I say, to borrow a phrase from the movie Spinal Tap. To make me crave salad is nothing short of a miracle. And who knew that I liked kidney beans and sunflower seeds in my salad? Not even me, until I built my own at Pete’s.

Another of my favourite things about living here is a relatively little-known walking trail along the rocky coastline just past York Redoubt. There’s a teeny little parking lot just off Purcell’s Cove Road and a path that meanders out along the huge boulders at the water’s edge. The view out there is so beautiful! On Wikipedia, this spot is referred to as the Herring Cove “Look-Off”, but I call it “the Whale Walk,” because I saw whales out there once, munching their way along some fishing nets. I used to enjoy walking my dog out there, but she’s too rickety now to manage all the jumping and climbing. But despite having to go dog-less, I still enjoy it; it’s a quintessential Nova Scotian location and a great place to recharge my “nature batteries.”

Other random things I like about Halifax: swimming in Long Lake, watching the seals sunbathe on the rocks off the tip of Point Pleasant Park, gawking at the cruise ships that dock down at Pier 22, and eating French fries on the wall by the Spring Garden Road public library in the summer.

But do all these things make up for the petty politics and the embarrassingly stagnant level of social progress that Halifax seems to have become famous for? Well, yeah, I guess they do. All the cat bylaws in the world can’t ruin a gorgeous sunny day by the ocean.