Wild Nights, Hot And Crazy Days

Part 2.4: Cracks Appear

One Saturday, a few days before Christmas, Colin suggested that we go into the big mall in Dartmouth. Dartmouth is about 15 kilometers south of Sackville, across the harbour from Halifax, and the mall there was one of the biggest in eastern Canada. 

I said, "How the hell are we gonna get to Dartmouth?"

He said "We can take the bus."

"No buses go from Sackville to Dartmouth on weekends. We'd have to take the 80 into Halifax, then get a transfer on the 66 across the bridge to the Dartmouth terminal, then another transfer to take us out to the mall. It would take hours."

"Oh. Well, I guess we could ride our bikes."

"To Dartmouth? That's an awful long way."

"Not really. We go to Bedford all the time, which is half way there. Once we got to the top of Magazine Hill it's downhill all the way."

Magazine Hill is a huge hill, about 3.5 km long and very steep. We would be able to coast the whole length of it, and likely get quite a head of speed, but...

"Yeah, and uphill the whole way back. I don't fancy pushing my bike back up that hill."

"True. But if we came home on the Waverly Road we'd avoid the hill coming back. It's a little further that way but it's flat."

"I suppose", I said, and that was it. Within a few minutes we were on our way.

The trip in was uneventful. As expected, we went really fast down the hill, ducking our heads down between our handlebars to cheat the wind and almost keeping up with the traffic on the highway. I can still remember the scream of those knobby BMX tires on that pavement. It was exhilarating. When we got to the bottom of the hill we turned up into Burnside industrial park and cut across it for the quickest route to the mall.

That mall was incredible. The Christmas decorations were amazing, and their famous but creepy attraction, Woody the talking tree, was present and accounted for. And the people! I don't think I had ever seen such a crowded mall. There were hundreds of stores spread out over three levels, with three department stores, an electronic store, a grocery store, and the rest were all boutique type places. We visited the electronic store and drooled all over the stereo systems (I had remembered Carman's Cerwin Vega speakers and looked for them but I couldn't find any there. I wanted to see how expensive they were). After we got bored of that place we headed for the main attraction for us, the arcade. This arcade was famous around here, and we wanted to see it.

When we finally found it and went in we were both in awe. The arcades we hung around at in Sackville had a few dozen games, but here there were hundreds! We didn't know which ones to try first. I finally settled on an old favourite: Gyruss, a space shooter game with a really cool background music track. I had played it hundreds of times at the Town Center arcade in Sackville and had gotten really good at it. Colin settled on one called Metro Cross. I thought it to be a boring and weird game, but he got right into it and was surprisingly good at it.

After a while we were both getting low on cash and were getting hungry, so we headed to the food court and had lunch. I still had about $10 left but was going to buy my mother a Christmas gift with that money, so after we ate we got up and started wandering the mall. We came to a large drug store that had a big display of perfumes and Christmas nick knacks, so I said "Let's go in here".

We went inside and started looking over the perfumes. There were so many, and they were so expensive! While I was looking at them, trying to decide on the perfect scent for Mom (IE "cheap") Colin got bored and wandered off. I finally settled on one that was called "Lavender". It smelled OK to me and I'd heard Mom mention that lavender was one of her favourite flowers. Most importantly, it was only eight bucks for the bottle. I paid for it at the perfume counter and then went looking for Colin.