Happy Friday friends! I hope that you have had a wonderful week and are excited for this weekend! Today I am excited to share with y'all a little bit about our time at the Port of Sydney in Nova Scotia, Canada. While I didn't know much about Sydney before this trip I had always wanted to visit the Cape Breton area of Canada and so I was excited that this would be a stop on our cruise with Holland America.
Like many people we chose to do a cruise excursion that went into the Cape Breton area, but I thought it was important to do a post about the Port of Sydney itself as I couldn't find much about it when I was researching for our cruise. It truly is a delightful port with a lot of things to do and we had a lovely couple of hours exploring a few things that I definitely want to share with y'all for those that might take the same cruise we did!
I found this above map online and thought that it was so cute in showing how the port is laid out and looks! You can see that there are so many different things right within walking distance, including visiting St. Patrick's church which is the oldest Roman Catholic Church in Cape Breton. If you are into architecture you could also take a walking tour of Old Sydney (right near the ship dock) and see buildings that were constructed in the late 18th century. For those who are American Revolution historians you may know that Old Sydney was actually founded by Loyalists who were fleeing during and after the American Revolution. All of this to say that this port has lots of history to walk and explore right near the ship!
Right when you disembark you will have the Joan Hariss Cruise Pavilion right in front of you. This area holds lots of concerts, events, etc. and when we were docked there were some musicians playing, an outdoor market that was neat to walk through and visit the different shops, and also beautifully relaxing to sit and take in the lovely scenery.
A fun side note for those that love to get your passport stamped- you can do this on the first floor in the cruise pavilion! It is so cute and the stamp has a violin on it! It is really sweet!
We opted to spend time off the ship and just enjoy the beauty after our excursion so we ate at the restaurant that is located on the 2nd floor of the cruise Pavilion, Flavor on the Water. I would say that the food was very good, different and really provided a lovely spot to sit and enjoy the beautiful day. Sadly, I can't recommend the service so much... the waitresses that we had were unfortunately not only rude to us, but to many of the people at different tables around us (almost seeming to be frustrated with having the cruise ships there) so the service was slow and left much to be desired. We even heard one waitress tell another waitress that she hated when the cruise ships docked. We were having such a lovely day and didn't want it to be spoiled with all of that negativity so we decided to change our order to a "to go order" (they weren't thrilled about it) and took our food down to the pavilion and it was perfect. All of that to say- I would recommend ordering to go and enjoying the food and not dealing with the strange and negative service.
If you are wondering about how much time to reserve for the port (and also if you are planning to walk around Old Sydney for a little bit) I would say about 1-3 hours depending on how long you want to eat and explore. If you are just going to go to the pavilion you won't need more than an hour. I hope that is helpful!
Thank you so much for reading! Please let me know if you have any questions about the port or our cruise with Holland America! It was simply lovely! You can read about all of our adventures on our cruise with Holland America by clicking HERE!
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