Cabot Trail

Cape Breton Highlands NP covers most of the Northern tip of the island.  It is basically a rocky plateau about 1000 feet above sea level, crisscrossed with deep river valleys and covered with a mix of evergreens and maple/birch forest.  Right now the fall color is at is peak and the hills are in flame with yellow, orange and red foliage, especially in the valleys.  We walked among 350-year-old maples in some of the only forests on the island that have never been logged.

The Cabot Trail is a 180-mile loop road, much of which follows the coast and winds in and out of coves with vistas of the shoreline and back into the highlands.  Small fishing towns dot the coast and farms are cut out of the forest in the valleys and hills.  It is a spectacular drive and we spent 3 days leaving our trailer behind in Cheticamp and staying at B&Bs along the way.  We explored a rocky cove with a waterfall cascading down one side of it, hiked around a lake smothered in yellow and red trees, walked a trail out to the headlands that ended in a wooded stairway down to a platform hanging over the ocean and saw dozens of pilot whales swimming just off the coast.

Cabot Trail

One night we stayed with the Gordon and LaVerne in the house that was going to be torn down before Gordon had it moved a mile to his property.  Here he spent 15 years renovating it with boards he cut from his own trees and all his own labor.  Gordon is 82 and is currently working on adding a roof to the from porch.  Gordon’s family homesteaded on this land in the 1860s and he and his wife were the nicest people you could meet, inviting us into their living room to chat in the evening and sitting with us while we had blueberry and elderberry pancakes for breakfast.  We talked with them about Gordon’s plans to put solar panels on his house and discussed new oil drilling off Newfoundland and fracking in New Brunswick.  As we left Gordon scuttled off and brought back a bag of beautiful potatoes he grew in his garden.  Our hearts were full when we left that house.

LaVerne and Gordon

Remote Cape Breton cove on a drizzly day

We remain internet deprived but have lots to update soon (hopefully). Meanwhile here is a taste.

Cheticamp

Cheticamp

We spent the first several days of our visit to Cape Breton in Cheticamp, one of two French Acadian districts on the island.  Cheticamp is the gateway to Cape Breton Highlands National Park and has been a fishing town since its founding in the late 1700s.  Until the middle of the 20^th century, Cheticamp was only accessible by ship and its inhabitants had a difficult way of life.  They grew or made almost everything they needed.  The only employment was the fish company that paid them in company store credits to buy stoves, utensils, musical instruments and such.  The Acadian culture is very communal and is filled with simple amusements, mostly around music.  We visited a small museum about “La-Careme”, which is basically a mid-Lent party dating back to the 5^th century where people dress up in elaborate costumes and go door-to-door trying to fool their neighbors about their identity.  Cheticamp seems to be the only place La-Careme is still celebrated.

Cheticamp is also a center of rug hooking, which started as a necessity to help make their homes comfortable, but grew into an art form much sought-after by wealthy city dwellers.  Some of the most elaborate rugs contain 500 colors of yarn (each hand dyed separately) and over 1,500,000 individual stitches.  Cheticam Museum

It was fun meeting several people with our last name—very common here and throughout Acadian Canada and Louisiana.  The vast majority of people named LeBlanc are descended from one Daniel LeBlanc, who landed in Nova Scotia about the time the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth.  Like most French Canadians he had a huge family of 15 or so children and subsequent generations of that kind of breeding resulted in a virtual army of LeBlancs (my father was one of 10 children and my mother one of 18). Like most of my generation, we stopped well short of those numbers, so the danger of LeBlancs overpopulating the globe is diminishing.

The MacDonald sisters get it on!

Our first Celtic Colours Festival event was an informal show during lunch at the Harbour restaurant in Cheticamp.  Cassie and Maggie MacDonald couldn't have been much older than 18, but they played like pros.  They got the crowd going!



We hiked another trail along the Cheticamp river with beautiful fall colours and lots of solitude.

 

Hiking and more music

On Saturday, our first full day at Cape Breton, we hiked part of the Acadian trail.  Beautiful vistas of shoreline and fall color (or as they say here "colour").  We are still very internet disabled, between the outrageous cost of Verizon data while roaming in Canada and the almost complete lack of coverage out in the national park where we are camped. I am learning to live without internet access and the withdrawal pains are frightening.  We will try to update the blog whenever we have wifi access as best we can, but expect some cool music snippets and photos of some beautiful sights as we tour Cape Breton this week.

We feel the cold breath of winter over our shoulders and know our time in Canada is short.  We will likely be here in Nova Scotia another week or so, then on to Quebec City.

FINALLY we arrive at Cape Breton Highlands National Park

Well, our trip from home to our first real destination on Cape Breton Island took a little longer than planned.  We were driving from the Magnetic Hill Winery near Moncton on Thursday hoping to reach Cape Breton that day when a warning message from our truck forced us to find a Chevy dealer which was luckily only about 30 miles ahead of us in Truro, NS.  It turned out we needed a part that had to be brought in from Montreal, so we settled in to a small, but very nice, campground near Truro to wait for the part to come in.  Miraculously it came in the next morning by 10 and we were back on the road by 1 and likely to hit Cape Breton before dark.

All-in-all it took us six days of driving to go the nearly 900 miles to get here.  Now we can stay put for a little while and explore the nearby Acadian town of Cheticamp, the national park and the Cabot Trail drive around the island, which we will do over three days next week. Our campsite is beautifully surrounded by yellow, red and green hills.

 

Last night we saw our first live music at dinner, which was really fun.

Scenes from Nova Scotia

The drive across much of the length of Nova Scotia was beautiful, with the fall color and even a few relatives.