Chicago at last!

Along Lake Michigan between Lucas's softball playoff games on this beautiful Sunday.

 

Lucas' halloween costume:  "chicken cord on blue (the shirt was actually blue)"

 

Plans Change

So our original plan was after leaving Nova Scotia we would drive to Quebec City, spend a few days there, then drive across Eastern Canada to re-enter the US in Detroit, then on to Chicago.  But when we left Judique, the forecast was getting ugly--frozen mix for several days, lows in the 20's and highs in the upper 30's across  Canada.  It didn't sound like what we wanted to be in.  So we called an audible on Tuesday and took a left turn onto I95 and re-entered the US in Maine and have been driving consistent 300+ mile days and have now (Friday) reached the outskirts of Toledo, Ohio and will get to Chicago tomorrow.

The Desert of Maine

We spent a night in Freeport, Maine at the Desert of Maine, then Wednesday night we got a KOA campground in New York near the Pennsylvania border.  Thursday night we were at Parker Dam State Park in Western PA (near the "highest point on Interstate 80 East of the Mississippi").  We woke this morning in a snow shower and were a bit concerned about driving through it, but the weather settled down and we had a beautiful drive through the mountains of PA and the flat plains of Ohio to land at another Harvest Host winery.

Trying to stay warm in Pennsylvania

Driving through the snow in western PA

Majestic Oak Winery is a real find!  Who knew there were wineries in Ohio?  This one has only been open 4 months and we are their second Harvest Host (www.harvesthosts.com) guests.  As luck would have it, tonight they are having a shindig with a food truck {"she has a full gourmet kitchen on that truck") a DJ coming at 8 and lots of wine to taste.  They are hoping to get the high school football crowd after the games (if you know anything about the midwest, they are BIG on high school football).  So instead of having leftover mashed potatoes, pasta in a doggie bag from last week and other odds and ends, we get shrimp quesidillas and Indian tacos (from a full blood Lakota, no less).

At Majestic Oak Winery in Ohio

Tomorrow it is a three-hour drive to Chicago and we get to spend two weeks hanging out with our son, Lucas, staying in his apartment in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and seeing Chicago.  We have a date with Keith Urban in Peoria on November 11th and from there it will be all South and West to stay ahead of winter.

Ceilidh in Judique

Today is the last day of the Celtic Colours festival and Judique is having a Ceilidh, which is a Gaelic name for a small concert.  We are sitting drinking a Nova Scotia beer and tea while listening to a really great fiddler, Ian MacDonald and watching some locals square dance, Cape Breton style.





We are staying on the property of our neighbors in Plymouth, which is beautifully situated right on the coast facing Prince Edward Island.  We walked some of the coastal trail yesterday, which goes for dozens of miles along an old railroad bed.

Sunset from our trailer

along the Coastal Trail near Judique

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.