Quick Nova Scotia Trip, Sunday

We got up as soon as it was light on Sunday the 29th, we had a long drive in front of us.  It showed signs of becoming another absolutely gorgeous day, but was pretty foggy early there on the seaside.  We had some granola bars and room-made coffee, so after we dropped off the keys at around 7:50 we were bound to get as far Southwest as we could before stopping.  We had filled up the tank the night before … we got 6.3 on the trip to Cape Breton!  What this means is that when we switched the car to metric, it reported gas efficiency in liters per 100km rather than in miles per gallon.  So a lower number was better rather than a higher number … I kind of liked this.

Barely anyone on the pink highway early on Sunday, and we set the cruise control and just watched the trees roll by, down 104 towards Truro.  Kind of strange to go West to Maine!  We finally did stop at a Tim Horton’s (we had to go to one, it was as imperative as going to a Cracker Barrel in South Carolina) to get more coffee and a breakfast sandwich.  A bit West of Truro we detoured onto route 4 to avoid the only (sic) toll in Nova Scotia, but then re-joined 104 and soon crossed into New Brunswick, where the road became route 2.

I’m sure parts of New Brunswick are as beautiful as Nova Scotia, but all our time there except for our lunch break was spent on the superhighway … route 2 to West of Moncton and then route 1 down through St. John … and it was kilometers and kilometers of lovely trees, but not much in terms of rolling hills or vistas of the sea.  And all road signs there are bilingual, with the non-English language being French this time, as opposed to Gaelic or Mi’kmaq.

Finally got South of St. John and were desperate to find a nice little park or something, stretch our legs and take a lunch break.  We still had half our bologna sandwiches left!  Signs kept tempting us to detour down to the Acadian Coastal Drive along the South-facing New Brunswick coast rather than continuing on the highway.  We resisted because we wanted a “stop” rather than a “drive,” but took one of them eventually and down route 790 we found the lovely little town of Chance Harbour.  We continued along the loop and lucked into a small turnoff where we could park, walk around, and gaze out over a marsh to the ocean through the hazy afternoon light.

790 looped back up to route 1, and it was just another hour to St. Stephen and the border crossing back into the USA.  We crossed the St. Croix River, gained an hour, and had just a short wait to get through immigration.  They barely questioned us, just glanced at our passports and waved us through.  Filled up on gas again at the intersection of routes 1 and 9, and hit the road into Maine.  As much as we’d liked our trip, it was kind of nice to be back in the States … Canada never seemed abnormal to us, but this was definitely much more normal, or at least familiar.  And the Harris signs outnumbered the Trump signs all along route 9.

One last stop.  We love the Airport Brewing Company pub in Ellsworth but had never been to their taproom in Amherst ME.  So we detoured a bit and got a quick pint there, which was another great stop after having been on the road for almost eight hours.  Then one last hour through Ellsworth and back home to Sedgwick, where the cats were very happy to have us back.

How to sum up?  We had a great time, and it was an entirely successful, quick foray outside of our comfort zone of Northern New England.  We don’t know when or if we’ll ever be back in Nova Scotia, but we definitely concluded that it’s somewhere we’d love to go back to and spend some more time exploring.  Who knows?

Quick Nova Scotia Trip, Saturday

The rain petered out finally, in the middle of the night, and we woke to a crystal-clear, beautiful morning on Saturday the 28th.  Went back to the restaurant for another fine breakfast, with staggering views to the Northwest up the Canso Strait, which separate Cape Breton Island from the rest of Nova Scotia.  Packed up and hit the road North around 9:00 (after filling up on gas), crossing the Canso Causeway and turning up 105 in Port Hastings.  The highway was almost empty, and after an hour or so we were back driving along the coast, diagonally up the Northeast side of the island.

First Nations place names suddenly appeared, and many road signs were in both English and Mi’kmaq.  The culture was centered around the town of Whycocomagh and Whycocomagh Reserve.  We saw some gaming locales, and suddenly every other storefront had big signs saying, “We sell cannabis!”  Though it’s legal in Canada, these were the only dispensaries we saw, perhaps there’s a loophole in regulations for natives.

This was a beautiful drive on a beautiful day, up the interior coast past Nyanza and Baddeck toward St. Ann’s.  Here you’re supposed to turn West onto the beginning of the Cabot Trail around the Northern part of the island, but we realized that if we kept on up toward Englishtown, we could take a free ferry across St. Ann’s Bay instead.  This also took us past the Giant MacAskill Museum, which is a sister museum to the one we had seen in Dunvegan Scotland!  But it looked even dodgier than the one in Scotland had … the only sign for it was a small one at the end of a muddy, uphill driveway and we didn’t stop.

Our timing was perfect and we had to wait only a minute before they waved us and seven other cars onto the small Englishtown Ferry.  It was a very short, tumultuous ride over the narrow channel to the spit on the other side, and we’d probably saved significant time over taking the land route.  We joined the Cabot Trail, route 30, and did I say it was beautiful before?  This was just incredible as the Bay opened up into the North Atlantic, the wind and the waves kept coming from the Northeast, and we wound along the lovely coast up to Ingonish.

Liquor and beer stores in Nova Scotia are all branded as NSLC outlets … alcohol is well regulated in Canada … and we stopped in one in Ingonish, where we picked up a great assortment of beers and ciders and had a nice talk about the upcoming National Day for Truth and Reconciliation with the orange-shirted clerk.  My favorites of the Nova Scotia beers I sampled were Black Angus and Crazy Angus from the Cape Breton Brewing Company of Sydney, and DIPA from the Propeller Brewing Company and “The IPA” from Nine Locks Brewing, both of Dartmouth.

We also stopped at the Ingonish Visitor Center for the Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Ingonish, paid our entrance fee and picked up a map.  The National Park is one of the most spectacular, scenic, breathtaking, wild, places I’ve ever seen and I’m so glad we went there.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to hike any of their many trails and then get back to Auld’s Cove and Maine on schedule.  We’ll need to go back there someday to do it justice.

But we did stop at many overviews, we just couldn’t pass them up.  Some are down at sea level, where the massive swells from the ocean break on the cliffs, some are up high on top of the cliffs themselves, from which you can see for many kilometers up and down the coast and out to sea, some are at the bottom of lovely, peaceful valleys between steep hills, and some are at the heads of those valleys, from which you can see huge distances of Fall-colored forest.

We saw a little pink granite in the seacliffs and exposed hills, but it was mostly sedimentary rock: red, white, and gray, sometimes all in one rockface.  Some of the jagged rocks were so shiny gray they looked like aluminum or stainless steel.  The mix of trees was a lot like Maine, mostly spruce and pine, but with more deciduous trees, mostly oaks and poplars but also many maples and beeches.

The Cabot Trail leaves the Park in places, and it’s funny how the road surface instantly turns into a mangled mess of potholes and creases … it’s well maintained in the Park.  And the signs for every kind of tourist trap you can imagine pop up like campaign signs.  We stopped at one artisanal sandwich and pizza place and got some nice home-made lemonade and a couple of sandwiches, which turned out to be mostly bologna.  Then back into the amazing Park and we had a great mellow lunch stop at a picnic table in one of the hidden valleys.

Continued on and then down the Northwest coast, to Chéticamp, where the Park ended and the cheap hotels dominated.  We had a long way to go down the coast to Margaree Forks, where we kept right on 19, down through Inverness and Mabou to Port Hood.  I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t have as many glimpses of the sea as we had had on the other coast, but there were plenty of trees, run-down houses and neatly kept houses, farms, lakes, marshes, and sudden tidal gashes in the land.  At one point, Google told us we were about to go through Dunvegan, and we were psyched (we’d been in the Dunvegan in Scotland), but it was only a deserted intersection.

In Port Hood the road ran alongside the ocean for a while, and we realized we’d gotten farther along than we thought we would by that time of afternoon.  It was less than an hour back to Auld’s Cove all of a sudden.  So we put the brakes on and started looking for a nice turnoff, maybe a nice trail, and there weren’t any!  Oh well.  We poked around some and in Craigmore we found a road down to a beach and a muddy parking lot at the end of it (with a friendly dog), where there were some people in a camper van camping rough (we’d seen a few doing this all over the island, nowhere near as many as in Scotland).  We took a walk on the beach and then were going to press on but thought, wait a minute … we have a great view of the sparkling ocean out to Cape George Point to the right and the entrance to the Canso Strait to our left.  Let’s sit right here, have a beer/cider, and enjoy the end of the afternoon.  It was a great cocktail hour!

We were tempted to go straight back to our nice cabin from there, but wanted a little variety for dinner and, after going through Port Hastings and back over the causeway, stopped at 3 Square in Auld’s Cove for dinner.  They’ve just opened and have more plans for a nice restaurant than they have a nice restaurant at this point, but we didn’t care and the food they had was excellent.  Sarah had mussels in a curry sauce, and I had a pork belly bowl.  Back to the cabin for a beer/cider on the small porch and then a game of Azul when it started to get chilly.  It was Saturday night and most of the other cabins were now occupied.  There was a little late-night revelry, but it remained a peaceful spot.

Quick Nova Scotia Trip, Friday

Of course, the first night in a hotel, nice as the room was, neither of us slept well even though we were wiped out from the trip.  But we got up eventually and had fine coffee and a couple of nice omelets in their restaurant, and then got on the road a bit before 10:00 (9:00 by our clocks) on Friday the 27th.  It was a stormy, foggy morning and though we were just a block or two uphill from the harbor we could only see a few huge fishing boats right at the dock.

We found 103 West, which took us around the Southeast part of Nova Scotia, up toward Halifax.  There were very few other cars on the road, as was the story throughout most of the trip, and though it was raining … sometimes pretty hard … the scenery was stunning.  The sun tried to break out a few times but then the rain would come back hard.  It was savage, seaside weather, which we loved, and we caught glimpses of small fishing villages and vistas out to islands and the North Atlantic for the few hours up to the capital.

The traffic and the rain got intense and 103 ended and dumped us on local roads when we entered Halifax.  We followed 111 through town and over the MacKay Bridge, which suddenly required a $1.25 toll!?!  We’d been told that the only toll on Nova Scotia roads was in one stretch of route 104 and so hadn’t gotten any Canadian cash, let alone coins for the toll hopper.  Luckily there was an attendant out in the pouring rain, and she accepted five US quarters and raised the gate for us.

It was time for lunch, but we wanted to get out of the big city and finally did, continuing Northeast onto route 7 and eventually highway 107.  We had our eyes on the Rose and Rooster in Grand Desert on the Chezzetcook Peninsula, and this was a very mellow lunch stop in an artisan bakery/sandwich shop.  Sarah had excellent crab cakes and I had a very nice Cobb salad.

Just as it had always been low tide when we were in Scotland, it’s always high tide in Nova Scotia, by my scientific observation.  We crossed over and drove along several beautiful inlets of the sea, and briefly considered changing plans and exploring the peninsula more.  But we had objectives and didn’t linger, getting back onto route 7 and touring farther and farther up the coast, past quaintly named peninsulas and towns (Musquodoboit, Jeddore, Popes Harbour, Mushaboom, Watt Section, Dufferin, Necum Teuch, Ecum Secum, etc.) and more and more sudden views of the stormy sea.

We finally made it to Marie Joseph and the eponymous, deserted Provincial Park there, where we took a short break to stretch our legs and feel the stiff onshore wind coming off the Atlantic and through the offshore islands.  It was getting late by then, but we were still barely on schedule to make our reservations in Auld’s Cove that evening.  Route 7 turned North soon after that in Spanish Ship Bay, and it was a few more hours across the interior of Nova Scotia, past several long lakes, up towards Antigonish.

Place names familiar from our Scotland trip had started, and signs were now bilingual in English and Gaelic.  One of the lakes was Lochaber, and several towns in the North of the island had the ubiquitous “-ish” suffix.  We turned East on 104, a two-lane superhighway after kilometers and kilometers of pot-holed, severely twisting coastal and mountain roads.  Highways and gas stations are all metric in Cananda.  I can multiply by 0.64 pretty well, but after a while this got to be a pain and we changed our brains and the car’s dashboard display to kilometers.  Another unusual note was that much clay and rock in Canada is red, and so we were traveling on pink macadam.

In Havre Boucher the traffic came to a dead stop, there may have been some kind of accident, as no cars were coming the other way.  We took a quick (illegal) u-turn and got off onto route 4, which parallels the superhighway.  Another few miles on the Sunrise Trail up to Auld’s Cove, where we turned onto the D 31 Road out onto a peninsula, ending at the Cove Motel and Restaurant, where we were going to stay for two nights.

We loved this place!  We were in a touristy area, at the gateway to Cape Breton, and though this was one of the less expensive places it was still a pretty high price, but well worth it.  We got a secluded cabin off in a corner of the peninsula with a king-size bed, a table big enough to play games on, a nice bathroom, windows that opened, and wonderful views.  The rain and wind were peaking again, and after dumping our stuff we made our way back to the restaurant, where we had a fine seafood dinner and couple of beers.

Ty Wallace entertained the guests with his well-produced, solo country act.  He basically played karaoke tracks, accompanied them with his big six-string, and filled in with a very nice baritone.  He did all the usual suspects, Yoakam, Haggard, Travis, Jennings, Buffett, Denver, etc. but sadly didn’t cover any Canadians!  Oh well.

Quick Nova Scotia Trip, Thursday

For years I’d been staring at the map of the Atlantic Provinces and figuring we should take a trip there someday, but it had always been put off.  To get there you pretty much need to go through Maine, and when we’re up in Maine we want to stay put.  But this year the timing turned out perfectly, and we planned a quick trip up to Northern Nova Scotia and back through New Brunswick.  We knew it would be a lot of driving, but we really wanted to get up to Cape Breton and really didn’t want to leave the kitties for longer than three nights.

We packed for a few days of variable weather and took off for Bar Harbor on September 26th, where we caught the 3PM departure of The Cat car ferry.  Of course, after weeks of perfect late Summer/early Fall weather it was a dark, rainy day, but that was no problem.  The boat actually left around 2:45 and only held about a third as many passengers as it could have, though the car decks seemed pretty packed.  There were many cars from away, most from South of New England: Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, etc.  I watched from out on the side and rear decks with a few other hardy souls as we left Bar Harbor, cruised fast through the Porcupines, dropped the pilot South of Ironbound, and then gunned it out to sea at 40 knots.

I rejoined Sarah in comfortable bus-style seats in the forward-facing lounge.  It didn’t take long before the motion of the boat made us both feel a bit seasick.  I tried reading at first and then just closed my eyes, which calmed the nausea pretty much, and dozed for most of the 3½ hour trip.  We finally spotted land, and then the Cape Forchu Lighthouse.  We were still really moving fast and didn’t slow down until we’d turned up into Yarmouth harbor and past Bunker Island into the inner harbor.

There was quite a wait to get off the boat, and then again at Immigration/Customs.  Could be that their systems were down in Immigration, because they were moving very slowly.  By the time we got out it was already about 8:00 (we were now on Atlantic Daylight Time) and so we stopped immediately at Rudder’s Seafood Restaurant and Brewery, where we had some armor-plated haddock, fries, and a passable red ale.  Then just a few bocks up to the Rodd Grand Hotel, where we got a small but clean and totally acceptable sixth-floor room from the young, nose-ringed woman at the desk whose boyfriend was lurking in the shadows.  The bar was still rocking, though the streets of Yarmouth were empty at 9PM.