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.
No comments:
Post a Comment