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.