Summer Travel Map

Sunday, August 12, 2007

A day (or more) late, but not a dollar short

August 8, 2007
North Sydney, NS

First off, I was able to format some pictures, so here are a couple of links.

Halifax:
http://picasaweb.google.com/GeorgeandGeri/ScenesFromOurTimeInHalifax

Sydney:
http://picasaweb.google.com/GeorgeandGeri/SomeRandomPicturesFromSydneyNS

The neat thing about plans is that they’re just always something you can change. Well, yesterday was just such a day. When we planned the day, everything was looking good for a Cabot Trail tour. Unfortunately, I woke up from a dead sleep right around 6 AM to the sound of rain. Thinking it had just started, I quickly headed outside to stow the lawn chairs (nothing worse than a wet you-know-what) that I’d neglected to put away the night before (because it was so nice out, of course). Well, there was already a ½” puddle in the chairs, so it had been raining for a while. I did a quick assessment and made an executive decision: off with the alarm and back to bed.

As the morning went on, the rain turned to showers and the dry spells got longer, so we decided to do a shorter drive, to the little town of Baddeck and then around part of the Bras d’Or Lake (the full lake tour is an all-day affair, so we took a shortened route). The lake is nice, but we’re glad we took the shorter path. We stopped in Baddeck for some pictures, but the weather wasn’t exactly cooperating. As we toured around the other side of the St. Patrick’s Channel, we happened to see what’s called a “C@P” site, which is a public Internet site where the community “rents out” bandwidth for a couple of loonies (C$1) an hour. Since we had the foresight to pack the laptops in the car, we dropped 4 bucks on an hour each of access to check email, update the blog and catch up on finances. It was a reasonably good deal, since we were just driving by and saw the sign.

After we completed the lake loop, we were back in North Sydney, so we “dined” at a local fast-food place called “Lick-a-Chick”. Other than the interesting name, there wasn’t anything else worth going there: the wait was too long and the food too unremarkable.

Back at home, we plowed through a backlog of email, and I formatted some pictures for posting, then we called it an early night.

Today was a whole different story. I could tell from the light as I woke up that it was brighter than I’d expected. Much to my surprise, it was pretty sunny outside. It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise, since changes in the weather are routine here. We were on the road by 7:30 AM (could be a new record for us!) and headed for the Cabot Trail. We stopped at Tim Horton’s for a breakfast sandwich, and started out on the Trail in a clockwise direction. From what we read, this is the “traditional” route, since you’re driving on the “inside” as opposed to along the cliffs. From Geri’s point-of-view, this was a good thing.

We made the whole loop in just about 9 hours, which is pretty good time. We made quite a few stops for photos and did three “side trips” off the trail, to “Meat Cove” (another superlative – the “northernmost town”) to Dingwall (a nice little harbour but not much else) and to White Point (a pretty drive along the coast, with several photo-ops).

We stopped for lunch at the Cabot Landing site (well, the estimated landing site, since they really don’t know for sure). It was a nice picnic site, shielded by trees from the strong wind that kicked up. What was interesting to learn is that Cabot’s real name was Giovanni Caboto, from Venice. Who knew?

We got back home just after 5 PM, which made for a good day trip. We managed to get the local TV stations using the antenna (how quaint!), but the pickings are pretty slim. There are 4 channels, one en Français. We did finally get the news on CTV, so we know that the weather will turn bad overnight and it’ll probably rain most of the day tomorrow. The good news is that Friday through Sunday is supposed to be nice. This is good, since Friday is “packing up” day and Saturday is a travel day. We also realized that local shows like “Corner Gas” are an acquired taste, which you can only acquire if you have a very dry sense of humor.

Tomorrow, we may visit the Alexander Graham Bell historical site (or we may just hang out at home). Friday morning, we may visit the Louisbourg historical site before we get things ready for Saturday’s departure. We’ll have to leave relatively early on Saturday, because I want to catch the 1 PM ferry to PEI and we need to get there by 11:30-ish to queue up. We’ll need to leave here by 8 AM, 8:30 at the latest, so we’ll want to be all packed up and dumped by Friday evening.

Here is a link to some of today’s photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/GeorgeandGeri/AlongTheCabotTrail

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