Nova Scotia

After leaving Cape Breton Highlands National Park, we headed south along the Cabot Trail to Baddeck. We found the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site and used our Parks Canada pass to cover admission. The exhibits showed the life of a man curious about a myriad of subjects. More of the museum was dedicated to flying machines and hydrofoils than the invention of the telephone.

We had to backtrack a bit as we headed north to Sydney, Cape Breton’s only real city. We found a grocery store and stocked up, since we had been in smaller towns for most of the past week. The town itself appears to be a slightly depressed former industrial area. Apparently, the coal mines closed in the nineties…

Looking on the Internet, Lisa found a Ceilidh in Louisbourg that night – only a half hour east of Sydney. Since we were planning on heading to the fortress in the morning anyway, we headed over to get tickets and find a place to camp. The RV park turned out to be more than adequate. In fact – the tent sites had a small covered pavilion for the picnic table. Since rain was forecast, we moved the table and set up our tent under the roof – in the morning we would have a nice dry tent to pack.

The fiddling was fantastic yet again. The show took place at the Louisbourg Theatre which was a recreation of the Globe Theatre in London. Apparently, Disney built the theatre for a movie in the nineties and donated it to the town afterward. The show featured traditional Cape Breton fiddling by Jennifer Roland with interludes of country and jazz vocals from the piano player. We even got tea and Scottish oatcakes at intermission!

The next morning we headed to the Fortress of Lousbourg National Historic Site. It was a recreation of a French fortress on the site from the early to mid eighteenth century. Upon arriving at the sod-roofed houses outside the wall, the tenants joked about being able to harvest their carrots from the ceiling.

We enjoyed the open houses with period actors and found ourselves fawning over the boat-builder’s shop. We opted to eat lunch at the “commoners” restaurant where we were only given a spoon for the three-course meal. We ate our fill and decided to head out as we were both feeling the “museum lower-back.”

We decided that we had seen the best of Cape Breton and that we would start heading towards New Brunswick again. We decided to skip Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia since our guidebook described: “hummingbird sized mosquitoes” and “eel sized leeches,” thanks Susie Mick! We are now on our way to Fundy National Park on the southern shore of New Brunswick for some hiking.