It's there, in the top right. I put an X where we stayed in the extreme top right. Now that you're up to speed, we can continue with the pictures and commentary.
We visited/hiked at about 15 of the places indicated on the Highlands National Park map, and many more off it.
Almost had to make a detour when I found out we were just 4 km from paradise.
This was home for nine days. Our friends, Sara and Bronwyn, have been inviting us to visit for years. Glad we finally made it. That white van next to the house in the photo with the lobster traps was home for the four-plus-days of driving it took to get there and back.
Bronwyn's family bought the cottage in New Haven, the gateway to Neils Harbour, (apostrophe optional, "u" required) in 1969. She and Sara now own it and have a close connection to the neighbors, who include people who grew up there, people who come from "away", and snowbirds. There's often a fire on the waterfront below their house and we got to join them one night for stories about growing up and living in the area, the pursuit of the local ne're-do-wells by law enforcement, and the fishing industry. That's the fish plant behind us with far too many lights. I think the guy in the hat was somewhat responsible for them. They enjoyed hearing my banjo, but insisted it be in tune so Gail took over. The social life there was over-the-top and we had to go hiking and biking every day to be excused from attending everything.
Bronwyn is waiting on a new hip, but she and Sara were able to drive to one of their favorite places to hike with us on our first day. White Point is near their house and it was the perfect destination for Gail and I to ride our bikes to after 2.5 days of driving. It's off the popular Cabot Trail, which circles much of the national park. We would spend a considerable amount of time on the ridge in the background.
A view from the road on a different day.
After five days of calm seas filled with sunshine, we wondered what they were talking about when they referred to weather being "dirty". Ooh, did those waves thunder when they crashed on the rocks. Visibility remained low all day with quite a bit of rain. This is right behind their house, or in front of it, depending on who you talk to. The shore is like this, uninterrupted and uninhabited, for five miles (or 8 km) as the gull flies all the way to White Point.
I spent about half of the nights in the tent listening to the waves and the groaning buoy just off shore. Gail spent a few minutes and decided the bed inside the house was quieter, drier, darker, and more comfortable. I took the rain fly off for the peak of the meteor shower and was not disappointed.
Going the other direction from their house, there is Neils Harbour Beach. It has lots of mica suspended in the waves.
We got to some of the other beaches in the area too. The top two are a provincial park to commemorate where John Cabot was reputed to have landed when he got credit for being the first European to sail to North America. The bottom one is South Harbour. It and North Harbour are along the Cabot Trail, but just outside the national park.
While I was thrilled to see the ocean for the first time in almost 10 years, I was even more excited to get up into the mountains, even though I'd been to the Adirondacks just a few weeks before. Cape Breton is teeming with mountains, but since they start at sea level, the topography is more relevant than the elevation. A couple places had ropes to assist with getting up or down.
This is part of the Aspy Fault that extends 40 km from the northern part of the peninsula to the middle of the island. It's a slip fault where two tectonic plates collided billions of years ago. Another part of the island is made up of rock from a third plate. Gail studied geology as an undergrad and kept bugging out over the various rocks and minerals, with good reason.
More of the geology as viewed from a whale watching cruise we took.
We didn't see any whales during the cruise, but at one point we saw four juvenile bald eagles together, which, combined with the views of the shoreline from the water, was worth the price of admission for us.
As you can see, the crowds get pretty intense.
And it's important to carry a Canadian bike lock with you.
These trees are confident they have the boulder locked in. I happen to speak Stoner and understood the boulder laugh and say, "Dude, all I have is time."
In case you need a reminder.
Almost every hike in the national park has a red chair bolted to the ground at an overlook or point of interest.
You get the idea. There were many more.
It was peak season for wild blueberries, and we indulged on every hike.
Though it was the second half of August, strawberries were in season too, but had to be purchased at the co-op in Neils Harbour.
I found so many rocks I wanted to bring home. This one wouldn't fit in my backpack. I didn't want to carry it an hour to the house anyway. I brought several smaller ones.
Hurricane Fiona made a direct hit on Cape Breton in 2022. It set lots of records (many of which have since been surpassed), as well as deposited this buoy near their house. The waves eroded the yard and now the house is about 20 meters closer to the sea. The neighbors saw a wave crash on top of the shed, but it stayed in place.
Sara has been putting her Hammerstone workshops to good use in re-shingling the shed. I put my height skills to use one day to help out.
They made sure we ate well too. Sara cooked us a crab dinner with some they picked out at the processing facility across the harbour from their house. The lobster season was short and gone, but they saved us a couple that we had on a night they went out. I'm still a vegetarian, I just like to suspend my standards when I'm on an island in the ocean.
The fish plant. The crab season was supposedly over, but someone brought in three bins of crab while we were there.
The most dramatic sunrise of the ten I went out onto the rocks to watch.
I tried to call you, but mistakenly used a US quarter and jammed the phone.
I'd just read a Glenn Curtis bio that included a lot of history of Alexander Graham Bell's place on Cape Breton. They completed the first flight anywhere in the British Empire there. Bell doesn't get enough credit for inventing an early solar powered cell phone.
How about a few more shoreline pics? By the way, those bottom two pictures were taken the same day as the waves crashing photo way up at the beginning of this post. That's the difference between windward and leeward.
How about a couple more geology photos? We hiked to a former mica mine in the barren, and a former gold mine in a river valley. There was mica all over, less gold.
I came up with what we refer to as a Jim Lauderdale-ism: I'm sweating like a vegetarian on Meat Cove Mountain.
Every-damn-trip.
Hmmm. What could be happening here?
Just another excellent adventure together. Thanks Gail, and thanks Sara and Bronwyn (and Maggie).
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