We just arrived back at the trailer after a 10 hour day driving around Cape Breton Island. The drive is supposed to take 5 or 6 hours but, "Hey" - ya gotta stop and smell the roses! If I was going to do this again in the future, I would have booked a hotel or B&B around 1/2 way through the route. That would have given us much more time to stop at more places.
Our first stop was the Nova Scotia Provincial Visitor Information Centre (that's how they spell Center here...) just after crossing the causeway onto Cape Breton Island. The very helpful gal at the desk took out a map and pointed out several places to stop while circumnavigating the island. When she mentioned sea-glass on the beach at Inverness, Laura perked right up. While driving the next hour or so, Laura checked the AllTrails app for some short hikes we could do along the way. We knew we wouldn't be able to take any longer hikes - 3 or 4 hours - because we wouldn't have time and still get back to the campground before late at night.
Laura found a hike a short distance from Inverness which was only 1/2 mile but climbed 800 feet to a waterfall. We punched the trailhead into Google Maps and followed it's directions. A little while later we turned down this dirt road with trees and bushes close on each side. After about 2 miles of bumps, ruts and potholes, we thought we must be close to the trailhead. Instead, we came back out on a main road. Looking at the map, Google routed us through a 2 mile dirt road to save 4 miles of main road. That sucked!
We checked the route to the trailhead and saw it was another 25 minutes yet. I vetoed this hike because it was too far from our route and would eat up most of our spare time.
After about 1/2 hour, we came to the beach in Inverness and it was very beautiful. The beach was one of the longest we've seen on Nova Scotia. It was a mixture of stones and sand. Laura walked about a 1/4 mile of the beach looking for sea-glass and found a nice piece almost right away. I knew she would be awhile so left and walked around the harbor. Here is a short video I took showing the beach - Beach at Inverness, NS.
Laura found several pieces of sea-glass and she posted a picture on Facebook. I don't know how she does it. I didn't find any. But, I can't find my golf-balls either...
I was able to pry Laura from the beach after about an hour and we continued our drive north. An hour later we stopped for lunch at the Belle View Restaurant. The view was very nice but they didn't have umbrellas on the deck so we sat inside. Fish chowder was good. Fried clams overcooked (as usual) but Laura enjoyed her steak-sub. Oh - the wi-fi was really good (much better than the campgrounds lately) and I was able to download 5 episodes of Outlander from Netflix to my iPad while we ate lunch.
A little while later we came to the Cape Breton Highlands National Park of Canada. We again stopped at the Visitor's Centre and were able to obtain a couple handfuls of trail maps that our campground was out of. The road followed the ocean and reminded me of Rt 1 in California. I was so glad we hadn't pulled the trailer through this. Some hills were 16% grades with no room to pick up speed. Plus, going down the other side would have been really scary hoping all the brakes held. Here's an example of the twisty roads following the coastline.
After several stops and starts for construction (on the side of mountains!), we came to a more flat area of bays and beaches. This is a typical harbor along the way. All the boats look in great shape but no pleasure boats. Guess the ocean is for working around here.The lack of pleasure boats was to continue along our whole trip. On the eastern side, we drove around beautiful bays that looked like Lake George in Upstate NY. Except, no marinas every 2 or 3 miles. In fact, we didn't see one pleasure boat marina on the whole trip.
I'm not sure how this is going to come out but here is a picture going down one of the very steep hills with the ocean right in front of us. On some of downhill twisty parts, I had the truck in 1st gear to keep off the brakes full-time.
Check out this screen-shot from my phone showing the road in front of us. This is not zoomed in either. This was the next 1/2 mile or so. All down hill!
Once we turned the corner and started south around the other side of the island, the roads became better but still closely followed the shoreline. Every little bay and inlet we went around following the water.
Laura and I talked about stopping for dinner but Google Maps showed our ETA back at the campground for around 8pm. Neither of us were hungry so we continued the drive, enjoying the scenery and getting a little tired of sitting in the truck. We were glad to get back to the campground, eat a little snack and work on the blog.
On the way back, we started researching our trip for tomorrow. A little over an hour west of here there is a ferry to Prince Edward Island (PEI) where we plan on spending the next several days. The lady on the phone from the ferry company said we should have no problem with the rig if we showed up about an hour early for the 1:30pm ferry. And, it's free! So cool. We're going to turn our truck and trailer into a boat for a little while.
I also made reservations at a Provincial Campground on PEI for the next 2 nights. I don't usually like to make reservations in advance because if something happens, we loose the deposit. But, these provincial campgrounds are usually booked up for the summer and I happened to find an open site on this one. I'll let you know how it works out!
221 miles today (no towing) - 1,823 total trip miles
We can recommend visiting the Newman Winery on PEI, it was our favorite (all 2 wines that the guy makes). We also visited Rossignol but it was a bit commercial with OK wines. We could recommend Murray Harbor as a stop for lunch at the restaurant that is within sight of the harbor. We took our boat in there!
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