Cape Breton Island

It's been a beautiful, busy 3+ days exploring Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Wowzers. Our first stop was Baddeck, which has a very dangerous outdoor clothing store as well as a museum detailing the life and mind of Alexander Graham Bell, who lived much of his life here and did oh so much more than invent the silly old telephone.

From there, it was onto the famed Cabot Trail, much of which overlaps with Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and the combo of which are priority #1 for most tourists to Nova Scotia. It's clear why. We took 7 of the 25 or so of the park's hiking trails and saw incredibly varied landscapes, from windswept coastline...

...to swampy, frog-filled forests...

...to 350-year-old sugar maple patches...

...to riverbeds recently visited by moose...

...to more sparse forests where fiddleheads were past their prime...

...to more evidence of moose (but where were the moose themselves?!?! My mother was beside herself with anticipation)...

...until finally, after probably nearly 8 total hours of hiking all these trails, in our last ten minutes of the last trail, we FINALLY saw an actually moose, a female with some serious battle scars.

The next night we went back into the park to look for more moose but weren't having luck as dusk was really setting in, so we went back to the same place we'd seen moose the day before and saw the same female in the exact same spot. Better than nothing, and we named her Mathilde.

Outside the park (but still on the Cabot Trail), we spent some time in the Acadian, fishing town of Cheticamp. This struck me as a really special place, with genuine, modest people, lots of fun French to be heard in every doorway, and a hard-working yet cooperative ethic that I really enjoyed.

Cheticamp is reknowned for what the guidebooks called rug-making, though the work is so intricate that it takes 6 hours for a pro to do even the small circle this woman is working on, and we never saw anything that was as big as an actual rug.

We also visited Cheticamp Island to see its lighthouse, intending to have a picnic lunch...though we ended up eating in the car due to relentless wind and no boundary between us and a whole lotta cattle, including a wary bull.

These aren't the cattle we saw on the island. They live in the field by the B&B where we stayed. I just thought they were cute.

As was this couple--also tourists--who asked the waitress at the Home Kitchen how to eat the whole lobsters they'd ordered for dinner, and received a full, detailed lesson.

Reluctantly, we departed Cheticamp to continue on to Mabou, the epicenter of Celtic music in Nova Scotia, and not a bad place to take a walk with mosquitoes, either.

I'm a little concerned at how amused we were by setting three tiny snails in a row in hopes that they would start inching forward in a slow-motion race. Instead they scattered in three different directions as soon as they came out of their shells. (Don't worry: no snails were harmed in the making of this photo.)

The path was along what used to be the railroad tracks, and we walked as far as the next station north from Mabou.

Then, that night at the Red Shoe restaurant, we got a sampling of that famed fiddling that puts the town on the map. It was pretty impressive, though I'm not having luck uploading the video so have to just give you a still shot.

As we drove back to the B&B for our final night's sleep on Cape Breton, the most unbelievable cloud cover was rolling in. It looked like the end of the world, though it never ended up raining at all. At least not on us.

A very dramatic, beautiful end to a very dramatic, beautiful leg of the journey. From here, we are Halifax-bound!