Sunday, August 27, 2017

(Backup) On to Cape Breton!

First, just realized I forgot to mention the campground in Amherst--Lochlomond, site C-3.  This is a lovely campground, right on the water and the site, as they all appeared to be, was quite level.  Good place!

Friday we drove to Antigonish, and stayed in a delightful small campground in Linwood, just past Antigonish, Linwood Harbour Campground, site 10.  Another wonderful campground, with level sites, sort of terraced down a gentle slope toward the water.  Beautiful views, only a relatively few sites, but that made it easy to do laundry with no crowds.  We enjoyed sitting outside looking at the water.  Met a nice couple who had lived on San Juan Island  Washington for years, then full timed for years, recently bought a house in Arizona, so they downsized to a 27 foot Class C to enjoy periodic trips.  

Saturday morning we were only a little over a hundred miles to the ferry, so we drove to the North Sydney/Cabot Trail KOA, site 9&10.  They have these wonderful pull through sites that are really two sites into one.  Anyway, it overlooks Baddeck Bay--just beautiful!  We unhooked and drove the Cabot Trail to Cheticamp, where we had visited before.  The Cabot Trail is a spectacular drive and we really enjoyed it, even though it was overcast with some rain at first, but then it cleared.  We saw lovely little churches, great vistas over the water.  We stopped at this little yarn and gift shop at Margaret Forks where we had been on our previous trip.  It was here that we found this incredible 14 piece Nativity, all hand knitted by a woman who's now in her 90's!  Amazingly beautiful work (I posted a picture of it on facebook during Advent as part of our daily Nativity scenes), and she uses jelly jar tops as stands in the bottom of the figures.  Anyway, Trisha found some wool yarn that she will use for hooking, and we had a lovely visit with the woman who runs the shop.  She recognized us right away when we came in and told us about her recent trip to NYC with her daughter to attend a relative's wedding.  While going through her things for the trip, she was looking for a small clutch bag to take and when she pulled it out she found my Santa picture card that I had given her in 2014--what a coincidence!  We drove on into Cheticamp to a rug hooking shop we had visited previously and had a delightful time reconnecting with the owner.  At first we didn't recognize the shop, as its name had changed--she used to call it Proud to be Hookers, but she told us that some people had found this offensive, so she changed the signage to feature her name, Lola, on the sign, but still kept the proud to be hookers in smaller letters.  She said her name sounds like a hooker's name anyway, so now it reads Proud to be Lola's Hookers--too funny!  We were reminiscing about going to a local pub, The Doryman, where we heard an amazing Celtic Cape Breton fiddler named Mark Beaudreaux.  She told us that, sadly, he had passed away this past year, before his 30th birthday.  Sadder still, it seems that his drug use played a big part in his heart failure--drugs are so damn insidious!  Anyway, we mentioned that there was a young woman who accompanied him on the keyboard who was the most high energy performer we had seen.  She laughed and said that it was Heidi, her cousin, and she remarked "Yeah, she's high energy, her hands are everywhere, so we have to keep her away from our men!"  She fell all over herself laughing and told us not to tell her cousin she had said this, so if any of you see Heidi, mum's the word!  Came back to the campground for supper and then drove into Baddeck for a ceilidh--very different, but enjoyable.  Typically at ceilidhs the fiddler is accompanied by a piano, but this night there was a fiddler and a guitar player.  The guitar player was the jokester and it was a lot of fun.  Now we're off to the ferry this afternoon for the long crossing to Newfoundland!

Love the vibrant colors in the houses!







Trisha just loves to see clothes hanging on the line!


Coming into Cheticamp




Same church up close when we got into town












Beautiful flowers in town, on the way to the ceilidh



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