Quiet Quilters of Port Hastings

Time to pack up and leave lovely Cape Breton Island - and as a farewell gift the autumn colours were gleaming in the sun as we left Baddeck. A last fling on the island, just before the causeway - we had morning tea with the quilters at Port Hastings Community Museum. These community museums are great with their collection of old items that might otherwise be lost and excellent explanations. They also seem to come with a band of passionate supporters, especially today's who welcomed us with a piper playing the bagpipe, hugs, handshakes and oatcakes. We are such a novelty that they
were taking photos of us! The quilted items were very good and not expensive so they made a good few sales.

Antigonish was the stopping place for early lunch which gave us good time to get to the ferry for Prince Edward Island, a 75 minute trip - us and the bus. I got some knitting done on the long trip - nearly a whole sock.

First impressions of Prince Edward Island are of extremely neat houses sitting on rolling green lawns and of agriculture: for the first time we have seen sheep and spent crops if what might be canola. (Next day: it is actually soya beans.) Our hotel in the capital, Charlottetown, is The Great George and is very nice. Their welcome drink(s) and cookies made us happy and it was a noisy group who set off to walk two blocks to dinner in a private room under the local theatre catered by Mavor's Restaurant - succulent chicken and nice salmon.

Happy Hookers of Cheticamp

Rug hookers that is! An early start this morning saw us in the bus driving through the Margaree Valley on the start of the Cabot Trail which goes right around the north and east coast of Cape Breton covering some spectacular scenery. Cheticamp has only had a road connecting it to the rest of the world for sixty years - so they have kept their Acadian traditions alive, even to the extent of still speaking an old world French quite different from that spoken in Quebec or Paris. Our waitress at morning tea had a strong French accent, as did the lady demonstrating rug hooking. That's her in the photo showing me how to do rug hooking. It's a craft here done by men and women and an art by some which commands high prices. You would have to do something in a place which only had one month of summer (July).

It is a very clean and neat-looking town as the houses are all freshly painted in different colours with white trim and each sits surrounded by smooth green lawn, no fences and no gardens at all, just these little boxy two or three storey houses. It's windy - and we were there on mild day. We had no fog, a rare event for the Cabot Trail.

The Cabot Trail enters the Cape Breton National Park, hugging the Atlantic Ocean, a rugged and rough shoreline diving up and down like a roller coaster through mixed woods of spruce, birch, maple and ash interspersed with bright red wild apples and even brighter rowan berries. Not much in the way of fall colours as the recent two days of low temperatures haven't been enough to turn the leaves.

Lunch happened at Cape North in a little red-roofed church and was supplied by volunteers from the excellent little pioneer museum that was having a special exhibition of weather. Boy - do they ever have weather there! - mostly snow but this August flooding rains.

The eastern coast is firmly Scottish, even to a Celtic College to teach their heritage. The coastline is wonderful; the road goes in and out little bays and there are working fishing villages with lobster traps stacked high for the winter. They can have 250 to 375 traps each depending on geography; David found that out by talking to a fisherman at Neil's Cove. Black Brook Beach is a beautiful little (stony) beach where we had our photo taken - see below.


Merryle thought we might be hungry - as if! - and booked us for afternoon tea at a posh old inn Keltic Lodge at That's it in the photo with the Canadian flag waving. It is perfectly located on a headland with water on three sides, a smooth- looking golf course and a comfortable lounge where guests were sitting around having English-style tea (I refuse to call it "high" tea).

We were late back at Baddeck where a Thanksgiving dinner awaited.

Giant Pumpkins

Must add this tidbit from today's local paper: the winner of the giant pumpkin contest weighed in at 1800pounds / 800kg! The runners-up are hollowed out and take part in a boat race - prizes for rowing and motorized division. After the race they're hauled away for compost.

Photo below of a pumpkin display at Keltic Lodge for Thanksgiving - these are small pumpkins:

Cape Breton Island

Goodbye to Halifax after 4 nights there and north to Truro to the largest rock garden in the Maritimes at NS Agricultural College and a lovely guide who kindly came out on Thanksgiving Day to tell us all about it. (Sunday is when you have The Dinner, Monday is a holiday for public servants and schools. ) ( He was having lobster and it was all ready to cook. )

It is a most elaborate garden with much attention paid to sheltering the roots with rocks - fabulous conifers, many alpine plants including my favourite platycodons. Surprise - even a patch of PLANTED prickly pears. Friends of the Garden supplied morning tea - not that we need it but when they go to all that bother you have to eat another blueberry muffin.

An hour and a half later and it was time to eat again, lunch at Antigonish where there is a causeway from the mainland to Cape Breton Island - still Nova Scotia but a separate large island with a huge lake, Lake Bras d'Or (Arms of Gold) running down the middle. We are staying at Auberge Gisele on the shores of the lake.

The people of Cape Breton have retained a separate cultural identity and are more Scottish than the Scots with some still speaking Gaelic, many Scottish place names, bagpipes and the ceilidh (pronounced caylee) which is an evening of singing and dancing. And we were invited to a lobster supper and ceilidh in the local hall (all except Peter who swept off to the dentist to get his root canal seen to - what bad luck on holiday!)

The entertainment was Jennifer on fiddle and Mark on keyboard playing Celtic music that made you tap your feet and want to dance but we had to concentrate on the food: fish chowder followed by great buckets of mussels with melted butter. I had 26 mussels - opposite me a lady had at least double - then salad then the lobsters all nicely broken up ready to poke at with lobster picks and get out every morsel. All very fresh and delicious. Finally Ginger pudding with lemon sauce. Jennifer told us the origins of their music and played some more toe-tapping music till we all walked back to the hotel.

Bottom photo is of Merryle enjoying her lobster :

Sunshine at Last!

It was a pretty day today, warm sun of 23' C and just a little breeze to make the water dance and ripple. There are miles of boardwalk along the harbour here and we set off to walk the length, stopping first for a Cow's ice-cream, Canada's finest. ( Mine was Moo Nuts, which turned out to contain mini Reese's Peanut Butter cups. I contemplated licking them off and bringing them back for Alison but maybe she wouldn't appreciate that...)

Along the way we saw lots of little and big boats plus a cheerful Theodore the tugboat then arrived at Pier 21 the Farmers' Market. What a fabulous market! Jam-packed with fruit and veg and locals out in droves to stock up for Thanksgiving. Everyone seemed to be carrying a bunch of cape gooseberries on stems, looking very cheerful with their bright orange outer seedcases. At last we were able to buy new season apples - Honeycrisps - which are sharp and sweet with red-veined flesh and full of juice which runs down your chin.

Our destination was the Immigration Museum as recommended by Merryle where we had a guided tour of the exhibits, mostly about 20th century immigration, not as interesting as earlier when the Acadians came from France then were thrown out by the victorious British in the Great Displacement, some going to Quebec, some to Louisiana to become
Cajuns and some hiding out in Nova Scotia.

Our garden today was the best yet and once again the Halifax Gardening Society was on hand to supply afternoon tea. This is another one acre garden lovingly tended by a couple of gardeners with a wealth of plant materials - something like 300 rhododendrons to start with. Next year's tour with Merryle will be in June so they will see them in flower. The property rolls down a terraced hill to a small lake, ending in a high berm and a bog with all sorts of bog plants including sundews and pitcher plants while nearer the house was a veggie garden in full sun and flowering dahlias. We just wanted to sit on the Adirondack chairs and enjoy the warm sun, the hosts' gardening books and the view.

Sunny South Shore

8' C and no wind - huge improvement! Off we drove to the South Shore past Peggy's Cove to a private garden at Mahone Bay where our hostess has been gardening for 20 years. She belongs to the Rhododendron Society and has access to rare plants which she tends lovingly on a very steep slope.

Then on to Lunenberg which has Unesco World Heritage status for its pretty and well-preserved houses on very steep streets rolling down to the water front and working shipyards.
We went to the Maritime Museum where our guide was a fisherman's wife and descendant from the original settlers who came from Germany and Switzerland to take up fishing with no prior experience. It's a fascinating story and who'd have thought a fishing museum could be so interesting.

Merryle arranged for us to visit Laurie Swim's studio where she displays her silk quilts: they are art rather than craft and her latest one sold for $60,000. Absolutely beautiful, they depict local scenes especially fishing and she is so clever at depicting water - sometimes with silver material and sometimes with stitching. They are hand-pieced and free-form machine quilted. (No photos allowed due to copyright.)

Back we went to Mahone Bay which is having a scarecrow festival: houses and shops decorated for Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday, pumpkins everywhere and cute scarecrows including the Royal Wedding. And really good shops! Even the guys had to admit the shops were good, especially Amos Pewter which is made there. I loved the wool shop called Have a Yarn and award it the prize for best sheep knitting scarecrow. I bought some lovely yarn there. Nova Scotians are great craft people - something to do with those long cold winters - and today we saw rug hooking which is making a comeback and men are doing it. I'd like to see more of that.

Tonight was our special dinner that we'd paid for two months ago. 24 of us went, in 6 taxis, to Stories where we had a lovely set menu of scallops ( again - the nearly local scallops from Digby are justly famous - but they serve them without the roe which is a shame) and strip loin grass-fed beef which was good but ours us better then a trio of delicious desserts, just two mouthfuls in each. Picture is if the scallops done in rice paper with a basket of salad in the middle: it's their signature dish.

Halifax and Peggys Cove

Good news! The rain has stopped - but the maximum for today is 5' that's FIVE degrees Celsius!!! On our free morning David and I walked briskly along Barrington Street then separated, him to the secondhand book stores and me to the shops of Spring Garden Road. I couldn't find a department store but lots of small shops in malls; in fact our hotel is connected to a mall by an overhead walk called a pedway so that you need not go out in the cold. The most interesting shop I checked out was a pet supermarket with every imaginable accessory for your pet but I don't want to try to bring catnip through customs.

I had a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks in the lobby: very nice, not that I could taste the pumpkin.

The afternoon trip started with a detour to the bus station to pick up my adaptor and charger which took us through the dock area where we saw 5 (the magic number for today) huge cruise ships: that is an extra 10,000 people in Halifax today. And a lot of them went on buses to Peggy's Cove.

Merryle did a good job describing the charms of this little fishing village and had reserved our seats in the restaurant for afternoon tea but it was a battle to fight your way through the gift shop which was shoulder to shoulder with Texans buying red plastic lobsters. The queues for the washrooms and checkout were horrendous and there were 35 buses
in the parking lot. (The permanent population of Peggy's Cove is only 34 people.) Then outside we were stunned and shocked by the howling wind which combined with a temperature of 2 was enough to drive us back to the bus. There's a nice little lighthouse but none of us cared as it was swarming with tourists.

Much more interesting was a gallery of local art by the painter William deGarthe and it was only us, no cruising Texans, and a chance to see the real side of fishing here - a hard life. A bit further along the coast is a monument to the victims of the crash of SwissAir flight 101 in 1998, very tastefully done and you can look back at Peggy's Cove - the best way to see it.

COLD!!! This is only fall. What must winter be like?