Cape Breton Travel Diary

First I must start with a disclaimer: All the photos in this post were taken by Douglas. I am shamelessly using his photos because he has a very fancy camera and took much better pictures than I did. He has also already posted about our trip.

Last weekend I took a trip out to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to attend the wedding of Heather Murray and Chris White.

I left Seattle on Wednesday night. You know it’s going to be a long trip when it takes two luggage tags to get your bag to its final destination. Despite that ominous beginning things picked up when the random person sitting next to me on the red-eye from Vancouver to Toronto happened to be a girl I’d gone to Shad Valley with back in 1996. I think we last saw each other some time in 2001 back at Waterloo. Neither of us managed to get as much sleep on the flight as we’d planned because we had a bunch of catching up to do.

On Thursday morning I met my travel companions Douglas and Matt in Toronto and we flew on to Halifax and then to Sydney (Nova Scotia, not Australia, this confused my United check-in agent in Seattle). In Sydney we picked up our rental car, did some grocery shopping and then headed out north along the Cabot Trail to Ingonish. We stayed at the Ingonish Chalets and I would highly recommend this accommodation to anyone heading up to the area. Try to get a unit with a wood stove like we had!

On Friday morning we drove further north to Bay St. Lawrence to go sailing with Heather, Chris and a bunch of other wedding guests “from away.” The boat we went out on is owned by a friend of Heather’s family and he was kind enough to take a bunch of city folk out on the water. We even saw a whale while we were out.

After sailing we drove up to Meat Cove, the most northern settlement on Cape Breton, and had a picnic lunch. After lunch we did a little exploring and Matt and I couldn’t resist having a stone skipping competition. I have to admit that my stone skipping skills leave much to be desired.

Later that afternoon we dropped by the Murray residence to pick up some CDs of photos of Heather and Chris. We spent most of Friday evening assembling these photos into a “slide show” presentation for the wedding reception. This was the formation of the “wedding AV club.” I guess when you come with one powerBook or iBook per person it only makes sense.

Saturday was the actual wedding up in Dingwall and it was just perfect. The ceremony and reception fit Heather and Chris to a tee and I think that everyone had a great time. It was wonderful to see two of my friends so happy together. As a side note you may recall that Heather and Chris first met in the now infamous Grad Pub Dating Game. Who would ever of though that it would have all lead to this?!

Sunday we slept in and then headed ever further north and west along the Cabot trail. We made many stops to check out the view and make Douglas take pictures of the beautiful fall colours. By this time I had stopped taking my own pictures and just decided to steal all of Douglas’. Ah the joys or airport cards.

We drove up to the Skyline trail and did an easy hike which took us through forest and then out to a viewpoint overlooking the ocean. On the way back we saw five moose. One was a male moose with his rack fully up who was blocking the trail. We waited about 10 minutes for he and the other two moose that were with him to move off the trail. When we did decide to walk by I just kept telling myself to walk calmly and not make eye contact. Moose are big and if they wanted to I bet they could do some serious damage. Here are Matt and Douglas searching for wildlife.

On Monday we left Ingonish at 5am and started the long trek home. I got back to my apartment in Seattle 19.5 hours later. That much traveling on only four hours of sleep makes Cecilia very cranky and emotional. I almost fell right into bed when I finally got home.

The trip to Cape Breton was absolutely wonderful. I fully intend to go back at some point when I have more time to do more exploring. And just because I want to say it one more time: Congratulations Heather and Chris!