Travelogue

The next leg of our trip was Cape Breton. We headed for Cheticamp, the longest drive of our trip at more than 4 hours. We had upstairs accommodations on a working fishing harbor in a rather ramshackle building, older, worn, a bit slanted but comfortable with creaky stairs and floors.

Le Gabriel, a big bar across the street, beckoned with a sign promising live music.

We went back to the car and drove to Cape Breton National Park. A young man working in the visitor’s center suggested a bog trail and Benjie’s Lake as good places to see a moose and also suggested Skyline Trail though he warned us it was so crowded on a recent sunny day they almost had to close it for overcrowding.

We left and drove just a bit into the park. The troll at the gate warned us 1) Young people in the visitor’s center don’t know what they are talking about and 2) Moose are dangerous and on the road after dark and there are special driving techniques to avoid being killed in a collision. Unfortunately, she also didn’t tell us about those techniques. I was surprised our pass didn’t have President Trump’s face on it.

Le Gabriel

We walked over to check it out and stayed for a beer. There were 3 free pool tables in the place. I struck up a conversation with a guy shooting pool with his friend Tommy. Cyril was 75 or so. They were Acadian, not Quebecois, Francophiles nevertheless.

“We play different rules here” he explained, “the new owners are Filipino. They said we could keep the tables if we played Filipino rules. If you sink an 8 on the break you don’t win. If you sink a ball on a break the table is still open. If you don’t hit your intended ball first, it is a scratch and you get to put the cueball anywhere on the table.”

I took winners. Cyril cleaned my clock.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said, “but this place is dying. There are few young people and the ones that are here don’t want to work.

“I made tires when I was workin’, Michelin.”

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“Sure, what do you want to know?” He said.

“Do you think Cape Breton should be a province?” I asked.

“Oh I don’t like to talk politics,” Cyril said. “I stay away from that, but definitely. It should be a province.”

We departed and resolved to go back to hear Melissa and Ashley playing from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and to share a lobster dinner.

Our food was outstanding. Melissa and Ashley played mostly folk rock covers, hitting us with “Harvest Moon” from Uncle Neil and The Hip’s “Ahead by Century” and “Boots and Hearts.”

I noticed the locals on the pool tables stopped playing and only started again during breaks.

About Gil and those cards

Also, no story about Le Gabriel would be complete without mentioning Gil Doucet, one for the previous owners. He was still there drinking beer surrounded by the hockey collection he sold with the place.

Classic jerseys like Leafs, Canadiens and Bruins as well as old school Canucks and even Nordiques sweaters.

The bar was covered in hockey cards under plexi but in plastic protectors, and not just boring ones like Doug Jarvis, Bob Gainey and Larry Playfair, but valuable ones like like a 1970 Gil Perrault, a Sabres Tim Horton and even a Blackhawks Dominik Hasek as well as a Gretzky WHA.

“A lot of those cards are very valuable,” I said to Doucet. “Did you think about keeping them?”

“When we sold the place, we sold everything in it,” Doucet said. “Some of those cards are worth thousands but they belong to the new owners.”

Visiting the park for the first time

We headed into the national park for the first time.

A 20-something attendant in the visitors’ center told us about hiking. Beth wanted to see a moose. Benjie’s Lake, early morning or the Bog Trail were the two best chances. He also said the Gypsum Mine trail was worth checking out.

He warned us in a few weeks, the Skyline Trail would require a permit and it was so crowded two days prior they almost had to shut down the parking lot because it was full.

We left the visitors center and drove into the park where we met a cranky attendant who had been there for years.

“If you are going in today, you need a permit,” she said.

Beth peppered her with questions about moose and hiking.

“You don’t want to drive at night. They are everywhere,” she said.

“I know when you hit a deer it wrecks your car, when you hit a moose, you die,” I said, acknowledging the massive animal can come through the windshield.

“There are special techniques when you see a moose,” she said, as if it was some sort of local secret she wasn’t about to share.

“Are you hiking today?” she asked, “your pass is good today and until 4 p.m. the next day.”

“We are coming back tomorrow,” Beth said.

“I will date your pass for tomorrow,” she said. “Keep it displayed in the park so you don’t get a ticket.”

Finally the hike

On Monday morning, we woke early and headed to the bog at about 6:30 a.m. It was cold. As in 4C (39F) as we hit the bog, a short boardwalk shrouded in fog on a frigid morning. We were glad to have packed warm hats and gloves and rambled along the fog-shrouded boardwalk without a moose in sight, admiring the fiddleheads everywhere as well as the spruce and birch.

We left and headed to Benjie’s Lake. Again, we couldn’t see much beyond 10 feet or so but the solitude was nice and the warblers serenaded us.

Both hikes were short. We left and headed for the Skyline Trail. There was one car in the parking lot with a person sleeping inside.

We headed into the frigid mist, alone in a beautiful place, with the first tiny orchids of the year growing trailside along with Canada Mayflowers and more fiddleheads.

There was a fork and a trailmap. One way was out and back, about 4.5K. The other was a loop, 5.5K. People taking the longer hike typically for counterclockwise. We chose shorter, knowing we could do the loop if we decided.

The path was spectacular, frigid and silent. There were vistas that would give great views if it weren’t for the ground-level cloud.

We made it to endless flights of stairs, going down, down, down. “How can you laugh when you know I’m down” as Sir Paul wrote long ago.

I paused to read every sign along the way, about how the place had been denuded by hikers before restoration and the stiff fines you could face for leaving the boardwalk. We made it to the end as the fog lifted slightly to give mystical views of the Atlantic below as well as the basalt cliffs and the twisting highway.

We headed back up and decided to take the longer trail back as the fog cleared a bit more and we gained a couple degrees. 10 minutes in we encountered our first other, a woman hiking up the long way up.

All the way down, we encountered one hiking party, after another, after another. Apparently everybody waited for the fog to clear. Everybody but us. We returned to the parking lot to see 150 cars or so. We had escaped just in time.

Dinner again

Beth left me unsupervised and I went searching for the seafood market we had seen driving into town. I didn’t find it but came upon the Coop Market which seems like a chain in these parts. $14 Cdn got me enough fresh scallops for dinner. I sauteed spinach, fiddleheads and onion and then hit the scallops with salt and pepper, sauteeing them quickly before removing them from the pan and adding a bit more butter, garlic, a bit of honey mustard and some lemon juice. It made a fine sauce and a delectable dinner.

The Gypsum Mine

Tuesday morning, we headed to the Gypsum Mine of Cheticamp Back Road. It was a nature preserve that used to be just a local thing but has, according to the internet, grown in popularity. We pulled into the lot to find an Iveco camper, a big, truck-like thing with European plates, and no one else.

About a half-mile into our hike, we saw the other guests hiking out. Again, a crowded place on a shoulder season weekday, alone for us early morning.

Merlin, the birdwatching app, kept hearing a redstart, a fairly common bird I have never laid eyes on. More about him later.

Eventually, we came to the quarry. We walked off past the mine onto a trail framed by spectacular gypsum cliffs. Old mines can be otherworldly and this one felt like Mars.

We heard ATVs in the distance and returned toward the pond to find a trio of sisters has arrived to sit a spot. Their dad moved them here from the Toronto area 40 years ago and they stayed.

One of them mentioned a trail around to the right lead to a rope up to the top of a massive rock on the other side, where the kids to jump off in the summer.

Beth joined me for about half the path before she turned back – it was a rough, and buggy way.

I came to the first rope, it was actually double, but up a hillside with healthy trees and roots. Double was good because both ropes were dry rotted. Healthy trees and roots was good because it gave plenty of hand and foot holds. Never trust the unknown rope as more than a balance point. I contemplated jumping into the pond for a brief moment before my sanity returned.

I worked back to Beth across uneven terrain, harder returning than arriving. The ATV people had left as we turned to hike out.

The redstart kept taunting us. That the thing – the Merlin bird app is a mnemonic master. I can hear an ovenbird, a northern yellow warbler or that taunting redstart.

As we worked back, the redstart kept getting closer. I finally laid eyes on him and zoomed in with my phone camera. He would taunt me no more.