Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia
After breakfast on PEI there is a long drive ahead of us (6h) with all day rain forecast to reach Cape Breton Highlands and the Cabot trail. It is a very cold evening but we are looking forward to do some nice hikes in the next few days.
️The Airbnb we picked is the cheapest place we could find and it's definitely not the nicest. However, there is another person in. His name is Alex, an Acadian who came to work for a week from Moncton, NB. He is a marine biologist and he is working on a new type of snow crab trap to reduce the amount of ropes in the bay which wold hopefully reduce the number of whales dying because of those ropes. We are having a nice time talking before going to sleep and decide to do a hike together the next day.
Most of the national parks in Canada are not free. There is a daily fee which is generally between 10 ans 20 Canadian Dollars. If you are planning to visit a lot of those parks or stay for a lot of days, it might make sense to buy a discovery pass for 67CAD for a single adult or 136CAD for the family place which includes up to 7 persons in your car. The pass also gives access to some other places like museums for free.
At the info center, we get a map and a few hiking recommendations. Together, we decide to go for the Acadian trail (2-3 h loop). It is a foggy day, so we don't have a perfect view but it is still beautiful and worth to hike up!
Alex has to go back to work after the first trail. We jump back into the car and keep driving on the cabot trail for a short distance before stopping on the beach for our lunch break. It's foggy and we can't see more than 50 meters but it looks like the wind is pushing it away.
Suddenly, everything is clear and we decide to go for another trail, the Skyline trail (2 h loop). Beautiful view on top!
Next day we cannot really decide which hike to do, so we go for a longer one (4h return), the Aspy trail. We are almost alone on the trail as most of the people are only going to see a waterfall, which you can reach in the first 30 minutes.
On our way back, we catch up with Alex in one of the only pub in the village. They have live music from 7 to 9pm. We spend those 2 hours drinking beers and eating junk food. Just perfect !
It is a beautiful day, our last day in the Cabot trail area. We are driving all the way to the east side of the Cabot trail national park. We decided to stop for a few nice spots and for 2 hikes (Franey - 2h loop and Middle head - 1h loop).
We finish the day in Sydney, the capital of Cape Breton Island. We realize shortly after entering our Airbnb that guests don't have access to the kitchen, so we have to go downtown for dinner. At the end of the day, we had a nice chat with the hosts, which gave us some good tips for traveling around Canada.
Fortress of Louisburg
The Fortress of Louisbourg is a National Historic Site of Canada and the location of a one-quarter partial reconstruction of an 18th-century French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. (This is including on the Park Canada Discovery pass).
We spend a few hours visiting the place. It's nice, the weather is fantastic, and the people working on the site are all wearing older looking clothes. There are a lot of things explained from the native people to the first settlers and the war between the French and the British.
That's the end of our adventure in Cape Breton. We drive back south to our next Airbnb in Antigonish.