Day 8: North Sydney, 14° 💨☁️

Fortress of Louisbourg!

Returning from our wanderings today we found ourselves caught up in the local Sydney rush hour. Rather than wait in backed up traffic with an empty fuel tank, we decided to find a gas station and a pub (definitely in that order) and wait it out. I figure a small beer is ok while we wait to drive to our restaurant in North Sydney, right?

Our slow morning started out with a good breakfast shared with our new acquaintances, Don and Anne from Vermont. Damn, I’m beginning to like these people from Vermont. Intelligent, well traveled, and very concerned for the future. It’s really hard to get too angry at most Americans for the political mess when you meet people like this. Perhaps something to keep in mind going forward. Vermont has a republican governor who isn’t aligned with the demented clown. He was voted in by a very blue electorate.

Our plan today was to drive east to the fortress of Louisbourg.

The reconstruction of this site took 20 years from start to finish. It was completed with as much authenticity as was possible with a huge team of historians, architects and construction workers. They have restored only about 20% of the original city, but there are concerns for some of the rest that remains underground. Sea levels are increasing here and this will soon impact a number of the graves closer to the water.

A huge undertaking and cost to remediate and reconstruct with much of the city dating back to the early 1700’s. Everyone has a personal opinion about this sort of thing, but after walking through the site for almost 3 hours I was pretty impressed and felt that it was a good use of tax dollars. They could charge a lot more than they do, a meagre $7. Europe you would happily pay $20+ to visit something similar.

The French defended the fortress from the British twice and lost both times I think.

A fairly extensive city with a large natural harbour.

There would be gardens and livestock inside the city walls.

The Louisbourg Lighthouse is the oldest in Canada and the second oldest in North America. It’s been rebuilt three times because the whale oil fuel for the light caught fire. The light could be seen 8 miles from shore. Today like so many other lighthouses along both coast lines, it’s now fully automated. An interesting bit of history.

We found a sign that said there was a walking path running along the northern shore. We didn’t need to be asked twice .

I figure everyone must be a little tired of all the beautiful lush reds, oranges, and yellows I’ve been posting here these past days, right?😉 So I thought something different might be in order. It turns out that we were walking through a very special area, an Acadian Boreal forest! These forests are one of six that are formally protected by the World Wildlife Fund. I really like it when I make these sorts of discoveries. These forests apparently only exist in the north east part of Canada, where the boreal forests meets the southern hardwood forests. This apparently creates a very disease resistant ecosystem and habitat. Very cool. When we left this area, we noticed that just a couple of kilometres away from the water that we were again back into the boring gorgeous colours.😂

In any event, it was a lovely walk.

I could’ve walked on for many more kilometers, but it was time to return to our car and head back to Sydney. It was good enough that we’d had this experience, something special to take away.

So here we sit in this pub. A band is setting up to play music, and we are wondering if we can stay here for our dinner.

It seems that we can. So instead of some really good seafood and pasta, AT has decided that she would like to stay here. She claims it was my idea. Mummm, right. So she has just gone to cancel our reservation with her phone!😆 I sure hope the bar food here is good. The place is completely packed. Another spontaneous decision. Let’s see how this works out…

The show was pretty good and the food was ok too. The main thing was that we enjoyed ourselves while the traffic sorted itself out. The downside was driving home some 25 km in the dark.

Now back to our very nice B&B we have some time to sort out tomorrow’s adventure. We head south down the east coast to take in another two Celtic Colours events. I wonder what AT booked? It will be our last full day on the Cape then we will drive south into the mainland proper.

That’s about it from here.

Cheers!🍷

Geoff