The Maritime Provinces - June 30 - July 7

Map of my route through the Maritimes

July 2 - Nova Scotia

I drove up the west side of Nova Scotia from my landing point in Yarmouth because a biker on the ferry with me pointed out that both sides had a slow local highway, and a fast multi-lane highway paralleling each other (this is good because most of the traffic will take the big highway) but on the east coast it zigzagged around every crag and it would take me an extra day to get to Halifax. So I drove up the French coast of NS, enjoying the intensely purple wildflowers that randomly crop up from time to time. I made Halifax that afternoon. I didn't look at any maps but instead chose the "look for the tall important looking buildings and head that way" method of finding the city center. This usually gets me lost, which is fine also, since in the process I get to see a bit of the place. My plan was to wander around and see if a hostel was available and if not back out of the city a few miles and camp.

The one little problem with playing things this loose is little surprises...

So I was driving towards downtown past a park with a natural ampitheater built into a hill, with thousands of cheering Canadians at some kind of concert. I made the first turn I could to get away from the throng, but I couldn't help but notice all of the Canadian flags. Turns out it was Canada Day. I'd tried to escape the US and get far away from the border prior to the insanity of the 4th of July, and I'd run right into the center of the 1st of July. Canada Day is the anniversary of the act that created the Dominion of Canada - except that the act was actually signed June 20, which could have given Canadians a little leeway to avoid gridlock for travellers between the two countries... but that probably wasn't a big concern 130 years ago. I decided to see if I might get lucky anyway, and I tried a few hostels and struck gold with the second one, where I got a spot for two days, in the center of downtown, and they had parking.

That evening, I went to the Economy Shoe Shop Restaurant (actually a really good cafe) where I sat outside. I'd picked up a copy of the New York Times because I was missing it and I found a book store that had it, and I finished it with my dinner. As I was getting ready to go, one of two guys at the next table asked me if I had a paper, so I said sure, but it's from NYC. So I ended up talking about my trip, and one thing led to another and I ended up hanging out with them for the evening. Mark and Chris and I went back to the concert and got in for free since it was nearly over, and I got to see Tragically Hip for the first time, and then we went back to Chris' place where he played some music - turns out that the two of them are trying to start a band, though they both have day jobs. Chris was a professional grade guitarist/songwriter and played one of his tunes, and he also copied all of my mp3 format cd's, and we talked about music. Mark mentioned that when he had asked me for a paper, he had actually been asking if I had any papers, as in rolling papers... and he proceeded to roll a joint.

Mark's girlfriend and her friends and Chris' roomate showed up and it became an impromptu party. Being the random traveller I was one of the main topics of conversation, which I tried to steer towards other things like what they did, and what Nova Scotia was like. We ended up talking about the different music styles in regions of Maritime Canada, especially the Cape Breton area, which was where I was headed next. His girlfriend's friend was doing a show the next day at the Economy Shoe place, where she wanted everyone to come and get doodled on by her, so they could walk around the temporary gallery wearing her art.

The next day I got to the Citadel, which is the fort that the English constructed here, first to wrest Nova Scotia from the French and make it part of the American colonies, and then to defend what was left against those same colonies. The fortress has historical exhibits that are strongly anglophile, which seems a little odd in the context of Canada being multiethnic. The coexistence between French and English seems like a recent thing that has not completely taken yet. Inside of Halifax Citadel, they gloss over the English deportation of thousands of Acadians who refused to swear a loyalty oath, which resulted in the American Cajun community. This makes me wonder if the French parts of Canada will have the same kind of fading but still warm love for the French Empire. On my way up from Yarmouth, I passed on the west side of Nova Scotia which is also called the French Coast. The houses there fly a flag which is the French flag with a yellow star in the upper left corner of the blue stripe. The identity is obviously not forgotten in the people who eventually returned after being deported.

The mental fault line for the Canadians seems to be that they can separate themselves from America by their history with the English Empire, but this excludes the French and Native Americans who were oppressed by that empire. This is similar to the problems in the South of the US with flying the Confederate flag. On the other hand, people here are still so mellow that it is hard to imagine real conflict over it. Today at the Citadel, there was a man walking along the earth ramparts that surround the open yard at the center. The ramparts overlook a ditch 20 or 30 feet deep, and since the little kiddies would be liable to plunge to their tiny deaths in the grass far below, everyone is forbidden from walking on top. So one idiot did it anyway, and it took four requests along the lines of "Sir, could you please come down from the wall?" before one o the guard/performers got pissed and changed it to "Sir, could you please get down from the wall...NOW!" The guy ignored them anyway, probably got all of his photos in, and came down when he felt like it. In America, they would have put up a fence and some security guards, and possibly shot the guy when he reached for his wallet.

Later I found an internet cafe, and rebooted the Visor that I'm writing this on, and then started thinking about doing an oil change, but it looked like rain, so I decided to have an early night and watch a video at the hostel.

July 4 - Cape Breton Island

Following my time in Halifax, I zipped up to Cape Breton over the Canso Causeway and up the left side of the island to a youth hostel in the town of Maboo. I got there late, and I went out looking for dinner, passing a local ceili (a Celtic music gathering.) It started as I was going to dinner at 8, and I figured I'd catch it on the way back, but it was already over. Unlike an Irish ceili, which is a dance late into the night, this was a early evening concert kind of thing. I went to the local bar hoping the musicians would show up, but no luck. I ended up heading back to my hostel, and down the hall I heard music. I opened the door to the dining room, and three local fiddle players were there, surrounded by a small crowd of hostel guests and locals, and they played for about 4 hours. I asked them questions about the local music scene, and I recognized most of the tunes they played.

Cape Breton music came from Scotland, but is faster, more upbeat, and fairly staccato, with the fiddle player rapping out a beat with his foot. The local music community was the most talented in Cape Breton - everyone there knew Ashley MacIsaac, who I'd heard of in the US, and one of the players had just moved there from the other side of the island to learn from the town's fiddle players, and he was no slouch himself.

They were pretty surprised that I knew their tunes, and I explained that my mother had played Irish fiddle, and my sister played these tunes on the wooden flute. The flute was not used as much in Cape Breton music, and one of them asked incredulously "She plays this tune on the flute, this fast?" I said sure, at least that fast. They had a low opinion of Irish fiddle players, Appalachian fiddle players, Newfie players... and they were good enough that I didn't mind. At the end of the night they invited me to a dance nearby, but I didn't think I'd make it.

The next day, I did the Cabot trail, which was a winding two laner with sharp climbs and drops through Cape Breton Park. The mountains dropped right into the ocean and the views were incredible. I went whale watching, and saw some pilot whales while on a Zodiac, the little boat jumping over waves at 50mph and slamming down 10 feet on the other side, smashing us into the boat and giving me a new respect for those Greenpeace guys. As we came back a huge storm rolled in, and I took shelter in the Whale Interpretive Centre at the dock for an hour. I grabbed a lobster dinner (where the waitress assured me that you could eat every part of the lobster inside of the shell, which I decided against) and by then it was 6, and I had 150 miles of trail to go to get back. There were warnings of moose at night -- actually, they could jump out on the road at any time, but they were attracted to lights, and a typical car impact would just annoy them, never mind a motorcycle. Determined not to get stranded at night on the road, I hit the windy road back through the park at insane speeds, close behind a guy from Newfoundland, and made it back just before dark.

The next day I decided that I wanted to go to Newfoundland. This was possible via two ferries from North Sydney. One was 6 hours to Port-aux-Basques and left every 8 hours, the other was 4 times a week and went to Argentia on a 14 hour trip which left you 90 minutes from St John, the capital. Having to get to Montreal the next week, I decided on the closer ferry, and headed for North Sydney.

July 5 - Newfoundland

After my high pressure experience getting to the Yarmouth ferry, I decided I was never going to make reservations again for a ferry that required them... I'd just show up and they'd probably get me on, and if not I'd wait for the next one. A good strategy, I thought, until I watched the 2pm ferry leaving the dock. I had tried to squeeze in a morning trip to Louisbourg, which is like a French Colonial Williamsburg on the east coast of Cape Breton Island covered in its own completely localized fog cloud. So I made it to the ferry 20 minutes after it left because I'd misread the schedule. I hung out in Sydney for a day, waiting for the 11:30 pm ferry. I had not originally wanted to take the red eye, but I thought it would be no big deal.

I got back to the ferry at 10 to find a line that went back over a mile. The local highway led right to the ferry, and the people trying to get to the own were trapped in the traffic that was waiting to be loaded. It went so slow that I was sure that I'd be waiting again, but I managed to get to the booths, and got myself waitlisted, and got on board. Once on board for the six hour trip, I went up to the top deck. The ship had two cargo decks, one mainly for tractor trailer trucks, because Newfoundland is hundreds of miles away from any other landmass except Labrador to the north, which is even more remote and frozen. I went up to the top deck of the ship. The HMCS Caribou would compare favorably to the Titanic, with 8 decks. I got to the first open deck and climbed stairs outside to go up two more, where because of the heavy mist I was the only person. On one side of the ship was North Sydney harbor, with a lighthouse of diamond-like intensity, and on the other was a complete black void, the cloudy night shutting out the stars so that the ship seemed to be floating in deep space.

I realized that most other folks who had experienced this trip before had brought stuff to make it possible to sleep. It was too late to go back down to the cargo deck for my sleeping bag, so I spent hours trying to sleep in an airplane seat, then on a four foot bench, and finally when I saw that everyone else was doing it, the floor. I got off at 6am in Newfoundland wasted tired.

My first view of the place was of wind blasted cliffs rising from the ocean, with tiny houses hunkered down atop them, spread out a little more than your typical fishing town, and plants no taller than short grass hanging for dear life on in the thin soil. The thick storm clouds moved past at high speed. It had to be about 40. Just another nice summer day on the Rock.

I stopped for gas, and the guy at the convenience store was about as happy and helpful as your typical convenience store clerk. No big deal. So I went outside to get on my bike, and as I was suiting up a couple came out. He was wearing a Harley t-shirt. "Hey... people here aren't like that," she said. "We're actually very friendly. It must be because we're on the West Aide." I had arrived at Port-aux-Basques on the southwest corner of the Rock. They were from St John, and they assured me that if I made it there, people were very friendly. He looked at my bike admiringly, and said, "Yeah, you can make it in 10 or 11 hours if you get going now. Just be careful in this first stretch up here, the Wreckhouse." This 40-mile area apparently had incredible winds, capable of blowing over a tractor trailer. "But don't you worry, you just get down to 15 or 20 miles an hour and hold on!"

Newfies, as the folks of Newfoundland are known in Canada, have a rep for being tough as nails, and not averse to taking risks, especially when driving. In the Shipping News, the main character is a reporter whose job it is mainly to chronicle the horrible highway crashes that happen with great regularity. The day before I'd followed a Newfie at 75 mph down a winding two lane mountain road overlooking the ocean that went down at a 10 percent grade with switchbacks. With a gleam in his eye as he looked at my motorcycle, this guy outside of the convenience store was basically saying that I was their kind of maniac (this made twice in one week)... which really wasn't what I wanted out of this little side trip.

So I started up my bike and headed off to the north, with the landscape of deep green stunted brush, perfectly flat around me with an occasional river gorge sliced deep through the crust. Then the wind pushed some clouds away, and monstrous mountains arose in front of me, two straddling the highway and creating the wind channel. Multiple signs warned of high winds, of danger to campers and trailers. The folks back at the store had mentioned winds of 130, which I translated into miles per hour, to get about 70, which is bad but I'd seen the like before in the desert. Actually, it turned out that they were helpfully converting the 200 km windspeed to miles for me. I thought that winds like that only existed inside of tornados or hurricanes. It turned out the signs on the other side of the Wreckhouse were more explicit, with the 200 km spelled out. Had I known, this might have made me turn around.

So with a wet road, no sleep and occasional sudden gusts of who-knows-how-fast blasting me towards oncoming traffic I inched north at 30 mph, which was the fastest speed I was willing to suddenly crash at. After an exciting hour and a half, I decided I had to sleep. I looked around at the landscape, a cross between the west coast of Ireland and Alaska, covered with clouds that seemed to portend a major storm. I watched a single shaft of brilliant sunlight 100 feet wide break onto the road between me and the car in front of me, and follow the car for a mile before overtaking it.

I pulled off of the main road, a 2-and-a-half land job that was the only paved road running through most of the province, onto a gravel offshoot labelled with a sign that declared it ominously to be a "Natural Disaster Gathering Point". I went up about a mile on the gravel road studded with big rocks to an area I assumed was deserted, since the next town on my map was not for 40 miles, and pitched my tent. I woke up around 11 because I was broiling inside my tent. It was bright and hot outside. And then a truck passed by my tent, without stopping, and I realized that this minor road probably lead to some kind of settlement not on my map. So I busted down my tent and got on the bike. By the time I got to the main road, the sun had disappeared again.

I was a little groggy but felt ready to ride, and the wind was low, so I cranked it until I got to Corner Brook. This was 220 kilometers from Port-aux-Basques, an industry town scattered around steep hills running down to a giant paper mill at the harbor. I found a Mexican joint run by a guy from Pittsburgh, an ex-Marine who had married a local girl, and he told me a story of going through the Wreckhouse and watching a box truck flip over in front of him, and then having his pickup pushed off the road and turned over. I was half awake and listened to a forecast that said "Today mostly cloudy, tomorrow rain, Sunday rain." I asked the guy if Gros Morne Provincial Park was worth seeing, and he said it was, if you were willing to do some hiking - it's a place where the rocks came not from the crust of the earth but from the mantle, and are enormously old. But from the road, it would be just a bunch of mountains. That decided it for me. I stopped at a bar to use a phone and was instantly befriended by an Irish guy from Cork and the Newfie bartender. They told me about the custom of getting Screeched in - you drink a shot of Screech, the local bathtub rum, then kiss a cod, and eat a piece of local steak which I think was some kind of blubber. This makes you an honorary Newfie. Mercifully, the owner wasn't in and the bartender was new and didn't know how to do it, otherwise I would never have left that day.

I slipped a way after my first beer, begging off an offer of a second because I had to ride back through the Wreckhouse, and rode hellbound through breathtaking scenery, mist like a coursing river sweeping over mountain tops, for the 7 pm ferry back. Miraculously, it never rained except for the last 10 miles, and I made it back to he ferry, half-frozen, where I bought a bunk and slept all the way back to Nova Scotia.

July 7 - Prince Edward Island

This place has more than one derisive nickname - the Million Acre Farm, and Spud Island. I entered the island by the ferry, and cruised through farmland to Charlottetown in about an hour. Charlottetown was the site of the original Confederation of Canada in 1867, and only 10 years ago it was also the site of a failed attempt to patch the Canadian Constitution.

The island is the site of the Anne of Green Gables series of novels - which apparently are so popular in Australia and Japan that they merit a special trip to the island. I talked to a girl from Australia whose family was thrilled that she was there... I thought she was being sarcastic. But no, her parents long distance from Australia were telling her places that she should visit from Book Two. As I arrived at the hostel, a Japanese man of college age rode up breathless on a bicycle, mentioning that he'd just come from a town on the other side of PEI (as people refer to Prince Edward Island). It was about 30 miles. He looked like this was some sign of extreme devotion. He was talking to the wrong person - I told him this was a good way to tour through the whole island, which he clearly thought was crazy. Half of the people in the hostel were from Japan, and the signs were bilingual in English and Japanese. Apparently the book has been translated into Japanese and was put on the school curriculum in the 1950's and has been a huge hit ever since. So I'd never read Ann of Green Gables, and I was beginning to feel like maybe I should squeeze in a few chapters just to get what PEI was all about. I couldn't find a copy in the hostel, so I asked the Aussie about it - she compared it to Emma. "Oh - so a bunch of landed upper class people wasting all of their plentiful leisure time on high school style romance while the virtually invisible lower class people wash all of their outfits offstage and kiss their asses onstage?" I'd just seen Emma the month before. She said that sounded about right (she was after all Aussie.) That cured my curiosity.

The exit from PEI was the Confederation Bridge, some 7.5 miles long. I'd read about its opening in the New York Times a few years earlier, where it was described as possibly changing the character of the island by making it much more accessible. It sounded interesting when I read about it, but for all its length, it is incredibly prosaic, just a bunch of concrete with columns underneath it. And with that I was into New Brunswick. New Brunswick was like a continuation of the unpopulated area of northern Maine, and a lot of it was on fire. I cut through it as quickly as I could, nearly running out of gas in the process. I stopped for the night in Fredericton because there was a hostal there, and got going early the next day to try to make Quebec City.

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