my travels in pixels

Cape Breton Highlands National Park, NS 25/7/16-30/7/16 The Cabot Trail As usual, when we need to go somewhere we put the address in our GPS and go. Most of the time this works well. But sometimes it thinks it’s doing us a favour by taking the quickest or shortest route. On the way to Chéticamp, it took us up the Old Cape Breton Road which is not only gravel but is also quite narrow. Luckily it was only a couple of kilometres and no-one came the other way or I don’t know what we would have done. We were getting worried and we couldn’t turn around. After coming back on the highway for a short while, it then took us up a back road, named appropriately “Back Road” which had a few pot holes in it. It turns out that there is a check box to avoid dirt roads. Who knew? lots of curves on the Cabot Trail A week before we arrived I decided that I had better book a campsite. Luckily I did as there was only one spot left out of the two largest campgrounds that I looked at. Admi...

Alexander Graham Bell Museum Baddeck, Nova Scotia On our way to Cape Breton, we stopped off in Baddeck to see the Graham Bell Museum. The Bell Family How often do you hear that they found that something worked while taking medication for something else. Quite a bit. Alexander Graham Bell is known for inventing the telephone, named from the Greek language meaning "far speaking". I can't help but think that if he hadn't been so interested in helping deaf people, would have he invented the telephone? After all I'm sure what he learned about the ear had an impact on what he discovered. single and double pole magneto telephone At the age of 21, Graham used his father’s invention to teach the deaf to speak at a school he taught in London. Word of his achievements spread around the world. Multiple Telegraph Transmitters & receivers He was a very interesting man. In 1867 his brother died of tuberculosis. Then his other brother came do...

Louisbourg, Nova Scotia If you are up to it, here is the long version …. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but it makes a good story. In 1715 the French lose their fishing bases in Newfoundland and Acadia (Nova Scotia) with the war that ends the Spanish secession. They receive two islands – Île Saint John (Prince Edward Island) and Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) as compensation. Prince Edward Island was to be the bread basket for Louisbourg but they got there too late in the season and it would take a good 3-4 years before any food would be available to feed the new town. They needed a capital town for their new colony and the French decide on Louisbourg, so it became a planned, walled, fortified town. The French military told them it wasn’t a good idea as the hills were as high or higher than the walls they would be building, but the decision makers didn’t listen. The military wanted to use Baddeck, which had nice high cliffs, and was easy to defend. Louisbourg was a direct ro...

Louisbourg, Nova Scotia 23 July 2016 From Halifax we drove to Sydney, Nova Scotia. We had good roads, with three lanes, one for each way and a third that alternated as a passing lane for each way. Louisbourg Lighthouse in the fog Louisbourg is about a 40 minute drive from Sydney. I knew there was a lot to see, so we wanted to have a full day there. It had been a foggy, but warm and humid in Sydney, so we wore shorts. By the time we drove to Louisbourg, the fog had gotten heavier and the temperature had got a lot colder. After seeing a sign for a lighthouse we went to investigate and nearly didn’t see it in the fog. Fortress of Louisbourg Louisbourg in it's heday the gate to Louisbourg You can’t drive directly to the Fortress of Louisbourg. At the visitor’s centre, you have to wait for a bus which takes you down to the old settlement. It was still foggy and cold, so we put on our jumpers. We hadn’t counted on waiting for the bus for over 20 minutes when w...