Ive heard about the Cabot Trail for years and it always sounded like such a romantic place. Even in my recent research when I looked up John Cabot, I came away with the impression of a Medieval Marco Polo adventurer who came looking for the Northwest Passage to these chilly environs and at least left with a place named for his explorations. The reality seems instead to be that John Cabot did whatever landfall exploring he did in Labrador, but given the more remote and rugged nature of that place versus the northern islands of Nova Scotia, his name was simply borrowed for public relations reasons and applied to this place as part of a grand tourism promotion scheme by Angus L. Macdonald, a Premier of Nova Scotia around the turn of the last century. Macdonald was a strange blend of liberal and conservative that was a bit Puritanical in terms of his work ethic philosophy, but equal part liberal who seemed to realize, much like his fellow Harvard graduate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the state had an important role to play in promoting the public welfare, especially in times like during the Great Depression. His family was from the Scottish Highlands, so it was no wonder that they emigrated to a place like Nova Scotia and that when Angus began to consider how best to elevate his somewhat economically limited province that he decided to promote it as a northern vacationland. He decided that the world loved Scottish things and that he would turn Nova Scotia into a version of Scotland. He named the rugged northern island archipelago Cape Breton and its most rugged and beautiful part the Cape Breton Highlands. His last bit of promotional effort was to suggest that john Cabot had traipsed these parts, so in 1932 he declared a circular track around those Highlands to be The Cabot Trail, whether John Cabot had ever set foot upon them or not. So, not quite as historically accurate and romantic as I had thought.
Nonetheless, we have travelled up here to ride The Cabot Trail and we did just that yesterday, starting in Port Hawkesbury to the south. Cape Breton Islands are connected to the mainland of Nova Scotia by a small land bridge called the Canso Causeway. Like any good bottleneck, the Canso Causeway is prone to overcrowding at certain times of the day, most notably morning rush hour. It’s not like Manhattan is on the other side of the Causeway, there is only Antigonish from what I can tell, but it backs up nonetheless and stood between us and our allotted mission north to the westerly side of the Cabot Trail. Being on motorcycles and coming from California, where lane splitting to take advantage of our two-wheeled advantage, is quite normal, I led the way to our leaving the girls behind in the car while we scooted around the traffic to the southern coast road headed for Port Hood. That suited the womenfolk just fine since they had a day of shopping planned along the route north. Meanwhile, at Port Hood, I found a nice lonely church with an outdoor stone crucifix overlooking the harbor to stop at, much to the amazement of my traveling companions, who had come to think of me over the years as the least religious member of the group.
From that short stop for reflection and prayer, we headed up the western coast road through places that sounded distinctly Scottish like Inverness and Dunvegan. All I could think of was some poor lad who years ago told his wife he was done being a vegan and wanted some damn meat to eat. We detoured toward the water near St. Rose and up to Margaree Harbour where we encountered the proper Cabot Trail with all its state-sponsored signage. Technically The Cabot Trail is on something designated by the highway department as Trunk 30, which is the Cape Breton moniker like Route 66. It appears on signs and t-shirts, a long-sleeved version of which I am now a proud 3XL owner of. The Cabot Trail is a 185 mile loop that was not so much discovered by John Cabot in 1497 as branded by Angus L. Macdonald in 1932 and built by the Canadian version of the Civilian Conservation Corps to help the local employment level.
We roared past what seemed to be a park toll booth, assuming that we didn’t need to pay since we weren’t expecting to camp or hike the Highlands Park. We paid the price in weather discomfort by running smack into Highlands fog, which turned into Highlands mist and then eventually, Highlands rain. What’s a motorcycle trip without a little bit of rain, right? It was really a shame that was when the weather decided to hit us because the landscape certainly was the most dramatic we had ridden through in Nova Scotia yet and we needed to keep our rain covered eyes on the yellow dividing line just to stay on the road through the Highlands switchbacks. When we came to the end of Highlands in all its soaked beauty, we did so to a dryer and less challenging coastal stretch where we found our lunch spot at the Rusty Anchor restaurant. This place considers itself to have the best lobster roll in the Maritimes and while others chowdered or fish and chipped it, Mark tried the lobster roll and agreed that it was perhaps Nova Scotia’s finest. After lunch we had a bit more Highlands to go through on the northern tip of the island, but after a short stop once again for a road crew getting in its last bit of pre-winter repairs, we opened up the bikes on a lonely stretch of highway only to see the dreaded flashing red and blue of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police chasing us down for the scofflaws that we were. We were going 125 in an 80 zone and the officer suggested we were at least at 110. We accepted our guilt like men and handed over our licenses accordingly. 15 minutes later we had our documents returned with a warning ticket…welcome to Nova Scotia. We meandered at 60-80 the rest of the 30 miles to Ingonish like chastised little boys who had been caught out.
Our hotel for the night was the the Castle Rock Inn set above Ingonish Beach. It had somehow escaped my attention that the nearby Keltic Lodge is the place one is supposed to stay up here in grand Scottish tradition, but as they said in Babe, that’ll do pig, that’ll do. We had to pile in the car to find an open restaurant where more lobster rolls and fish were consumed by all. The rooms at the Castle Rock are nothing to write home about, but we made it through the night and are ready to find our way to Louisburg on the southeastern shore of Great Breton. The guys are in search of an on-demand ferry at Little Narrows while the girls do what they do best, which is shop until they drop. We will meet up in Sydney Harbor for lunch with any luck, and then on to the Fortress Inn for another night of squeezing ourselves into Queen-sized beds before we find our way on Saturday to Prince Edward Island.
The road to Ingonish may have been a Depression-era fabrication, but the landscape beauty is still worth the trip so we will spend another day on the Cape Breton roads and see what we will see.