The world famous Cabot trail

The Cabot trail is a road around the top of Cape Breton island. the signs say it is world famous. It may well be world famous - but I would have to say I had never heard of it until we started reading brochures about booking a trip here...

We have been very lucky with the weather here - especially given it is autumn - and only struck serious rain on "transit" days rather than sightseeing days. So we left Charlottetown in the rain and caught the ferry from Prince Edward Island back to the main part of Nova Scotia then John did a lot of driving to get us to Baddeck (interestingly pronounced badDECK - more deck less bad) and the start of the Cabot trail.

Baddeck is a lovely town in itself and features a museum about Alexander Graham Bell - who did lots of things with flight as well as the whole telephone thing. In fact, he had a finger in a lot of pies and one experiment that he was successfuL in was transmitting sound using light. Turned out not to be practical at the time - but seems pretty darn clever to me.

The Cabot trail is about 300 k. Lots of people do hiking and bicycle riding and motorbike riding around it. The scenery that we found most appealing was at the beginning where there were little villages in valleys nestled in the forest. But unfortunately didn't really realize how special it was until after we had zoomed past it. The rest is coastline - quite nice as coastlines go - but coming from a large island with lots of spectacular coastline ourselves, we are probably a little hard to impress.

The trail is in a national park. Unlike Australian national parks they give you instructions on what to do if attacked by a coyote or a bear at the entrance. Turns out that with coyotes you should make yourself as big as possible, yell and wave a stick. However with bears the story is that you should just back away, v e r y quietly and not climb a tree - as bears are generally better climbers than we are. You don't want to get mixed up between the two. There were also words of wisdom about moose - but they were mainly to not run into the moose with your car. Not sure whether that was for the benefit of the car or the moose. In any event, we didn't run into any wildlife - in any sense - on our journey.

The other thing we got at the national park entrance was a map. Unfortunately, the people who had printed the map didn't seem to have spoken to the people who put in the signs - so attractions and side trails that appeared on the map weren't necessarily signposted, meaning we zoomed past them (oh that must be the crofters cottage, guess we have also missed the track to the waterfall then), while other things were signposted but not on the map (what does it say about that on the map? It's not mentioned - oh)...

Incidentally, turns out that Canadian for "lookout" is "look off". Makes sense I guess.

So - in summing up - probably underwhelmed by the whole Cabot trail. World famous or not.