Highlanders

The morning after our rainy eight mile hike, we picked the slugs off our tent and peeked out at the sky. We were relieved to find that the sun had returned and used the opportunity to try and line dry our clothes (again).

One thing that's nice about bike trips is that no matter how damp things get, your bike can't start to smell. This is not the same for a road trip.

We took the morning easy and eventually packed up camp to move across the park to a new site. There is only one road, the Cabot Trail, that takes you from one end of the park to the other, and it's very beautiful and windy. We enjoyed some scenic lookouts, fish and chips (again), and visited the Whale Interpretation Centre, which was small and cute and also sad because modern humans have treated whales so badly. Over 30,000 blue whales were killed in a single year in the 1930s. Evolutionarily, whales are way older than humans. They experience emotions including loss and grief, have families, complex social structures, and even dialects, and though we've kind of moved past hunting them en masse, we're still literally killing them off in other ways.

Anyway, it was good to see that this humble little building had such good programming and that it wasn't empty. Both the whale centre and the wildlife rescue were way more informative and straightforward than US zoos and aquariums are interested in being these days, and admission to the whale center was $6. No fancy screens or cafeterias, no contracted out gift shop, just a nice variety of specimens and lots of information. I'm glad we went.

After our drive we set up at our new campground and went to hike the Skyline Trail, which is Cape Breton Island's premiere scenic destination.

Parking required a reservation, which I loved because it meant you were guaranteed a spot and the lot wasn't congested with cars circling around. There were even helpful park rangers there to orient you. Also, it obviously limits the amount of people on the trail so it's not overcrowded. We learned that this hike was so popular for so long that the delicate boreal-taiga ecosystem was destroyed by tourists, so they built boardwalks for people to walk on that plants can still grow under and have gradually been re-wilding the area. It looks great, and I love to hear a good restoration success story.

It was so beautiful outside and there were a lot of people around. Sometimes that bothers me but today it felt nice to be around people who appreciated and respected this unique place as well.Read more