The Great Circle Route to Cape Breton

We’re doing the “Great Circle Route” to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Our first stop was to Darien CT for a few nights to visit with “the world’s cutest grandson”™, then onwards to Morristown NJ to visit my mother. Highlight of the visit was a surprisingly good Korean BBQ in Morris Plains. What a relief in the suburban desert of boring eateries. Woodam Korean BBQ https://woodamnj.smartonlineorder.com/

Peggy and Barbara at Korean BBQ. Note the gas BBQ in the center of the table

We headed up to Lakeville in the NW corner of Connecticut to attend my 50th high school reunion. (Really? It doesn’t seem THAT long ago …) A classmate was also camping in the parking lot with us. One of the pressing issues facing the school was cell phones. Effective the Monday after our reunion, new rules banned cell phones in classroom buildings and the dining hall. They want the kids to interact face to face, not text to each other while eating. Bravo! Fifteen years after the iPhone was invented -- a good move, even if 14 years late. 

We then headed north to the Adirondacks to visit with my Morristown childhood friend Sarah, and Morristown friends Todd and Susan. The colors were changing, and her location on a lake is soooo quiet. Even Criehaven is not that quiet -- we always have surf, and usually wind noise.

Sarah’s house is quite unusual - hexagonal, built about a century ago. Her family has been summering here for about four generations. A recent family reunion had over a 100 attendees. For an ersatz comparison, our little Leo is the sole 4th generation representative of the Criehaven Krementzes. 

After four days of delightful eating from the grill, we headed to Lake Champlain for the ferry and onward to Bethel ME. Another surprisingly good eatery was a Loatian-French fusion restaurant, Le Mu Eats https://lemueats.wixsite.com/mysite with patio seating, great for Pemba. For those who know me, to eat out twice in the same week and enjoy remarkably good restaurants is unusual.

Rushing across Maine, we cleared Customs at Callous (spelled Calais) into Canada and went down the St. Andrews peninsula. We had a beautiful site at a campground right on the water. It’s off season, so we were probably the only transient campers in the 100+ sites. We had the best site, right on the river, nobody near us, looking across the narrow tidal St. Croix River. Stunning, it looked like it was for a TikTok video or camper travel porn. The lights at left are “distant” Maine (wide-angle shot).

Usually when I cross a time zone border (this part of Canada is Atlantic, not Eastern time), all the electronic gizmos (6) automagically adjust. Not this time: some did, one went the wrong way (!), and some didn’t change at all. Trying to know what time it was the next morning was comical. Although we’d been driven half an hour from Customs to Bayside, we were only about 500 feet from the US border in the middle of the St. Croix River. 

Our first “destination” stop was Moncton at the head of the Bay of Fundy, which I have been hearing about since I was born. Moncton’s tidal bore sweeps upriver as a (sometimes) meter-high wave. We had been organized enough to know that high tide on the full moon is likely to be the most dramatic. My parents’ first night on their honeymoon (71 years ago) was Moncton, which is why I had heard of it. The bore was, well, dare I say it, kinda boring. 

We stopped in St. Johns NB for lunch. Once bustling, it has seen better days. I saw a logo on a building that reminded me of the disastrous 2016 RI Tourism program a few years past. 

The logo on the left, with a sailboat, is the University of New Brunswick, even though it almost spells DUMB. The one on the right, representing tourism in Rhode Island, is supposedly a spinnaker, which most (non-sailing) people are unfamiliar with. The accompanying video included a skateboarder doing tricks in front of a glass building in --- Reykjavik! And the shot of a bustling harbor scene and cityscape was of --- Vancouver! Anybody know what “cooler and warmer” means? Five million taxpayer dollars not well spent, I guess.  The then-governor Gina Raimundo is now Secretary of Commerce for Biden.

From Moncton we changed plans and scooted across the Longest Bridge Over Ice-Covered Water (8 miles) to Prince Edward Island, the smallest Canadian province by both area and population. While almost double the area of Rhode Island, it has only an eighth of population, about 140,000. 

We decided to go to the easternmost (remote) part of the island, coincidently named Lakeville. This is off-season in PEI (and Nova Scotia); half the campgrounds are closed. Went to visit a lighthouse today - closed for the season last week. 

Lakeville (NOT in Connecticut) is a fishing port with about 50 boats, most about 45’ long. The primary catch is lobsters. The season is very short -- only May and June, and the trap limit is 300. In comparison, Maine is open all year, and generally has an 800 trap limit. All the traps were wood. A fisherman said they catch better than the metal ones, but there was no rule against metal. We saw very, very few metal traps. The round hoops holding the netting open were wood, too.

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Since the lobster season is so short, most of the boats were rigged for sport tuna fishing. The boats carried up to a dozen rods and reels. Each captain is allowed only one or two tags per year (it wasn't clear talking to the fishermen). One boat came in with a 278 kg tuna while we watched. It dressed at 224 kg (502 pounds).

Despite the bright yellow little fins near the tail, this is a bluefin tuna. This tuna was pretty good, so the buyer was likely to buy it for $14-$18/lb.  The buyer thought he had a high end customer in Toronto. The price in June was about $45/lb. Interestingly the scale was in kg, but the prices were in pounds.

The buyer had sliced off a small steak, and was carefully inspecting it and sending pictures to his customer in Toronto. It reminded me of louping gemstones before buying.

The weather has been great, in the 60-70s, a few people (locals) are swimming at the beach. PEI needs some good PR folks to tell the world October is great in PEI! Maybe that Rhode Island firm needs a job …