Historic sites – The Destinators

The rest of Cape Breton, part 1 – Isle Madame and Saint Peter’s

After landing in Sydney, NS from Newfoundland in 2023, we visited the northwestern section of Cape Breton that features Cape Breton National Park and the Cabot trail. While there, we visited most of the attractions and hike just about every trail. That’s only about half of Cape Breton. Here’s the other half…

The Edge of Fundy, part 2 – Chignecto Bay

Although we were still on the shore of the Minas Basin, our first interpretive centre/museum stop heading north was all about… dinosaurs? Ok, yes – and the tides that help to uncover their fossils. The Fundy Geological Museum in Parrsboro has close ties to the Joggins Fossil Cliffs of Chinecto Bay (both are UNESCO World Heritage Centres), so let’s just start there.

The Edge of Fundy, part 1 – Minas Basin

We noticed a large clump of e-pushpins surrounding the easternmost portion of the Bay of Fundy. Ha! We noticed two themes… about half of the places are related to the Bay of Fundy’s extraordinary tides, and the other half deal with the significant history of Acadians before and after Le Grand Dérangement/ Deportation of 1755. I think we can visit them all! Shall we? Allons-y!

Nova Scotia’s Atlantic Shore

So about those e-pushpins – they continue to get added even as we’re traveling. I like chatting up locals and often get comments like: you gotta visit XYZ!! And then there’re the e-pushpins that add themselves like: there’s something wrong with the brakes on our 6-ton RV – where’s the nearest brake service!? Each addition often spawns a few more (why waste a visit to an unexpected town?) and so the pushpin count continues to grow.

The North Coast of Western Nova Scotia

I’ve always had a fascination with travel and for the past 20 or 30 years (give or take a few) whenever Doug or I learned of an interesting place to visit we put a pushpin on an electronic map. (It actually started with a little silver bucket with small pieces of paper and a pen on the bookshelf in our living room – our ‘Bucket List’ bucket – evolving from bookshelf to computer to The Cloud, but the concept still holds.) (We also keep track of the source of each so that friends who made the recommendations receive proper attribution.) Anyhow, as we got close to retiring those e-pushpins were nearly out of control. We’ve now spent a good part of the last 12 years reining things in, tracking and checking off the locations, marking some for a possible revisit, thanking the folks who sent us somewhere, and learning effective strategies to navigate our pushpin map.

So, here we are in Nova Scotia.