Today is a super long one because I ran out of time and energy to post yesterday so this covers two days yesterday we started the day at The local café we had read amazing reviews about this place they were extremely friendly and we got some delicious pastries for breakfast for the road
This lemon pastry was seriously so delicious
We were up very early for our drive down the Cabot Trail to get to our whale watching tour which we had booked in Pleasant Bay. We started our drive around 7 AM and got there just after 9 AM
It was extremely foggy, but not raining so that’s a win
We were pretty early for our whale tour so we hung around Pleasant Bay for a bit
We had one more pastry from the bakery to split
The blue boat is the boat we went on
When we got there, the person working at the shack told us that there were only five people booked on this tour, including us and that he wasn’t sure if it was going to run and that he needed to talk to the captain when the captain got there they basically said that they were hoping that we would all postpone and go on the 12 o’clock tour instead of the 10 AM tour, but that if any of the five of us wanted to go that they would take us. We talked to the other group and we all decided that we’d rather go at 10 AM because sitting there for two hours would really screw up all of our days so I was glad they gave us an option to still go Right as we were leaving, we saw this bald eagle on a post
At one point it was so foggy on the water that we couldn’t see at all around the boat. I have no idea how the captain was navigating. I figured there was zero chance that we would be able to spot any whales. Thankfully, the captain uses his radio to contact other boats in the area and they know where these pilot whales normally feed so I think they mainly just took us to the area that they knew was likely to see whales.
And when we got there, there were so many whales. These are fairly small whales called pilot whales they hang out in pods. Our crew guy said he thought there were four or five pods of 7 to 12 whales there. They were super close to our boat, and a couple even jumped and breached With only five of us on the boat, we could move around when the whales moved and it was really cool
After the whale watching tour, we headed for lunch at one of the only restaurants in the area. I got fish and chips and Trev got fish cakes and beans.
From there, we basically headed back back in the direction of our Airbnb, we stopped at Cheticamp which is a little village that Chat GPT had recommended in our research. It was a bit of a busy and we walked around for about half an hour and there was really nothing to see. There were lots of lookouts on our drive but it was so foggy we couldnt see too much. We weren’t too concerned about this since we were doing the full Cabot trail drive the next day so we would be in the same areas again
Everywhere in this area of Nova Scotia sells oat cakes, the bakery we were at in the morning. We’re telling us about their special oat cakes that are peanut butter filled and dipped in chocolate so we had to try those we had these for a mid afternoon snack and they were delicious.
Next stop late afternoon was the Glenora distillery so Trev could try some whiskey
We got a tour of the distillery which opened in the 90s they played a hilarious video from when they opened that has not been updated in 25 years which was a bit ridiculous
After the tour, they gave us a little bit of whiskey to try I donated mine to Trev
After the tour we went to the bar and I had a Diet Coke and Trev bought two shots of whiskey, 110 year-old and one 21 year-old to compare. The verdict at the end of the day was that he didn’t really love either of them
I drove the hour back to our Airbnb after the distillery visit. We went down to the water to check it out very quickly while we waited for a pizza we had ordered since it had been pouring rain the day before. It’s a cute little waterfront in Baddeck.
Apparently, Tom’s pizza is quite famous in this town and we were exhausted so we ordered a pizza and snuggled in at our Airbnb to watch Survivor
Joel called us so we had a quick FaceTime with him as well
This morning we were back at our favourite café at 7 AM. Yesterday, the lady who worked there told us to come back today and she would give us all the hints and tips for the Cabot trail. We were chatting with her a bit the day before and she had let us know that you need reservations for the main hike that we had planned to do which we had no idea. She really saved us there because we were able to snag one of the last reservations for the timeslot we needed. Turns out that without Rick Steve’s were really at a loss with knowing that detail! ChatGPT does not replace the Rick Steves it turns out. The lady’s name is Rose and she tells everybody that Rose Knows! When she saw us come in this morning, she said OK after your breakfast come talk to me Because Rose Knows! She had a map of the Cabot trail there that she normally lets people take pictures of she circled the places that she recommended that we stop and the hikes that we recommended that we do then she wrote her personal phone number on it in case we needed it normally she just gets people to take a picture of the map, but since we were staying overnight again tonight in Baddeck she said oh just take this map. I’ve got another one. Just bring it back tomorrow. it was actually super handy to have that map. We got sandwiches to go from the bakery for our lunch and the other great hint she told us when she was showing us where to go on the math was she said stop here for lunch but only eat half your sandwich then drive another little bit stop here that’s where you should eat your second half of your sandwich! We ended up doing three different hikes today and we ate half a sandwich and a banana at the first Lookout then we did a second hike and eat the other half of our sandwich and then on the third hike we ate our pastry that we had got from the bakery this morning. It was great and I probably would’ve just ate lunch at one spot if it wasn’t for her recommendation. So we were off with our map to do the Cabot trail, which is about 4 1/2 hours of driving non-stop without Lookout or hikes
Oh, and before we left the café, another guy that works there was like wait. You guys should take a picture with Rose and he gave us these “Rose Knows” ball caps that they sell to put on and we got this picture. 😆
This was the first hike we did at Black Brook Beach. There’s a little hiking trail above the beach that took us about 45 minutes and had some amazing lookouts. We then went down to the beach where there were some picnic tables and ate the first half of our sandwich.
After that, we decided to add in a hike that Rose had recommended at white point. This was a very different hike instead of through Bush. It was wide open and had amazing ocean views. The landscape was very unique, and this was probably my favourite part of the day we wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for Rose.
This part of the landscape remind me of a Catan sheep tile
The waves were very rough on the shore, and you could hear the water basically tumbling the rocks here it made a very cool sound, and it was neat to see the round rocks from the water
The pictures absolutely do not show the beauty of this hike at all
From there, we drove to the skyline Trail. This is the most famous hike on the Cabot Trail and this is the one that I didn’t realize we needed reservations for parking. It’s part of the national park. To be perfectly honest, I found this hike overrated after our other hikes. I didn’t find the views as good and it was quite a bit longer. This one was 8.2 km. there is a slightly shorter version of this trail at 6.5 km but we decided to do the longer version because we wanted to see the views this hike took us about 2 1/2 hours and we were really booting it the whole way we were pretty tired when we got back. There’s a lot of elevation change so there is a lot of down and a lot of up. we ended the day with about 23,000 steps today
Unfortunately, when we got to this trail, some fog and missed rolled in, and it basically made almost every viewpoint completely covered so you couldn’t see a thing
This was the grand finale view, and all we could see is fog
Trav pouting because after all that we couldn’t see anything
We stayed for about 15 minutes and just as we were about to leave suddenly some of the fog began to move out of the way
And suddenly where we couldn’t see before we could see across to the highway, and the Cabot trail we could see the ocean and most of the view We felt happy we hadn’t left five minutes earlier
It was about an hour and a half back to Baddeck we went to a restaurant that Rose had recommended that morning to be honest. We’ve tried most of the restaurants in Baddeck already so this probably would’ve been our choice tonight anyways.
The interesting menu item we ordered were these honey jalapeño fries they were honestly a bit weird. They were like fries, covered in honey with jalapeños and bacon on them and a French onion dip, sort of thing to dip the fries in we both found them maybe a little bit too, honey flavoured
And that’s where I’ll end it for tonight. We went out tonight but I’m too tired to add this pictures 😆
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