Whiskey and Jammies

9 June 2015

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

The good thing about traveling up here in the off-season is that we haven’t had to fight any crowds at all, and there are still a good number of things open to do and see.  We were able to book a morning-of puffin and seal tour for this morning that I’m sure sells out during the actual summer.  The Puffin Express took us out to the two bird islands just outside the Big Bras D’Or inlet.  This tour did not allow us to actually land on the protected islands (there are a few in Maine & New Brunswick that apparently do but they’re about four hours long and a lot more expensive.  Sissy would have been fine but Eloise is kind of a hot mess when it comes to being contained) but we spent at least an hour and twenty minutes trolling around taking photos and learning facts and folklore from our sea captain and his son. 

After the motion-sickness Sissy vomit episode of yesterday, Matt asked in advance if I thought the puffin tour would be a good idea.  My response?  Vomiting on boats is totes acceptable.  Well, she did better than your average bear.  She was completely unaffected by the choppy seas, and was being a monkey on the stairs most of the time.  The captain even said, “She’s got her sea legs!”  (He obviously hadn’t seen our car yesterday).   

We decided to check out the Alexander Graham Bell museum following the puffin tour, and grabbed lunch on the way at the Yellow Cello.  The pizza was nothing to write blog home about, but it just so happened they had a gluten-free (aka flourless) chocolate torte on the dessert menu.  Obviously unable to pass on my quest for an equal or better cake as the Nemesis Cake, I ordered it.  Turns out, at this little mediocre-rated place in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, I found my number two cake of all time.  If it had sea salt and olive oil, it may have even made it to the top spot.  I asked for the recipe, but the woman who baked it had just left.  I left my email in hopes she’d send it to me that way.  Apparently she uses four types of chocolate.  It was dense but smooth, slightly warmer than room temperature, (as I prefer), and a pleasant surprise down to the last bite.  I admit, I didn’t share much of it, but Sissy did enjoy licking the plate when I was done!

The Alexander Graham Bell museum was the most crowded place we’ve been to on this entire trip.  Busloads of people were there, but it still wasn’t as bad as it could be in the summer, I’m sure.  Sissy enjoyed some of the exhibits and talking to her imaginary friend, Apple, on the rotary phone.  Just as we finished the exhibits and got to the play area, the power went out, so we headed back to camp to prepare for our dinner outing.  When we got there, it was so beautiful out, dada took the girls to the playground and we all got ready to go in the pool, but it wasn’t heated and they’d just filled it the day before. 

Our dinner plan that night was to go to a few Scottish ceilidhs at different restaurants. Our first stop was the Red Shoe pub in Mabou, which had a fiddler and pianist until 7pm, where we had dinner (decent food – I had a lobster seafood penne, and despite the girls having fish and chips, Eloise saw the penne and dove her pudgy little fingers right into my bowl.  She is such a hungry bunny that she tends to dive at anyone’s food that looks good to her).  Cape Breton is heavily Scottish, though we still hadn’t found anywhere that served traditional Scottish food (haggis, bangers & mash, etc.).

We finished eating and the next place (Glenora Distillery) didn’t have music starting until 8pm, so we took a walk down the street to a little gazebo by a lake and let the girls get some energy out.  It started to get buggy, so we drove up to Glenora.  The grounds of the distillery (and inn and restaurant) were beautiful.  Stacks of barrels and a small pond, lanterns, and well-groomed flowers and shrubs made up the scenery surrounding small bridges over a creek.  At this point, it was after 8pm, so we were the only ones walking into a live music distillery bar/restaurant setting with toddlers, let alone feeding them dessert at such an hour!  (To our credit, it was an hour earlier in New York…;).  We didn’t stay ‘til 10 when the fiddler and pianist finished up; we put the girls in jammies and started the longish drive back to camp for the night.

Once the girls were asleep, Matt and I sat around the campfire trying to decide on our next move.  We spoke a bit with the puffin tour captain about his off-season job (Canadian Coast Guard) and got on the topic of Newfoundland.  He said that Gros Morne National Park made the Cabot Trail look “just ok.”  We looked up the logistics of going to Newfoundland on a whim (a 7-hour ferry and a 3-hour drive just to get to the park, leaving the Casita on Cape Breton, and staying at a hotel for two nights).  Do-able, but quite a big undertaking with two little ones.  We decided to sleep on it…

Baby Gear Used Today:

On the puffin tour:
Ergo Sport for Eloise.  She slept in it for most of the actual time we were near the islands, and for the whole way back, (and then still slept when I transferred her to her carseat (Britax Advocate) after the tour – success!)

AGB Museum:

City Mini GT Double.  Sis was in and out of it, but it was still nice to have somewhere to put her when she got “tired of walking.”