The Caravan

North Sydney, Nova Scotia

The problem with the automatic satellite dish turned out to be a weak signal from the satellite. We're too far north and east to pick up a reliable broadcast even though my calculations show that the satellite is above the visible horizon.
It's raining again this morning. We'll spend the day reading, defrosting the refrigerator, food shopping and planning our trip to Newfoundland.


We've been here three nights. Yesterday we went to see The Coal Miner's Museum. We got a tour underground with Sheldon, an old coal miner who told us about rats, cave-ins, explosions and fires. The whole tour was with a four foot roof. The Coal Company didn't pay to remove enough rock from the mine to make the miners life comfortable. They only wanted the coal seam between the rock layers.

In the morning, I finally located some pipe tobacco in North Sydney. It was $22 an ounce. My last purchase in Maine was $12 for 16 ounces. I looked up the law on tobacco sales here and there are some odd provisions. They have to keep tobacco in a closed closet and they can only show you the quantity and product that you intend to purchase.
We bought our ferry tickets to Newfoundland. There was a five day wait here before we could get on a ferry next Tuesday.

This campground is only three miles from the ferry terminal so we see the caravans coming and going as we wait our turn.
"Caravan" has a limited meaning here. We use it to refer to a voluntary collection of motor homes, 5th wheels or trailers that have agreed to travel together.
Last night about 40 antique autos got off the ferry from Newfoundland and pulled in for the night.
We talked to some of them. As might be expected, broken pistons and failed oil pumps dominated their thoughts.

Most of the people in this caravan were Canadians.

The Puffin Express

North Sydney, Nova Scotia


Captain Mike is a tall thin older guy with a white, scraggly beard. He’s wearing an officer’s uniform with the one stripe of an Ensign on his uniform. Somehow he manages to look faintly disreputable with part of his shirt untucked from his pants.

I’m surprised when he clips on a speaker headset and keeps up an interesting monologue for nearly three hours. It’s about 40 minutes over to the bird islands. The bald eagles are here in numbers. They like to eat gull chicks for breakfast. Mike has a theory about why the the eagles are here earlier this year. It has to do with a poor lobster catch and less food for the gulls to eat as the fishermen change bait in the traps less frequently. We watch some gulls dive bombing an eagle. Mike says the gulls are hungry and less interested in protecting the chicks...maybe so.

Mike starts off with an interesting explanation of the tidal currents that rip though the narrow opening we are navigating between the Atlantic Ocean and the huge saltwater lake, the Bras D’Orr, one of the largest in the world. Sometimes one shore is flowing out, the other in and the middle is ripping trying to fill or empty a big lake though a small channel.

We see a lot of puffins, razorbills (kind of like puffins), great and double crested cormorants, seagulls and seals. There are also black guillemot, great black-backed gulls, herring gulls and kittiwakes.

Captain Mike keeps up an interesting line of patter, explaining about the regions “ferryman” pirates, which makes the place sound a lot like it used to be Somalia.

He has strong opinions about the seagulls, who are exploding in population due to their tendency to eat anything including landfill material. He explains that the gulls eat rodents, which answers one of my big questions. That is... why the bird islands around this area don’t have rats to prey on the bird nests like the islands up in the Aleutian chain.

The puffins dig small nest holes in the rocks over many generations by sharpening their beaks. It reminds me of the legendary small bird that sharpens its beak on a mountain once every 1,000 years and eventually wears the mountain away.
Captain Mike says the seal population has exploded since man killed off the orcas and now the seals are underweight due to over population and over fishing. Mike expounds on the lobster over fishing in the area. There are lobster traps everywhere and the catch is dropping 20% a year. Each of the 300 local lobster fishermen is entitled to 275 traps. They have to come out every day to change the bait in the traps. He says they get 70% of their catch in the first two weeks of the six week season.

Anyway, it’s all very interesting local color and I snap a lot of bird Pix. The puffins are fairly nervous because of the bald eagles and spend most of their time out in the water. They have little wings like penguins so they can fly though the water, but they have to flap pretty hard up in the air and take off into the winds. On this trip, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.

North Sydney, Nova Scotia

Arm of Gold RV Park
We're only four miles from the Newfoundland/Nova Scotia ferry terminal. The one way fare for the five hour trip is about $305 Canadian for our RV, Toyota and elderly personages.

The coastal drive from the north tip of Cape Breton was lovely and took about four hours.

While here, we want to see:

• The puffins on Bird Island.
• The Alexander Graham Bell Museum.
• The Marconi historic site.
• Fortress of Louisbourg.
• A few local museums.

If we can get on the ferry to Newfoundland, we'll book some advance campsites. We've been told Newfoundland gets very busy in the "season".