May 4How we finished the trailer trip and arrived on Cape Breton

Wednesday May 3
I screwed up a bit on the first post. I didn’t know how to load photos so I loaded a whole bunch with no explanations. Makes little sense. I’ll try to just add a photo or two at a time with explanations.
Basically I’m trying to avoid losing this experience to my encroaching dementia by identifying a highlight of each day. So, Tuesday we travelled like idiots with the car scraping the tarmac off the highway, a journey which ended with a tyre explosion and a vanished license plate. Wednesday we secured the trailer with brand new tyres and finished the journey. Crossing the Causeway into Cape Breton was an amazing experience, to have made it on that crazy journey. Of course it rained but that seemed appropriate. I had a flashback to summer in the West of Ireland, to rain rain rain on camping trips... It all seems so normal. And that last pull up the two almost vertical slopes of Michael’s 2 km roadway was the cherry: Subaru tugged her preposterous load in first gear at 3000 rpm.
Now I am immensely proud of both vehicles.
Back to Fredericton for a moment, breakfast in the Carriage House B and B is worth mentioning because it takes the mind off the trailer outside, loaded with IKEA’s vision of a modern kitchen. The dining room walls of the (at least) 30 by 30 dining room are covered with prints and paintings. It’s like a gallery. Apparently, the owner’s dad was an NB Minister of Culture under Premier Hatfield: there’s a photo of Queen Elizabeth, Hatfield and this Minister, both in bell-bottom trousers, which is fondly referred to as the “three queens” because both politicians were gay, and that back in no gays days. How did they get away with it? On one wall one huge painting by a local doctor/painter must be 15 by 15, an immense, red, thickly applied oil which hung in the Minister’s bedroom. Stars of the collection are Bruno Bobak, well composed but grey in impression, and a small Molly Bobak, colourful and full of people.
Breakfast is also full. Our fellow travellers include a nursing prof from Cheltenham in England, over to do a nostalgia trip to all the places she worked. Next to me is a very Country-looking 69 year-old MNA from the legislature on his way to a caucus meeting who tells great stories about his days as a heart surgeon, his first wife from Napa Valley. We talk about Canada’s new wave of Conservatism and Empire Loyalism in this part of the world. He lives in a huge house on the St John River and has built a post-and-beam vineyard from his own timber from which he hopes to extract good wines in the future. Very far in the future, my instincts tell me after a month in Chile with Donagh and Kate.
We now have two good tyres on the trailer and we’re running into Nova Scotia. This road is becoming very familiar. As you leave Truro, the forests gradually take over the landscape.
It is Anna’s birthday today and she is all dressed up to celebrate. She’s been out for lunch with Janet and Frances who very kindly made the trek up from Dartmouth for the DragonFly resto lunch. We grab our boots and the map of off-road Nova Scotia and head on to Cape Breton where we arrive in rain by nightfall.
This trip is over. It could have been a trip in a ship across the Atlantic. No, come to think of it, all those Irish had it far worse than us. This is luxury pioneering.