Who knew? Rocking really
does make you sleep better! All those mothers have been right all along… So we
slept late this morning before heading off on today’s outing onto Cape Breton
Island.
We had anchored in the bay beside
Sydney, Nova Scotia’s second city. “I’ve had a look around the town centre and
they’ve named the streets like ours!” exclaimed an excited Aussie. “Pitt and
George and so on!” He went a lot quieter on the coach trip when he heard that
this Sydney was founded three years before Australia’s.
It was an hour’s drive to
Baddeck, where our main focus was to be the Alexander Graham Bell museum – but
it was impossible not to be diverted en route by the glorious autumn colours,
which were just glowing in the sunshine, the trees set off beautifully by the
lakes and sea with their artistically-placed and super-cute little lighthouses.
The Bell thing was a
surprise: Scotland claims him so firmly that I had no idea at all that he did
all of his important work and lived for most of his life in Canada, and
specifically this little corner of it. He didn’t just invent the telephone: he
was very active with helping the deaf (his wife Mabel was deaf) and was also
very big in early flight as well as hydrofoils.
Having made his fortune
with the telephone, he spent his life tinkering with inventions big and small,
and chose to live here in Nova Scotia because he liked it cool, and also,
rather endearingly, because he felt Baddeck was “far enough from fashionable
centres to put our little girls in trousers”.
It’s interesting here. They
even have a Gaelic College! It’s well worth a visit – even if the man I met with the
Harley Davidson three-wheeler is only able to use it for 5 months in the year…
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