Labor day without labor! Woohoo!
I am writing this while sitting in an Adirondack chair, overlooking the ocean. After daily lake-swims at Keji for the past few weeks, the saltiness and the buoyancy of the ocean were a bit of a shock—well, a novelty, anyway. I walked in with my Tevas on, as the beach surface was all sharp rocks and shells. And as soon as I stretched out, “Bloop!” my feet shot right to the surface and the shoes were halfway out of the water. This made it difficult to swim, so I just floated for a while, looking around, tasting the saltiness of the water. It feels like such a blessing to be here.
Right now, as I’m trying to write this, the wind is trying to rip the Mac off my lap. No matter where I go, I cannot get this campground wifi to work, but there is enough signal here to cause my personal hotspot to never show up. I tried signing on to theirs, to mine, rebooting, but I couldn’t connect. I am not supposed to be online this morning I guess, and this breeze is telling me that I’m not supposed to be writing right now. Maybe I’ll just sit here and watch the sun come up over the trees for a bit...
Dawn on St George's Bay
I drove some of The Cabot Trail yesterday. It’s the coastal route up into the mountains of The Highlands. I guess it’s sort of like the highway in California that runs up and down the coast. US-1--Maybe The Pacific Coast Highway? I kept pulling over and doing "check-in" updates on fb because it was the fastest way to note, and share where I was. Most of the drive was fun and amazing.
My GPS had plotted a course for me in the morning that sent me over a route that included a ferry at Englishtown, and 47 miles of unpaved road. I checked my WAZE and my paper maps, all were sending me the same way. Not a lot of options here.
After I crossed the Canso Causeway, I pulled in to the Cape Breton Visitor’s Center, and asked the women there if there was another way to go. They told me I could get off at Exit 11, which would add a half hour of driving to my trip, but I could avoid that ferry. And, they didn’t know of any unpaved roads up here—maybe above the park for a bit, a few miles, but certainly nothing like 47 miles of it! I think they were insulted.
When I finally got on The Cabot "Trail," for some reason, the Garmin was interpreting that as an Unpaved Road. There was a long stretch of the road that was under construction—total reconstruction, it looked like. And, long stretches where I had to drive with two wheels over the double yellow line, because the right-hand edge of the road was a destroyed mess of potholes, broken pavement, and patches. It was rattling the rig to pieces. But unpaved road? No. Seriously? They ought to see parts of Queens!