Maine, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick: Day Five

The following day, we had made arrangements to sail Ingonish Bay on a whale-watching tour. Several outfits, all of them roughly the same in size and the boats they use, ply the bay during tourist season. Ours was the exception – called Sea Visions, it uses the Avon Spirit – a replica 1880s freight schooner and whenever possible conducts the tour under sail. The Avon Spirit was built locally a decade ago, as part of a project to preserve the ship-building tradition in Nova Scotia. Once a mainstay of Nova Scotia industry, it has stopped being commercially viable around World War II, and most of the last generation of craftsmen to have practiced it are no longer around. In an effort to preserve what it views as a fundamental part of its heritage, the government of Nova Scotia has funded the building of several very authentic, save for Caterpillar diesel V-6s, replicas of late XIX-century schooners of the type that had once sailed up and down the Canadian and New England coasts delivering consumer goods to seaside communities. Launched in 1996, the Avon Spirit served as a training ship for four years before being sold to its current owner for a surprisingly reasonable CDN 400,000. He added some modern navigation equipment and entered the tourist trade, where it remains to this day.

We boarded along with about three dozen fellow passengers and headed out to sea. Once we left the vicinity of the dock, the crew – only three people, two of them college-age kids evidently doing their summer jobs – raised the sails. Fully rigged, the ship is a breathtaking sight, especially from its deck. Unfortunately, though it seemed breezy to us, apparently it takes a lot of wind to move the ship at a respectable speed, and the engine remained on for the duration of the cruise. The weather was beautiful, the vibration and the noise from the engine intrusive, but not excessively so, and we had a reasonably pleasant ride. Crucially, however, in two and a half hours on the water, we did not see a single whale.

It was almost lunchtime when we docked, and after some very satisfying seafood salad sandwiches at a local bakery, it was time to say good-bye to Nova Scotia and head on to our next destination. In the interest of time, we had to forego driving around the northern tip of Cape Breton and instead headed back along the Cabot Trail, retracing our tracks of two nights ago. This time, however, we saw everything we missed on the way up. One curiosity was a tiny Indian reservation, barely half a kilometer wide, that advertised itself with “Tax Free Shopping” signs – not an insignificant draw as sales tax in Canada can be as high as 13%. A greater one was the Gaelic College, located, ironically, in Englishtown, NS. More of a cultural and crafts center than a real school, its chief distinction to the passerby are road signs in Gaelic found within twenty or so kilometers in either direction on the Cabot Trail.

We hit the mainland in need of gas and a snack, which we found at that most Canadian of places – Tim Horton’s donuts. Though not the best donuts in general, they handily beat both Dunkin Donuts and Krispy Kreme, and is the only major corporation I know of that really lives up to its motto – “Always Fresh.” The glazed sour cream donuts in particular are delicious – dense without being heavy, sweet but not cloying, and small enough to be enjoyed with a minimum of guilt. We would return to Tim Horton’s twice more.

We were headed to Alma, New Brunswick, and though New Brunswick is Canada’s smallest province, it is still big, and the hopes of having dinner in Alma were dashed early. Instead, we made a half-hearted attempt to find interesting food on the outskirts of Moncton, NB. We never did, but the short drive along the road leading into town shocked me a bit – a church on every block, sometimes two, many of uncommon Evangelical persuasions. Were we headed into Canada’s Bible belt? When we finally did stop for dinner – at a Subway attached to a gas station – the impression of having been teleported to rural American South was reinforced. Guys in wife-beaters and mesh truckers’ caps gassing up their beat-up GMC Sierras. Young women with overbleached hair and bad skin smoking outside with vacant expressions on their faces. A camo-painted quad in the corner of the shop, the grand prize in a local sweepstakes. Though New Brunswick is officially bilingual (the only province to be so, in fact), we were only hearing English.

The last hour of drive was once again in the dark, and once again along a small, deserted road. Luckily, the mountains were far less forbidding, and we were once again spared a moose encounter, though we did see two foxes along the road, their eyes glowing eerily. We checked into the surprisingly luxurious Parkland Village Inn in Alma around 11:00, tired but ready for the next day’s adventures.