September 20, 2013 This may have been my favorite day of the trip so far! Started off with a breakfast of eggs, bacon, yogurt and granola and lots of fruit and coffee at the Rendell-Shea B&B and interesting conversations with our fellow guests, a diamond broker from Belgium here on business, an owner of an herbicide company and his wife from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and four people from Calgary. It was a lively discussion and a fun way to start the day. As you can see by our photos, the buildings of St. John's are painted bright colors, probably to make those long cold winter days seem less depressing. Our street consists of colorful historic row houses with the harbor at one end and the large Military Park at the other end. We walked two hours up ... read more

Very nice...one of my photos was nominated and selected as Travel Blog's "Photo of the Week." See link: http://www.travelblog.org/Topics/33772-1.html September 18, 2013 Hotel North in St. Anthony provided a good night's rest and breakfast. We talked with a lot of locals, such a friendly town. We drove to the north end of the Viking Trail so that we could visit another UNESCO World Heritage site, L'Anse aux Meadows. This is the spot of the first authenticated European presence in North America. Vikings were here around 1000 AD and archaeologists have uncovered the remains of three dwellings. We found this place truly fascinating... seeing the artifacts in the well-done interpretive center, wandering around the mounds of the old dwellings, and enjoying the costumed interpreters in the cozy recreated sod buildings. We were the only hut visitors for ... read more

Up early for a pleasant breakfast at the Harbourfront B&B. Another guest from Toronto had just arrived from Newfoundland and took the time to write down a list of suggestions for us. We drove onto the ferry at 9:45 AM and then found our seats. We paid extra to get into the nicer reserved section for the six hour cruise from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. To get into this section with the cushy seats you need a key card. We entered and discovered there were only two other couples in the entire area, one from Colorado Springs and the other from Hamilton, which is near Toronto. We six had our own entertainer, a great singer/guitar player. We spent the entire trip visiting and dining with the Toronto couple, exchanged emails and ... read more

September 14, 2013 Ceilidh Trail Said goodbye to Halifax and Dartmouth at 8:15 AM, nice cities but we're ready for some countryside. We crossed the Canso Causeway onto Cape Breton Island, one of the "must do's" of this trip. The island's roads are divided into themed "trails" by the tourism bureau. We started out on the Ceilidh Trail up the west side of the island. The focus of this trail is Celtic heritage and music and you hear it everywhere you go...in stores, in pubs and restaurants, and even from car stereos. We decided to stop by the Red Shoe Pub for lunch in Mabou which is owned by the famous (not to us, though) Rankin sisters, an experience we highly recommend. At noon it was as lively as can be with loud conversations and Celtic ... read more

We amazed ourselves at how much we packed into one day! Matthew, our motel/B&B host and chef in Yarmouth, did indeed fix us a "special" breakfast as promised. When we walked into the lobby he escorted us to a beautifully prepared table for two. There were eleven different kinds of fruit on our plate. Matthew is very proud of his culinary presentation skills and even though it was just scrambled eggs, ham and a boiled then pan fried potato, after he expounded on the "purity of his ingredients" I was intimidated enough to not ask for hot sauce. But it was a great way to start the day, loved Matthew's choice of guitar music, too. We followed the Lighthouse Trail (Highway 3) all the way to Cape Sable Island and the southernmost point in Nova Scotia ... read more