Western Atlantic - Part Four: East To Big Sur

This kind of summed up yesterday, Wednesday - rain and wind, all day. 

I found myself thinking about the December 1917 explosion I saw documented so impressively in my visit to the Maritime Museum in Halifax. Two ships collide, one is a munitions ship, then the latter explodes, and more than 1500 people die, and an urban square mile is utterly destroyed. There is a park two miles distant which has a heavy chunk of anchor from the ship mounted where it landed, just to help underline one measure of it's broad impact on the city, and that city's resilience. It didn't appear to matter that it was cold and snowy on that day, let alone my rain-and-wind, their response, not to mention that of another place familiar with severe weather, Boston, was businesslike, rapid, and effective.

Another measure of the yeoman spirit is this isolationist humor in the washroom of a purveyor of impressive chowder in Whycocomagh NS, a fine mouthful for a fine mouthful:

It should be noted that Cape Breton is connected to the rest of Canada by a kind of skinny levee perhaps a mile long...


The wind continued as we settled in for the night in an otherwise pastoral setting in the village of Cheticamp, but the rain abated, and by the morning the temp has risen, improbably, to room temperature as we embarked on a traversal of the famed Cabot Trail, which I would call the Atlantic Big Sur:

The mixture of the conifers, the turning hardwoods, and the expansive views was remarkable:

It was sometimes a challenge to snag a shot of one of those long ocean views when paving crews had monopolized some key overlooks for staging, how insensitive...







It didn't keep us from making our way inland to a nice waterfall...

And a vertiginous, hurricane-like experience at the edge of the Atlantic world that threated to throw us off the edge:

We will, alas, have to harden ourselves tomorrow for the more typical daytime fifties, and perhaps not a little rain, in the days to come.