After our 327 mile trip here we were beat I tellya…pretty much beat. About half of the trip was on a nice 4 lane freeway…then we got onto NS-105…which forms the eastern port of the Trans Canada Highway…it’s composed of a series of different roads as it goes from Newfoundland to the west coast and the construction type and quality is variable depending on where you are…the named road was constructed largely of already existing roads. Anyway…105 was pretty rough…and we discovered on arrival that the window shade over our living room window had fallen off the mounts on the ceiling…further investigation revealed that the wall anchors had pulled out. Not surprising…it’s happened before…but there are no metal structural members in the ceiling, just fiberglas and insulation with a thin sheet metal backing board. The solution is just to put in new screw wall anchors…luckily we had a few but they’re on our list to buy more……then hang the shade back on the brackets. This requires…naturally…that you remove the window valence but it’s still a less than an hour job which we got done today after our driving tour of Lake Bras d’Or was done.

Sunday we headed off to Mass at the church about 400 yards away from the campground…the pub is the same distance in the opposite direction on Church Road…so we’ve got pretty much everything we need fairly close…and then were headed down the east side of Lake Bras d’Or…our plan was to stop for lunch at Rita’s Tea House and then continue on down the shoreline another 20 mile or so before heading back. At the northern end of the lake we crossed westward onto the peninsula that has our Arm of Gold Campground in Little Bras d’Or, head around the southern end of that peninsula and then make our way back to the campground.

Some photos from our trip.

Rita’s Teahouse where we had lunch…we actually had High Tea even though it was only around noontime. It was the home of a Canadian country western singer named Rita MacNeil…after her death in 2013 her estate turned it into a teahouse and museum of her career. We had your typical High Tea menu…egg salad, cucumber, and tuna sandwiches with no crust, some assorted pastries…lemon squares, red velvet fudge, coconut macaroons and oatmeal biscuits (cookies we would call them) that were pretty good…and tea of course.

Sitting at our table…an usie…this was before lunch got there.

A shot of the rig parked in our site…looking out ahead of us about 400 yards is the church we went to.

After our trip we headed home and did a little spot touch on the driver side quarter panel on Little Red…some jerk down in Maine scraped it up a bit. We put some touch up paint on it to keep it from rusting until we get back to Fort Myers…then we’ll get it fixed when we’re not moving.

Found some interesting facts on the population of Canuckistan today. The country has a total population of about 36 million folks…and it’s even more skewed in distribution than the US is…sure, NY, PA, OH and CA are heavily populated with lesser numbers of people in the west and Alaska…but they’ve much more population density variance up here.

99% of the population lives below the line in the image below…1% lives above it. That’s a total of about 360,000 people total living above the line…and even below the line a lot of the land is very lightly populated.

50% o the population lives in the red areas below.

I saw another image yesterday that was the above map divided into colors each comprising 20% of the total population…but then I went to find it again to post here and couldn’t find it…basically 3 of the 5 20% blocks were on the east coast in the area from Toronto to Quebec, another one was centered around Calgary and the last comprised the remaining 80-90% of the land area. The one below showing population density was the closest one I could find to showing this…note the large dark gray area which is pretty close to the last 20% block on the image I couldn’t find again.

Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut have a total population of 118,000…and the three red cities of Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit have 50,000 of that 118.000. Even the more populated provinces like BC, Alberta, and Quebec have most of their population concentrated in the southern or coastal sections.

What this tells you is that vast, vast majority of the country is basically empty of people…the lightest yellow area in the image above is a density of 0.4 people per square kilometer and the gray area is less than that. Having been in the upper portions of Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon on our Alaska trip back in 2015…I can tell you that if you see a half dozen cars per hour total on the major (well, the only ones actually) highways that’s almost classified as rush hour. There are about 3.9 million square miles in the country and probably 3 million of them are basically empty.

Later on…I found the one I was referring to before…the colors below represent 25% or about 9 million of the population of Canuckistan. It really bears out…again…the ones above.

So we had 2 full days here for Fun Stuff© in the Sydney area of Cape Breton Island…the first was taken up with a visit to Low Point Lighthouse and some errands…we needed to buy more jeans as we’ll not be in shorts the rest of our time in Canuckistan. We found Levi’s 505s for 35 bucks US…score. The second day was devoted to a trip over to Louisbourg to visit the restored city and fort there. We were originally going to do a rum tasting as well…but Connie woke up with an upset tummy so we punted on the rum tasting.

Here are a few shots of the Low Point Light as well as the barriers that were previously constructed to help prevent erosion of the bluff near the light…you can see how well it’s worked…and also a working lobstah boat right off shore.

After our Fun Stuff©it was 5 o’clock in Tel Aviv as one of our RVing friends would say…so we headed over to the Blue Mist Tavern for dinner…turned out their kitchen was closed today so we just had a couple of brews and met some local Bras d’Or good ole boys…then went next door and brought home a pizza from Janes Pizza for dinner…it turned out to be a hit as it was the best pizza we’ve had in quite a long time.

Tuesday…we scheduled a trip down to the Louisbourg historic site…it’s run by the Park Service up here and is a reconstruction of an old French settlement here on Cape Breton Island that was first settled in 1720 and occupied until the French lost New France to the UK in 1758. We took about a mile hike around the town and got a few shots…

The King’s Bastion…which housed the 600 soldiers manning the fort, their unmarried officers, and the governor and his family.

Married officer’s house.

Looking down the Quay…the widest street in the town, The harbor is immediately to the left and in addition to shops this wide street was used for social functions.

One of the shops along the Quay.

The Frederic Gate from the harbor to the Quay…located in the center.

Cannon along the Quay…there are others behind this fortified wall in the Demi-bastion…a fort basically…that look out over and protect the harbor.

The Dauphin Gate out to the land side of town…at the west end of the Quay.

Cliff Swallow…there were dozens of these nesting up under the eaves of the buildings in town.

Some of the local residents.

Ye Old Royal Sword Maker…although since this is a French town I guess Ye Old is not really appropriate.

The Ice House where they stored ice for their wine and beer. The sign says this is an upside down cone shaped building…sure looks right side up to me.

Guardhouse where the soldiers stood duty…right outside the King’s Bastion.

Chapel.

Confessional.

The rear of the King’s Bastion and courtyard…this was taken from the parapet of the fort that looks out over the land between the town and the remainder of Cape Breton Island off of the peninsula the town is on,

The Atlantic Ocean was pretty rough today…so Neil got some shots of the breakers.

This first one is a rock just outside the harbor…probably 20 feet tall spray from the waves.

We left Louisbourg and drove around to the Louisbourg Light which is across the harbor from the town. This light was constructed in 1734 and is the oldest lighthouse in Canuckistan…it’s still operational today lighting the way home for wayward mariners.

With that we headed home…Neil made stir fry for dinner…it was really tasty. We used the last of the chicken breasts that our friend Jeff gave us when he left Seminole in April…this pile of chicken chunks came from a single boneless breast…it was the largest chicken breast any of us had ever seen by a factor of 2…huge. We’ve seen turkey breasts that weren’t this large. We used it specifically so there would be leftovers for tomorrow night after the ferry trip…we’ll be getting to the campground pretty late so need something quick.

Interesting things from the net this week.

Now you know the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.

I don’t play around.

More truth.

Cyas.