SUNDAY 24 July
First off, our What 3 Words location here at the North Sydney Cabot Trail KOA is “steamy.provide.rally”. I forgot to capture and post this when we first arrived.
We are back in a dome of hot/moist air, with excessive heat warnings for daytime high temperatures of 90 degrees F +/- (29 to 33 degrees C), “humidex” readings of 36 to 40 C (96.8 to 104 F) and lows barely in the 60’s F. Temperatures moderate a bit near the coast, but not much. Fortunately, our electrical power is good and our two heat pumps have been functioning well in cooling mode.
Paul and Nancy will be observing their 33rd wedding anniversary on the 29th of this month, but will already have left the RV park by then. We were going to take them out to dinner in Sydney (Regional Municipality) this afternoon but first decided to visit the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site (Parks Canada) in nearby Baddeck, NS. Baddeck is just off Hwy-105 (the T-CH), about 25 minutes from the RV park.
An early patch cable telephone switchboard.
The A. G. Bell NHS was another fine example of what we experienced with Parks Canada locations. Besides a nice building complex, it contained a lot of well-curated artifacts, large and small, with associated information. We learned that Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and came to Canada at the age of 23. He eventually ended up in the USA, where his famous “first telephone call” with his assistant, Watson, took place in the Boston area. An old/small patch-cord telephone was on display and reminded Linda that her mother had once worked as a telephone operator.
Alexander Graham Bell did pioneering work with tetrahedrons as structural elements.
He and his wife, Mabel (deaf from the age of 5 and a former pupil of Bell’s) eventually bought property in Baddeck, which reminded him of Scotland, and built a marvelous estate. (The house/estate is still owned and occupied by their descendants, and is not open to the public.) We learned quite a bit about this couple and their long active careers and lives. Besides deaf education and telephony, A.G.B. was involved in aviation, hydrofoils, and the structural use of tetrahedrons, to name a very few of his interests and investigations.
The three amigos outside the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
Mabel managed their estate and had deep interest in conservation and ecology. They were both well-ahead of their time and we came away with a new found admiration for their contributions to a wide range of subjects and for the kind of people they were. Bell’s life-long passion, however, was teaching the deaf to speak.
Airplane and Hydrofoil, just two of A. G. Bell’s many interests.
Baddeck was a small but charming port town with an active marina and lots of pleasure boats anchored or sailing the Bras d’Or Lake. And it was a busy town on this day. The Lake is punctuated by headlands and bays, but ultimately is connected to the ocean via the Bras d’Or Channel, which is the body of water we can see from our RV park and over which the Seal Islands Bridge takes the Trans-Canada Highway into North Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Linda and Nancy outside The Freight Shed Restaurant in Baddeck, Nova Scotia.
Some quick online research indicated that The Freight Shed Waterside Restaurant might be a good place to eat lunch, and we decided to give it a try instead of driving all the way to Sydney (Regional Municipality). We had a bit of wait to get a table, but it was outside and under cover, and there was enough of breeze to keep it comfortable. We all got something different to eat and everyone indicated that their meal was tasty. After lunch I took Hwy-205 along the lake back to Hwy-105 and returned to camp.
The rest of the day we relaxed in camp (hid in the air-conditioning) until the sun dropped low enough and it cooled off enough to sit outside comfortably. We had both left our awnings out while we were away from camp to try to shade our rigs. Ours were fine, but Paul and Nancy’s awnings had automatically retracted. Normally that would be a good thing, as that is what they are designed/intended to do, but something on the big patio awning had apparently gotten tweaked.
A couple of seasonal campers had seen this happen and let Paul know. He fussed with it for a bit before one of the locals eventually brought his pickup truck to the site and used it as a work platform to reach the awning. (These awnings are mounted on the edge of the roof, about 12’6” off the ground.) They were finally able to get the awning to go in correctly and then Paul promptly disconnected the power from the awning motor so it could not be “accidentally” deployed. This awning will now be out-of-operation until they return to the American Coach Factory and Service Center in Decatur, Indiana, to have it fixed.
Situations like this are always a bit anxiety provoking, and it was our last night camping together on this trip, so Nancy got out the bottle of Cyser Mead they bought on PEI and we split it four ways; a nice cap to the evening and our joint travels. While enjoying our beverages, we reviewed the shore excursions that were currently listed for our Panama Canal cruise in February 2023 and made selections for each port of call. The Norwegian Cruise Line concierge service is supposed to contact Nancy in about 35 days and she wants to have all of our selections ready to book.
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