Salt Marsh Near Mabou
Yet another spoke

Cheticamp, NS Aug 16
Today 102 km, Total 2064km
So the plan was... Get an early start and do the 100km to Cheticamp before the day warmed up. Do the 40km to Inverness before breakfast, as the place in Port Hood didn't open til 9am. My suggestion, which Pete agreed to without much enthusiasm. Didn't rouse myself until 7:15, after which it was a simple matter to futz around until 9am. The best laid plans...
Got to the restaurant, and they let us in 15 minutes early (same place that let us in 15 mins late last night). Ordered the standard Big Boy breakfast with a side of pancakes, and Pete got the fish cake breakfast ditto.
I knew when the pancakes arrived that I had met my match. These were the real McCoy monster flapjacks, 10 inch diameter, half inch thick, two containers of syrup. The big boy lived up to its name too. Half an hour later I admitted defeat with half a pancake, a small mound of potatoes and couple of slices of flax toast left behind. Pete, of course cleared all his plates.
We hit the road at about 10, off to a roaring start, just chewing up the hills as they appeared, with a slight headwind that cooled us rather than impeding us. Twenty-five km in, we met up with the railway trail that we had seen yesterday. The surface was good, finely crushed granite, so we decided to give it a try. The trail at first followed the shoreline at a distance, mostly through woodlands with the occasional bridge across marshy salt-water inlets, very pretty. 10 km in, the surface started to deteriorate into lumpy, rocky ballast, and the fun was over. Too far in to turn back, and the occasional cross road that might have taken us back to the highway looked in worse shape than the trail. In some places we were riding over the ridges left when the railroad ties were removed. To make things worse, the dreaded "ping" as another spoke snapped in Pete's rear wheel due to the rough surface.
Finally, after about 20km we crossed a paved road. Flagged down a truck towing a horse-box to ask which way we should turn. The truck was carrying a two wheeled racing cart, probably coming home from the big harness race we had heard about in Charlottetown. The road took us down to Inverness, a pretty coastal village where we stopped opposite a bakeshop while Pete fixed his broken spoke.
By the time we got going again, I had lost the rhythm from the earlier part of the ride. I was getting up the hills OK, but it seemed like work, and the final 60km to Cheticamp seemed to take for ever. There were, however, some rewarding vistas across the gulf: in one place I could convince myself that a smudge on the horizon was PEI, 60km away.
Coming into Cheticamp, we were surprised to see French signs, and the red, white and blue Acadian flags. I hadn't realized that there is a francophone community in this part of Nova Scotia.
Caught up with Pete at the entrance to town, and he grinned and handed me a cold beer. A passing motorist had stopped to chat, and given him a couple of cans.
We decided to spring for a motel so that we would be close to downtown. The sign said free wifi, but neither of us could connect to it. We picked a sea-food restaurant down the road, I had a lobster and Pete had an enormous crab - both very good but hard work to disassemble.
I talked to Valerie, and she gave me the sad news that our friend Judy Griffiths is in the last stage of her battle with pancreatic cancer. Judy, I send you love. You have been an inspiration to all of us in the way that you have lived through these incredibly difficult years, with your sense of fun and your dedication to your family. We will never forget you.
Now it's morning, it rained during the night but it looks like the good weather will come back. I'm sitting writing in a chair outside the room, hoping that we can score some wifi later today to upload.
Until then,
Best wishes,
Barney
PS Pete's blog is at www.transcanada09.blogspot.com