On Sunday we drove from Halifax to Cape Breton, meeting up with friends from Alberta and staying with their parents for a couple days at their home in Port Hood.
The house was right on the beach. My friend took us for a boat ride, and then we wandered down the beach, collecting sea glass, interesting rocks, admiring the seabirds diving impressively for their supper, and inhaling entirely too much dead pilot whale for anyone’s liking.
It was a relaxing evening with them, a warm up for the insider Cape Breton tour we were looking forward to on Monday.
Monday started off with the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site. He and his wife had a home in Cape Breton at Baddeck, despite being American citizens. We all know about the telephones, of course, and other tidbits, but the historic site was excellent and I learned about a great deal of other inventions or experiments he was involved with.
There were lots of cool ones. For instance, he also managed to find a way to communicate sound using light, calling it a photophone. There was a gallery filled with the hydrofoils he and others worked on. There was a replica Silver Dart. Three was lots of information about how he worked with the deaf.
But I’m sorry to say what I will remember about Bell now, forever, was that he started breeding sheep, wanting to see if sheep having multiple nipples led to more multiple births.
It did not, but he was successful in breeding multi-nippled sheep. It took a few decades.
I was also impressed to learn about Mabel Bell, his wife, who seems like she was a pretty equal partner in the relationship, including some keen business sense and she was even a venture capitalist.
We drove large chunks of Cape Breton, though we didn’t do the whole Cabot Trail. There was a wonderful lunch (there’s an absurd number of places named after goats in Nova Scotia), met up with more of our friends’ friends who were coming to stay and were cheerfully talked into driving a fair distance to Cape Breton Highlands National Park to take in some of the more dramatic views of Cape Breton’s coastline.
Victoria Paterson 