Halifax : Features

Music to My Gears By Andrew Findlay Jun 1, 2007

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Sure, cycling Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail is a feast for the eyes. But as Andrew Findlay discovers, the Nova Scotia pilgrimage is just as captivating for those willing to slow down and listen to a proud people’s soundtrack

 

Our brake pads are nearly smoking as my girlfriend Lisa and I apply a death grip to our bikes’ levers and plummet down the 20-per cent grade of MacKenzie Mountain, halfway around Cape Breton’s famous Cabot Trail. Straight up, straight down—this highway respects no contours, as if someone had nonchalantly traced a line on a map and then built a road to match.

 

A briny breeze gusts in from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, rustling the trees that crowd the edge of the asphalt. In search of respite from burning forearms, we ride into a lookout where a woman at the helm of a giant motor home with an Acadian flag fluttering from the antenna leans out the driver’s window and says, beaming warmly, “ Vous ętes braves mes amis! Vous ętes brave!”

 

Perhaps.

 

Other than for allowing the brake pads a much-needed rest, the lookout is an interpretive sign that points far down to a wave-swept beach prosaically named Fishing Cove. It was there, back in the early 1800s, that a few boatloads of Scottish refugees put ashore to forge a new life on this lonely and inhospitable chunk of rock jutting into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not unlike the roughhewn land they had left behind.

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