Day 3 (March 18, 2021): Bay St. George

We woke to a weather forecast that made us frown and sigh:  one last blast of winter tomorrow, on the last day of winter.  And while all of Nova Scotia will be impacted, Cape Breton is to bear the brunt, with up to 30cm of snow.  The near-certainty of the Sydney area being shut down by that amount of snow made us decide to pull the plug on the Cape Breton portion of our March Break.  So, with heavy hearts we cancelled our hotel reservation for the next two nights and set out to complete the Mainland Nova Scotia portion of our plan and head home.

Sticking out of the north shore of Nova Scotia is a peninsula whose tip is called Cape George Point and whose eastern edge borders Bay St. George, with Cape Breton Island's western shore on the other side, and Prince Edward Island a short distance across the Northumberland Strait.  It's a part of the province we had never explored, so we were excited to dig our teeth into it.

With very strong Scottish linkages, the Gaelic influence was noticeable very quickly after we left the Trans-Canada Highway and started the Sunrise Trail heading northeast.  Place names are in both English and Gaelic, and as we saw at our first stop -- Arisaig -- the Scottish roots are something the area is deeply proud of.  We continued along the coast until the tip, where Cape George Point's lighthouse did not disappoint.  The drive down the eastern side of the peninsula towards Antigonish was steep and rugged, and reminded us a great deal of Newfoundland's Bay de Verde Peninsula, which we had explored last Thanksgiving Weekend.

After lunch at a well-established restaurant on Antigonish's main street, we made our way to the campus of St. Francis Xavier University, where we had made an appointment to view the small art gallery and to see what can only be described as a monument to one of St. F of X's most celebrated alumni, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

From there we searched out the moving memorial to the victims of the 1992 Westray Mine disaster on the outskirts of New Glasgow.  With the pre-blizzard rain having started, we headed for home, concluding our 500km trek exactly 48-hours after we had left home.

It was a truncated March Break, but we had excellent meals, saw a lot of things we hadn't explored before in Nova Scotia, and truly had a nice change of scenery and a rest.

As we pulled out of the hotel to start the day, we laughed at this pet food store sign across the street!

This sign was on the counter of a gas bar where we filled up.  As of today, March 18, 2021, Nova Scotia's four health regions have a total of 17 COVID cases among the 955,000 residents of the province.  The amazingly low COVID record of the past year is certainly due, in part, to the fact that we have all been disciplined in wearing masks in all indoor public spaces since July 31, 2020.

The Northumberland Strait looking toward Prince Edward Island was a hodge-podge of sea ice and open water.


Perhaps the most pleasant village along the Sunrise Trail towards Cape St. George is Arisaig, which was settled by Scottish immigrants in 1785.

The lighthouse at Arisaig Point was originally built in 1898, but burned in the 1930s.  This is a 2007 replica of the original.

The rugged coast at Arisaig Point was lined with piles of ice pans.

A Nova Scotia Historic Sites rock cairn at Arisaig Point, notes the Scottish immigrants who settled the area.

St. Margaret of Scotland Catholic Church in Arisaig is a Gothic design built in 1878.

Sharpened as perfect as pencils, this Arisaig truck was carrying a load of fence-posts.

This English / Gaelic highway place-sign shows how Gaelic the area is!

Cape George Point Lighthouse sits on a high cliff overlooking St. George’s Bay.  Cape Breton Island and Prince Edward Island can be seen on a clear day.  The original lighthouse was erected in 1861 and was destroyed by fire in 1907.  The present lighthouse is the third one located on this site and was built in 1968. The Lighthouse in now community-owned and maintained.

It's not quite an inukshuk, but it's certainly an interesting landmark in Ballantyne's Cove, near Cape George Point.

The red soil and steep cliffs of Ballantyne's Cove.


The home of the X-Men -- St. Francis Xavier's football team.

St. Ninian Cathedral, at the St. Francis Xavier campus, is the Episcopal Seat for the Diocese of Antigonish.

The Brian Mulroney Hall, opened in September 2019.

The replica of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Ottawa office, in Mulroney Hall at St. Francis Xavier University.  Mulroney returned to StFX, his alma mater, in 2019 to celebrate the grand opening of The Brian Mulroney Institute of Government and Mulroney Hall, a $52-million state-of-the-art building.

The art gallery space in Mulroney Hall at StFX currently holds a small collection of Mulroney's art works.  It will soon become the main exhibition space for the university's 3000 art works.

Cairn Park is a small park at the west end of Main Street in Antigonish, showcasing commemorative Scottish memorials. 

The Westray Mine was a coal mine just outside New Glasgow which opened in September 1991, but closed eight months later when it was the site of an underground methane explosion on May 9, 1992, killing all 26 miners working underground at the time.  The Nova Scotia government ordered a public inquiry and published its findings over five years later. The report stated that the mine was mismanaged, miners' safety was ignored, and poor oversight by government regulators led to the disaster. The mine was dismantled and permanently sealed in November 1998.

Their Light Shall Always Shine Memorial Park is a memorial to the 26 miners who died in the 1992 Westray disaster.  11 miners remain entombed 350m below the surface at the site of the park.

We stopped at a new viewing area just outside Truro, where the Fundy Tidal Bore pushes its way into the Salmon River twice a day.  We were 90 minutes too early to see it fill the river, but we marveled at the massive chunks of ice-mud that reveal themselves at low-tide.

While our four-day itinerary was cut in half, we still covered almost 500km.  This shows the full route we covered.