The Cabot Trail - Nova Scotia Cont.

 

The overarching goal of this particular trip, even more so than actually getting up to Newfoundland, is to give Kristen some seat time with her new Ducati. (Have I mentioned how proud I am that she’s so committed to become a better and experienced rider?!). We have some more lofty trips planned in the nearish future, so Kris is trying to figure out just how much solo riding she may or may not want to do. 

So we’ve been on the hunt for interesting rides as we’ve made our way north and one loop that kept coming up as we talked to people was something called the Cabot Trail. It sits at the tip of Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island and is only 190 miles or so. Most people told us it was going to take most of a day to ride it which made no sense since it’s seemingly a pretty short distance. Ten and a half hours later…

We didn't do much research on the loop which turned out to be a good and bad thing. The good: our minds were blown when it turned out that this thing is the truncated, Canadian equivalent of the Pacific Coast Highway in California. Like it is for real a stunner. The bad: it is FOR REAL a stunner and we couldn't stop taking pictures. Also, I strapped my new 3DR Solo on the bike and flew my drone a bunch of times, causing even further delays.

Pretty much all of Nova Scotia has been having a crazy cold snap with a ton of rain, so we were super grateful for the sunny, 55 degree weather. July in Canada, who knew. 

Probably the best piece of advice we could give to anyone visiting this area: head up to Meat Cove. It sounds gross and at the end of a gravel, twisty road but it has some of the most epic, empty coastline on the whole loop. Once we left the pavement, we were pretty much by ourselves.

If the Cabot Trail loop is a clock (stay with me here), Meat Cove is at about noon. Our stuff was down at about 4 o'clock and we were riding the loop counter clockwise... Wow, this is a convoluted explanation. What I'm trying to say is that by the time we left Meat Cove we had already been riding for about 6 hours and we were only halfway through the loop. So we did what we always do in a time crunch: let's take more pics!

We had been told to watch out for moose and for good reason. We rolled up on an adolescent male that looked about as big as a Clydesdale horse. Kinda blew us both away, to be honest. 

All in all, it was exactly the kind of thing that we were looking for on this trip. It gave Kristen some new challenges and she tore through them. I can admit we were both pretty beat at the end of the day after 10.5 hours of riding in the mountains but it was just so, so good.