Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

We have recently returned from 10 days in Canada on an island where bad photography is nearly impossible.

It's an unusual island in that yes, it's surrounded by water, but it also surrounds a huge lake in the middle, Lake Bras d'or, which has many 'fingers' making many bays and coves. The lake itself has islands as well for exploring if you have access to a boat.
Cape Breton is quite large and rocky, mountainous in fact.

All of this makes it an interesting place to shoot shots. The photo above almost gives me virtigo. This is taken at Marble Mountain, from the pulloff. They call these scenic overlooks, "Lookoffs". And we pulled off many times. But you can only look outwards for so long and I started looking much closer and found beautiful wildflowers and wanted to test the close-up feature on this camera. I think it does a decent job!

We made our way around the Cabot Trail in the northern part of Cape Breton, stopping at lodges at night. The Chanterelle B & B was our first night.
This was a lovely place with terrific, delicious meals, all very healthy and organic and clearly made with care.

The rooms were beautifully decorated, individual in theme.

This spot we found for fishing was at the middle of a hiking trail not too far from the B & B but as we started out for it after dinner, by the time we came out again it was dark.



A very good hike, but treacherous to navigate in the dark if your eyes don't adjust and your depth perception is dodgy. No, I didn't fall but I came close a few times. Still, what a beautiful spot to fish. No fish were biting that night. The blackflies were. Sneaky creeps.

The two gazelles with us had sprinted ahead and found a waterfall above this fishing hole and the rocks were littered with blueberry bushes.

And a good handful were ready to pick.

Now this one thing I found lacking on CB. Such few berries. Oh where they were, there were plenty make the effort but I lived in Alaska, similar terrain and climate and lots of berries, everywhere. And I found so many wild strawberry plants and no berries at all. Some were still flowering though, but I thought this berry was eaten in early to mid-summer, not August. And lots of the raspberry bushes were just starting to fruit, and yet in some places they were ripe. I didn't think it was that big a landmass to have such a discrepancy in the harvest! So any berry we found that was ready was like a jewel and we the lucky lucky trolls, pouncing on them!

John in the ditch with raspberries. Lingonberries