Tuesday August 18th - First Ride

We drove like Crazy on Monday to reach our campground way up north. This would have been our third night, so we have missed nearly half of our ride. On the way up the Eastern Coast we stopped at a "Highlight" restaurant for dinner.  The Chowder House was located in Neil's Harbor, and also the only game around. It is the only restaurant highlighted on the Cabot Trail official map.  Lets just make this short it was without a doubt the worst food we had on the entire trip.  If you make the trip do not stop here.

We camped at the Hideaway, a nice private camp at the north most point of the trail.  Only letdown was the mosquitoes.  The campground is in a nice wooded area just a few minutes from a lovely river. We made a hike down to the river but by the time we got back Heidi had lost half of her blood to the thirsty mosquitoes.

The next morning after our coffee and light breakfast we took our bikes out on a ride along the Spur road back to Neil's Harbor.  This was absolutely beautiful, however we soon found that the hills were nonstop.  We did this as an out and back of about 25 miles or more.  On the way back I took the very steep side trip down to White Point, which was a very nice fishing village.

After our ride we drove back to the Cabot's Landing Park to have another picnic lunch, it was really nice and very warm and humid.  We then continues along the Cabot Trail to the location of the pre planned campground, and found a nice cool running creek, so we jumped in to cool off.  We checked out the next campground along the trail but were worried about the mosquitoes there also, so I convinced Heidi we should head over to the campground on the beach several miles futher.  Before we did, we took a nice quick hike up to a waterfall, very relaxing.

The beach campground was nearly full, we grabbed a spot, and then took off to find dinner in the nearest town Cheticamp.  We found a restaurant called the Harbor House and had an amazing dinner by far the best so far.  It should be noted that Cheticamp was and still is mostly French.  Back at our camp we found the place to be full, and had a very nice night after watching the sunset from the beach.