Our Vacation to the East Coast:: No Seagulls or Good Food in Neils Harbour

(Installment #5 - Thurssday)
Photos and many edits to follow.

After leaving Meat Cove we headed back to the Cabot trail stopping at a very interesting Catholic Church called Saint Margarets in the village of Saint Margarets. What was interesting was that the church was open 24/7 and there were two young girls hired to watch the building. It is nice that the Catholic Church gives its members this place to pray any time they want to. It is however unfortunate that if the doors to the church were left open here in Ottawa 24/7 someone would abuse it. Across from the church was a large cemetery that had the words Pray for us written with stone on a hill side facing the road. I have never understood the idea of praying for the dead but I guess that is why I am not Catholic.

We headed westward and as we were tired of highway like roads (the trail is a well paved highway) we pulled off onto a more rural rout towards Neils Harbour. As we entered town we noticed why the trail bypasses the town, as there is a large smelly fish plant just near the shore. Why the town is lovely the smell is not. We stopped by a road side craft store as Michelle saw another Bald Eagle on the rocks in the harbour. When we went into the store the shop girl mentioned she had seen the eagle swoop down and eat a seagull that morning. She also mentioned to Michelle that when the eagle is in the harbour there are usually no seagulls around. As it was getting later in the day we decided to eat at the Chowder house just off the end of the harbour. Unfortunately the food was mostly fried and I suspect McCain frozen fish from the packing plant, as both Michelle and I found it too greasy and we did not feel all that well afterwards.

As we headed down the coast we noticed it was getting dark and thought we had better find a place to camp for the night it was a short driving day as we stayed most of the day in Meat Cove.

We stopped for the night at a campsite just inside the park at Broad Cove, a wooded campground near ocean, north of Ingonish near east entrance of park. There was really not much to see at the campsite. Broad Cove is just that a large open cove with a sand and rock beach. The campsite was too tightly packed in and the residents were noisy. It reminded me of Place Rouge in Quebec (also crowded and noisy). We walked down and sat on the beach for a while watching the lighthouses flickering in the distance and counting the millions of stars visible in the night sky, until we both started to feel unwell because of the greasy food we ate in Neils Harbour, and then called it a night.