A bunch of miles in the U-Haul van
Home: Inverness Beach Resort campground

Bikes strapped to the rails, panniers strewn haphazardly across the floor, we took off in our U-Haul van for Cape Breton. The miles on the 103, 102, and 104 passed not with the clarity of bicycle speed, but with the hilly, endless, evergreen forest melded into an impressionist blur.

We crossed the short Canso Causeway that connects Cape Breton island to the mainland, and then were on some roads that were either uncomfortably narrow, or normal roads that my unpracticed hands steering our Jello-suspensioned van made uncomfortable.

But we made it safely (through a few construction zones that would have been no fun on the bikes) to Inverness and a muddy campsite at the Inverness Beach Resort. And then felt strangely guilty(?) when we met a couple of vanless bike tourers a few sites over. Lucie, from Switzerland, was in the midst of a long-term trip on the order of ours, and with a plan to stay in the Canadian North impressively long into autumn. Stewart (from Canada, I believe) was just starting out his first-ever bike tour and digging it so far.

After cooking up some seafood chowder for dinner, we headed down to the beach. We walked south for two miles, half on the sand, half on a boardwalk. All the while through air so infused with pink that every time I put my eye to the camera, the colors that appeared on the screen told me that something was busted with the white-balance settings. But no, widening back out into the real world, it’s the white-balance of the landscape itself that was benefiting from a major glitch. It was one of the most impressively scene-changing sunsets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been lucky to see a lot of pretty great sunsets.