Cheticamp for the day
Today we went to Acadie. The drive north from Inverness goes from wooded steep hills to a bare shore land at Margaree Harbour, and the region of Cheticamp begins. The topography, architecture and language, all at once.
I’ve been up here before and I like the area. We ate well, twice. A lunch at a small cafe, the Hometown Kitchen Restaurant that was sold out of crab cakes but that provided a giant chicken Caesar. A supper at Le Gabriel where I had excellent filet of sole stuffed with crab and scallops. I’d return to either without hesitation.
The language question isn’t a question here, except to demand your preference. Bilingual service everywhere, even when you least expect it. The colour-coded menus at Le Gabriel were a surprise; pale pink and pale green are rendered equal in grey for me. The little kids at the neighbouring table had seen whales that afternoon, and their T-shirts were an ad for fiddling cetaceans.
Fiddling was in the forefront elsewhere, as we stopped in to Charlie’s Music store to purchase a few CDs. He has the best stock on the continent for those seeking Andrea, or Mairi, or JP, or Natalie, or Kinnon, or Buddy, or Ashley… he even does a thriving mailorder business from his website should the first name of a preferred artist be forgotten.
We had a great time at the local museum, learning the ins and outs of hooking rugs and mixing metaphors in two languages. I missed the tour at a second museum devoted to the rugs of Elizabeth Lefort because I was deep into genealogy, but she seems to have understood the pixel long before digital cameras were available. I used my time with two devoted researchers to solve a small puzzle with one of the many family lines I research.
We ended the evening with a shopping spree at the Bargain Barn. Pocket books at five bucks each. Cheap junk food. A giant Pez dispenser. Multiple pairs of cheap headsets (language lab replacements). Cheap sneakers. All that and more (for less than sixty dollars) puts a capital on the Bargain title.
I’ve had a good day, and we’ll return to this part of the world. If I wasn’t tied (heart and soul) to my Island, I could see why people come here to live.
