Today will be a short day trip. We are visiting the Highland Village, Baile nan Gaidheal near Iona, NS to trace the history of the Gaelic people leaving Scotland in the mid 1700’s to the late 1800’s to start a new, free live, away from the social and economic changes in their homeland. They landed on the shores of Nova Scotia to find a home where they could live their lives freely, based mostly on the same community groups they were familiar with in their homeland. Those communities were mostly based on family connections and religious beliefs, knitted together through valuing same community spirits, working hand in hand to build their church, schools, barns, a.s.o. The Highland Village led us through the language, culture, and rural lifestyle of the Gaelic people in Nova Scotia throughout the 1800’s into the early 1900’s when changes such as the attractions of cities, industrial jobs, and the railroad, and an English-only school system began to make it difficult to continue on with the old way they had. But the traditions still live on and are present in their music and dance, language, and passing on of the ancestral history.
cutting shingles, .....
In the early afternoon, leaving the village, rain started to set in and we abandoned the plan to take the ferry and run up the west shore of the Bras d’Or Lake. Instead we traced back the way we came, just to encounter shortly before the camp site some problems with the bike. Sudden ignition failures and what sounds like loosing one cylinder made us limp to the camp site. I start to call around for a shop to look at the bike, and for sure change our reservation for the ferry to Newfoundland as the nearest shop after arriving in Channel-Port aux Basques, NL would be St. John’s, NL, about 600 miles away. So better to get it fixed now than being stranded in Newfoundland. Tomorrow morning I will try to get the bike to Sydney, NS and then we go from there.
"Eilean grom nam beanntan ard; Tir mo dhuthchais, tir mo ghraidh. 'S iomadh tonn a bhuaileas traigh; Mun narr mi fatt air carachadh." - "This green island of soaring mountains is my beloved country of inheritance. Manny waves will strike the shore before I find reason to forsake it." - Jonathan G. MacKinnon, author and publisher of the Gaelic newspaper
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