Some pix my cousin sent me of sailboats on the Bras'Dor Lakes, a large fresh & salt water lake that splits Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  Also some shots of a "tall ship" in Sydney (Cape Breton) Harbor.  Beautiful place to visit if you've never been.... not to mention some of the best seafood you'll ever eat.

Closest thing to Scotland that you'll find in North America, especially when you get up into Cape Breton Island.  Very strong Gaelic tradition, with still some of the original Acadian culture and even some French influences. Both of my parents were born there, so we spent a lot of summers traveling from New England to Nova Scotia.

 

 

My wife and I took our first trip together to Nova Scotia - it seemed so exotic to us...spent most the time in Cape Breton, including camping up at Meat Cove, where we didn't see another human for 24 hours, but did see an entire school of pilot whales swimming past in the morning...loved it so much we went back for our honeymoon and spent a week in Cape Breton.  Bras D'Or Lake was the only place I've ever seen a bald eagle in the wild...

 

C-Dawg, you should definitely go - it doesn't have to be an expensive trip.  There are B&B's all over Nova Scotia, and while it's a healthy drive, you can make a road trip out of it - it's only 8 or 9 hours from Portland, ME to Truro, NS, or you can take a ferry to Yarmouth (though I'd recommend avoiding the overnight one if you're susceptible to sea sickness - it may look like a cruise ship, but it rides like a canoe).  Most of the drive is in getting to Portland - so you can fly there, normally pretty cheaply, or road trip through Philly, NYC, Providence and Boston...

 

You can fly into Portsmouth (NH) now on Skybus and rent a car. They got a great, high-speed ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine to Yarmouth called the "Cat"; much smoother than the Portland ferry.  Or if you want to drive up the coast of Maine into Canada,  there's another ferry from St. John, New Brunswick to Digby (NS).

 

Riverviewer... took my wife there not long after we were married and she didn't want to leave once she saw the ocean.... and the lobsters.

Beautiful!

 

My parents visited there in the sixties or seventies, and I rescued Dad's slides when Mom was about to throw them out. They're safely archived, but I haven't yet had time to scan them.

They got a great, high-speed ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine to Yarmouth called the "Cat"; much smoother than the Portland ferry.

 

On our first trip there, we were supposed to take the Cat back, but that was September 1999, and Hurricane Floyd was running right up the Bay of Fundy...that's when we learned how long it took to drive from NS to Bar Harbor!

 

I feel like listening to the gentle grooves of Christopher Cross.... "sailing takes me away..."

Holy crap...I thought that hillside in the background was a giant wave heading for them.