Day 79... Mountains again!

Inverness to Pleasant Bay Cabot Highlands! 117km

(Danica) Breakfast!!! My favourite meal of the day and with a promise of bacon and coffee we were out of the tent in a flash. Quick couple of small hills and we arrived at our new friends place right on time. Mike and Francis were up and bacon was ready! They are the sweetest couple just so tickled pink to have us over. We got coffee (with French vanilla creme), bacon, eggs, local fresh bread and homemade strawberry jam. After a delightful hour visit we carried on down the road. Hope to run into them again one day next time they come to the Peaks. We went into the National Park after lunch where we got very excited for the upcoming mountains? Ok well maybe not excited but just happy to finally be at the world famous Cabot Trail. It's very famous for its hiking, camping, cross country skiing and scenic drive. The road loops the Cape Breton Island hugging the coast line for majority of the trail. There are three main mountain passes we found out from Mike and it is quite "a thing" to bike the Cabot trail. People come from all over to cycle this route as it is so famous in the bicyclist world. Who knew? Well, great, look what we got ourselves into now. We were going the clockwise way which is easier than the other way (thank god)... But to us it's the only way we know how, west to east. Don't turn around and don't look back! So today we tackled hill number one.. Il s'appelle French! But before we got to it we had three major but short up and downs. These taught us that this is a scenic route therefore the road can be at any grade... Whereas BC (go BC!) is all trucking routes and at the worst were 8% or 9%. French mountain arrived and had the meanest stupidest sign... French mountain 11% for 6km. Great! Heat of the day we made it up the hill in great time and definitely visited all the "breath taking" views on the way up. Half to catch our breath, half to see the view. At the top we saw Elliott the moose and then had a lovely, absolutely fantastic downhill into Pleasant Bay where we camped for the night. We had a lovely waterfall swim which was freezing cold all while staring at the base of our morning mountain climb... North Mountain! Good luck to us!