Traveling with the Jones

In recent decades, Cape Breton Island, part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, has developed a significant tourism industry. We’ve visited this island several times via a cruise ship call at the port of Sydney, and wanted to learn more.

30 Fun Facts About Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada

1. Cape Breton Island is the northeastern portion of Nova Scotia, Canada’s second smallest province. The island covers 3,981 square miles and has a population of 135,974 (as of 2011.) “Cape Bretoners” or “Capers” make up about 15 percent of the provincial population of Nova Scotia.

2. The 110-mile-long island is mostly hilly and forested, rising to 1,745 feet above sea level at the Cape Breton Highlands.

3. Bras d’Or Lake, one of the world’s largest saltwater tidal lakes, covers 425 square miles at the center of Cape Breton Island.  

4. Cape Breton Island is separated from the rest of the Nova Scotia province and the Canadian mainland by 2-mile-wide Strait of Canso. A 130-ft wide, rock-filled Canso Causeway–constructed in 1955–allows two-way vehicle traffic and a single railway track to reach Cape Breton Island from the Nova Scotia peninsula.

5. Despite the Causeway, Cape Breton Island remains a true island thanks to the Canso Canal that allows ships to transit the Strait of Canso. A 308-ft swing bridge carries the road and railway line across the canal.

6. Cape Breton Island’s first residents were likely ancestors of the Mí’kmaq native people who were inhabiting the island at the time of European arrival.

7. Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot reportedly visited the island during his 1497-98 voyage. Although historians debate whether Cabot first visited Cape Breton Island or Newfoundland, Cabot’s discovery is commemorated on Cape Breton Island with Cabot Trail, a 185-mile scenic roadway around the northern part of the island.

8. The island — a French possession from 1632 to 1763 — was known as “Ile Royale” or Royal Island to the French.

9. “Ile Royale” grew in population after the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht under which France ceded it colonies on Newfoundland and the Acadian mainland to the British.  The French population of Plaisance, Newfoundland relocated to Ile Royale. 

10. Starting with a fishing settlement in 1713, the French constructed the Fortress of Louisbourg between 1720 and 1740. Known for exporting fish and cod-liver oil, Louisbourg became North America’s the third busiest port (after Boston and Philadelphia.)

11. British colonists captured the Fortress of Louisbourg in 1745, but it was returned to the French in exchange for European border towns (that are today a part of Belgium.)

12. During the Seven Years’ War, British forces once again captured Louisbourg in the Siege of Louisbourg which ended with a French surrender in 1758. The British then used the fortress as a launching point for its 1759 Siege of Quebec.

13. In 1760, British engineers systematically destroyed the fortifications at Louisbourg to prevent any future use of the town and port by the French. Some of the cut-stones from Louisbourg were shipped to Halifax to be re-used and, in the 1780s, to Sydney, Nova Scotia.

14. Starting in 1961, the Canadian government started a project to recreate 1740’s Louisbourg. The work required a team archaeologists, historians, engineers, and architects. The reconstruction was aided by unemployed Cape Breton coal miners who learned 1740’s French masonry techniques, and utilized as many original stones as possible.

15. Today, Parks Canada operates the Fortress of Louisbourg as a living history museum, attracting about 90,000 visitors per year.

16. Under The Treaty of Paris, also known as the Treaty of 1763, Ile Royale was formally ceded to the United Kingdom under the Treaty of Paris.  The British attached Cape Breton to Nova Scotia and governed the island from Halifax.

17. In 1784 Cape Breton became a separate with British crown colony with Sydney as its capital and Joseph Frederick Wallet DesBarres as its first Lieutenant-Governor.

18. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 to end the American Revolution, a number of Loyalist soldiers and civilians emigrated from New York City the Canadian colonies. Loyalist David Mathews, former Mayor of New York City, immigrated with his family to Cape Breton in 1783. Mathews served as interim administrator of Cape Breton colony between 1795 and 1798. 

19. In 1820, the colony of Cape Breton Island was merged with Nova Scotia for the second time.

20. Between 1800 and 1850, during Scotland’s Highland Clearances, as many as 50,000 Highland Scots immigrated to Cape Breton Island. These immigrants brought traditional fiddle music with them from Scotland.

21. Céilidhs (gatherings with musicians playing Gaelic folk music and dancing) are popular on Cape Breton Island.  The Celtic Music Interpretive Center in Judique works to preserve and promote the traditional Celtic music on the island.

22. Cape Breton Island’s two major coal deposits drove much of its economy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The coal-mining and related steel mill industries tied to the Sydney Coal Field were the largest private employers in Canada from the late 1800’s until after World War II.

23. The coal-mining town of Glace Bay got its name from the annual drift ice (glace) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Major coal mining operations began in 1858 and continued into the 1980s. Glace Bay was also the hub of the Sydney & Louisburg Railway and a major fishing port.  As its economically-feasible coal seams were exhausted, coal mining output declined rapidly during the 1960s. Today Glace Bay is home to a miners’ museum and a replica of a 19th-century miners’ village.

24. In 1885, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell acquired land on Cape Breton Island near Baddeck overlooking the Bras d’Or Lake. The area reminded him of his childhood years in Scotland. Bell established a summer estate with research laboratories, where he continued to experiment with hydrofoil technologies, powered flight, sheep breeding and numerous other scientific inventions. Helen Keller was a visitor.

25. Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission, used Cape Breton Island’s geography to his advantage. In 1902, he transmitted the first transatlantic wireless radio message from a station in Glace Bay to a receiving station in Cornwall, England.

26. The Royal Canadian Navy used Marconi’s Glace Bay station as its chief communications center during World War I and World War II. Today visitors can learn how Marconi’s work helped usher in the age of global communications at the Marconi National Historic Site in Glace Bay.

27. In 1995 Glace Bay lost its status as a town when it was combined with the city of Sydney and five other towns into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). Approximately 75% of the island’s population resides within the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.

28. In the 1890’s when a doctor ordered fresh air and rest for his ailing wife Julia, rubber industrialist Henry Clay Corson of Akron, Ohio bought land on Cape Breton Island at Ingonish. The Corsons built an opulent summer home that they christened Keltic Lodge. Her health recovered, Julia outlived her husband. In 1936 she sold the property to the Canadian government as it was creating the Cape Breton Highlands National Park nearby. The government turned Keltic Lodge into luxury resort and world-class golf course.

29. Open from June to October each year since 1940, the Keltic Lodge is adjacent to the 18-hole Highlands Links Golf Course, ranked as one of Canada’s best.

30. Five different cultures are found on Cape Breton Island: Scottish, English, Acadian, Irish and Mi’kmaq. English is the primary language, while Mi’kmaq, Scottish Gaelic and Acadian French are still spoken in some communities.

Read more about Cape Breton Island: 

Hiking Trails of Cape Breton, 2nd Edition

The Oak Island Mystery, Solved
The island of Cape Breton: its history, scenery and resources

What interesting fact can you add about Cape Breton Island? Please share in comments below, or interact with us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

Check out these other fun facts posts:

• 33 Fun Facts About Prince Edward Island, Canada
• 14 Fun Facts About Quebec City, Canada
• 15 Fun Facts About Halifax, Nova Scotia
• 17 Fun Facts About Ghent, Belgium
• 20 Fun Facts About Antwerp, Belgium
• 20 Fun Facts About Panama City, Panama

 

In anticipation of an upcoming visit to Saint Lucia, we wanted to learn more about this sovereign island country in the Caribbean. It is located between the Caribbean Sea and North Atlantic Ocean, northwest of Barbados and south of Martinique.

26 Interesting and Fun Facts About Saint Lucia

1. Covering 238.23 square miles, Saint Lucia is three and a half times the size of Washington, DC. The island is 27 miles long and 14 miles across at its widest point.

2. About 165,000 people live in St. Lucia, most around the coastal perimeter of the mountainous island. About 60,000 people live in or near Castries, the capital city on the northern part of the island.

3. Saint Lucia is said to be named after Saint Lucy of Syracuse by French sailors who were shipwrecked on the island on the Saint’s feast day of December 13th.

4. Saint Lucia is the world’s only country named after a woman.

5. The French were the island’s first European settlers. They signed a treaty with the native Carib Indians in 1660.

6. England took control of the island from 1663 to 1667.

7. France and England fought over Saint Lucia throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries with possession changing 14 times between the two countries. Because it switched so often between British and French control, Saint Lucia was also known as the “Helen of the West Indies“.

8. In 1814, the British took definitive control of the island.

9. From 1958 to 1962, the island was a member of the Federation of the West Indies. On February 22, 1979, Saint Lucia became an independent state of the Commonwealth of Nations associated with the United Kingdom.

10. As a Commonwealth realm, Saint Lucia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and shares Queen Elizabeth the II as its head of state and reigning constitutional monarch, but retains a crown legally distinct from the other 15 realms. (Australia, Canada, Jamaica, Tuvalu, Barbados and the United Kingdom are some of the other Commonwealth realms.)

11. As the Head of State of Saint Lucia, Queen Elizabeth II is represented on the island by an appointed Governor-General. Dame Pearlette Louisy, who took office on September 17, 1997, is the current Governor-General of Saint Lucia.

12. The Government House, located on the crest of Morne Fortune near Castries, is the official residence of the Governor-General of Saint Lucia.

13. Although slavery was abolished on it plantations in 1834, Saint Lucia remained an agricultural island focused on producing sugarcane.  In 1964, sugarcane fields were converted to banana production. Today bananas are the island’s principal agricultural crop, along with the production of coconuts, cacao, citrus, spices, cassava, yams, and a steady fishing industry.

14. Tourism — developed rapidly since 1970 — is vital to Saint Lucia’s economy. The largest number of visitors to Saint Lucia arrive by cruise ship.

15. Saint Lucia’s currency is the East Caribbean Dollar, a regional currency shared among members of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECU). $1 U.S. dollar is worth about 2.70 XCD (Eastern Caribbean Dollars.)

16. While English is the official language of Saint Lucia, Saint Lucian Creole French (Kwéyòl) or Patois (“Patwa”) is spoken by 95 percent of the population.

17. More mountainous than most Caribbean islands, St. Lucia is of volcanic origin.  Rising to 3,145 feet, Mount Gimie is the island’s highest point among a ridge of wooded mountains bisecting the island from north to south.

18. Two other mountains form the Pitons, St. Lucia’s most famous landmark and UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Gros and Petit Pitons are two rock pyramids rising sharply from the sea and enclosing a small bay. They are linked by the Piton Mitan ridge.

19. Piton beer is a local pilsner lager named for the Gros Piton and Petit Piton mountains. While the Piton beer brand is owned by Heineken, it is brewed in brewed in Saint Lucia and commands more that 50 percent of the island’s lager beer market share.

20. The town of Soufrière — French for sulfur — takes its name from the boiling Sulphur Springs in the crater of an ancient volcano near Petit Piton.

21. An upheaval of lava through a weak spot in a collapsed crater 410,000 years ago created the Sulpher Springs. At their center, scalding hot boiling water creates large plumes of steam. The water coming out of the springs is blackened by a reaction between the sulfur and iron.

22. Promoted as the “world’s only drive in volcano,” tourists can literally drive up to the edge of Sulpher Springs. Up until the mid-1990s, tourists were able to walk right up to the end of the tar-colored pits. This changed after a local guide named Gabriel fell through the crust into a pit and was burned. Now, visitors are restricted to viewing “Gabriel’s Hole” from a platform a few hundred feet away.

23. The Saint Lucia Jazz Festival each May draws visitors and musicians from around the world. The Festival’s grand finale takes place on Pigeon Island, located north of the main island of St. Lucia.

24. Saint Lucia’s cuisine includes flavors from West Africa, Great Britain, France and East India. Hearty fish soups, macaroni pie, and stewed chicken are popular dishes. Common ingredients include potatoes, onions, celery, thyme, coconut milk, spicy scotch bonnet peppers, flour and cornmeal.

25. The island is also home to fried or baked dough referred to as ‘Johnny Cake’ and often served with salt fish sauteed with peppers and onions.

26. With two Nobel prize winners, Saint Lucia boasts the world’s second highest ratio of Nobel laureates compared to the total population. Sir Arthur Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979, and poet Derek Walcott received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

Learn more about Saint Lucia with these resources:

 
Insight Guides: Pocket St Lucia (Insight Pocket Guides)
St. Lucia Dive Map & Reef Creatures Guide Franko Maps Laminated Fish Card

What fun fact about St. Lucia can you add to this list?

Please share your thoughts in comments below, or by interacting with us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

Check out these other Fun Facts posts:

• 18 Fun Facts About Half Moon Cay, Bahamas

• 33 Fun Facts About Turks and Caicos Islands

• 10 Fun Facts About Saint Martin

• 30 Fun Facts About Montreal, Canada

• 10 Fun Facts About Nevis

In July, we spent the last night of our 3-night post-cruise visit in the Netherlands at the new Hilton Amsterdam Schiphol Airport hotel. As with previous stays, we find this airport hotel very convenient for a 1-night stay before a morning flight out of Amsterdam’s busy Schiphol airport.

The reverse is also true: the new hotel is an oasis for travelers with late-night arrivals into Schiphol.

To reach the Hilton hotel, you just follow the signs along an enclosed walkway from the baggage claim area of the Schiphol airport.

Alternatively, if you are transferring to the hotel from downtown Amsterdam, your driver will deliver you to the hotel’s front door.

In our case, we used Uber to transport us from the Hilton Amsterdam Hotel (where we had stayed two nights) to the Hilton airport hotel for our last night in Amsterdam.

When you first walk into the new Hilton Amsterdam hotel at Schiphol airport, the light draws your eyes upward where you can see the sky through a glass roof.

Once checked into our room, we took a moment to look down over the hotel lobby. In the upper left-hand corner of the photo above you can see the Axis Lobby & Cocktail Bar, where we later enjoyed a light meal and cocktails.

Axis is clearly not your standard airport hotel bar, as evidenced by the detailed Gin and Jenever menu that includes gin tasting flights. It’s nice to experience a little Dutch culture at the airport.

We stayed in a King Executive Room, with access to the 11th floor Executive Lounge. The rooms have a bright, contemporary design.

Each detail, whether the desk or the sitting area or the corner coffee station are designed with a frequent traveler’s needs in mind. Yet the stylish decor is far from your standard airport hotel.

While the view from our room’s diamond-shaped windows showed just how close we were to Schiphol’s busy runways, we could not hear a sound. Excellent sound-proofing is invaluable when you only have a few hours for sleeping before an early flight.

Another surprise: behind the gold door was a sizable bathroom, compared to most airport hotels.

Complete with an over-sized glassed-enclosed shower, complete with a rain head.

If this shower doesn’t provide enough stress relief, the hotel also offers a full range of massages, facials and other treatments at the Eforea Spa.

Or guests can fit in a workout at the hotel’s 24-hour Fitness Center.

We also appreciated the art throughout the public spaces of the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol hotel.

Impressive bouquets of colorful, fresh flowers are another reminder that you are in the Netherlands, the world’s flower trading powerhouse. The world’s largest flower market is at Aalsmeer, a Dutch town only eight miles from Amsterdam.

After a good night’s sleep, we walked about 15 minutes via the enclosed walkway from the Hilton hotel directly into the Schiphol Airport to catch our departing flight. It was a relaxing experience compared to leaving a downtown hotel in the early dawn hours to reach the airport.

Staying at the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel with Hilton HHonors Points

We stayed at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel using Hilton HHonors Points. As a Category 7 hotel, a single night costs 30,000-60,000 Hilton HHonors points, depending on the time of year as well as supply versus demand. Even at the high end of this point range, we consider this hotel to be a good use of HHonors points.

Our bottom line on the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel:

• The hotel has a terrific location for travelers arriving into Amsterdam Schiphol late in the evening or needing to depart on an early morning flight. From the airport arrivals area, you simply walk to the hotel via an enclosed walkway by following signs to the Hilton hotel.
• The new hotel features stunning design and contemporary decor with all of the latest amenities.
• The Executive Lounge provides terrific views for enjoying evening appetizers and cocktails. Breakfast is offered to Hilton Diamond members in the lounge or in at the first floor Bowery Restaurant.
• The soundproofing at this hotel, crucial for one so close to a busy airport, is impeccable.
• The only downside we found was that hotel temperature was a little warm for a sunny, July day.

Have you stayed in the new Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel? How would you rate it?

For a look inside more hotel rooms, check out these posts:

• A Look Inside the Hilton Belfast Hotel
• A Look Inside the JW Marriott Marquis Miami Hotel
• A Peek Inside the Renaissance New Orleans Arts Hotel
• A Look Inside the Renaissance Fort Lauderdale Cruise Port Hotel
• A Look Inside the Cotton House Hotel, Barcelona

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