My days on a trip to Cape Breton are usually so jam packed from start to finish with travelling, hiking, photographing, visiting, eating, and attending musical events that I frequently have little to no free time. Because I have found that, once home, the trip seems to be mostly a blur, I have made it my practice in recent years to write brief but fairly detailed time-stamped notes on my iPhone as the day transpires so as to be able to fully recall the events of the day at a much later remove. In the few odd moments I have waiting for events to begin or food to arrive at my table, I try to catch up on any notes I haven’t recorded and then to recast those notes into a coherent trip post. On this first trip, I did pretty well up until KitchenFest! started, though by then the posts were already nearly a week behind; from then to the end of the trip, I fell so far behind that the 3 July post was made on 15 July. So, for this trip, the posts up through 3 July, a portion of that for 4 July, and the final two posts were written relatively close to the days described (a footnote indicates when an account posted during the trip after the day on which the events described occurred—their writing would likely have occurred on the day(s) preceding and certainly on the day of the posting). The remainder of the posts were constructed from my notes here at home in April of 2018. Throughout the trip, however, I did post to Facebook photos taken on the fly during each day both as proof to my family that I was still alive (a concern for them given my age and my habit of usually hiking alone) as well as to share what I saw and experienced with those who were not so lucky: some days, those photos were few in number and other days they were plentiful; I have incorporated those photos¹ into these accounts.

¹ Because the iPhone makes it easy to share photos on Facebook, all of these photos were taken with the camera on my then new iPhone7 Plus, which offers a significant improvement over my previous iPhone6s Plus; it amazes me how well this tiny camera and its software perform, sometimes even equalling the performance of my Nikon D5100 DSLR, though as often not even close. A number of these photos are of mediocre quality at best: photos that seemed, on the small screen, to be acceptable for posting often reveal serious imperfections at the larger sizes shown in these pages. Some of the problems I caused, e.g., by failing to hold the iPhone steady or properly, so I do not mean to blame the poor quality all on the camera—the photographer deserves a goodly share of the blame. I have nonetheless chosen to retain these photos in these pages as they were the ones I posted at the time.↩