He was born in Edinburgh Scotland but his family moved to Ontario Canada after his two brothers died of TB and his health was failing. After moving to Ontario his health recovered. He lived in other places. Including Washington D.C., before finally settling just across the water on about 600 acres from Baddeck. He named his home Beinn Bhreagh (means Beautiful Mountain in Scottish Gaelic). It is still owned by family members but is not open to the public.
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| Copied photo of his home |
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| Copy of the Hydrofoil |
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| The airplane |
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| Scale model of Hydrofoil |
We were not aware of all the inventions, research and teaching he was involved in. All we had ever heard was his part in the invention of the telephone. His passion was teaching the deaf to communicate. That is how he met his wife, Mabel who was deaf. He was involved in the first airplane flight in Canada, hydrofoil boats, air conditioning, schools for the deaf, and a very long list of other endeavors. One of the employees that gave a brief as we went in said that he was never interested in the money from his work, just that everything he did was for the benefit of mankind. He even did a lot of research on how to develop sheep that would have twins so the farmer could benefit.
We stopped in town for a sandwich before returning to the campground.
We had our driver's meeting at 7PM for our trip tomorrow. We only drive about 66 miles but we have a 6 hour ferry ride over to Newfoundland.
Day 33 Friday July 12, 2019 We had a short drive this morning of 39 miles to the Marine Atlantic Ferry for our 6 hour ferry ride over to Newfoundland. We arrived at the ferry parking lot about 9:15AM, checked in but we did not board the ferry until after 11AM. There were a lot of vehicles to load onto the ferry. We were able to load without unhooking the toad since we drove onto the ferry from bow and will drive off the aft. It was a VERY tight squeeze with all of us large motorhomes. There was just a few inches between each motorhome and they had to park us in staggered positions so we could get our doors open to get out once we were parked. You are not allowed to stay in the motorhome once you are parked. We went to the 7 deck were they had nice seating, a coffee bar and a dining room and free WIFI. We entered a new Timezone after the ferry departed and we jumped ahead ½ hour, that's correct, we jumped ahead ½ hour. We are in St. John's Newfoundland time zone per our phones. The ferry is similar to a mini-cruise ship and there is one floor of sleeping cabins. We will be on an overnight ferry when we leave the island and we will have a sleeping cabin.
We arrived at 6:45 PM and was soon allowed to drive off and head to our campground, Grand Codroy RV Park 25 miles down the road. We were assigned site 26, which was a nice full hookup site, that was level and had hard packed gravel so for a change we did not need to put board under our tires to get level. This is one of the two nicest campgrounds we have been to so far and it also has view of a lake off to our right and view of the mountains with snow still on the mountain behind us. The campground staff did a great job of getting us to our sites without much delay considering all 25 of us got here just minutes apart. We normally try to stagger our arrival at a campground but with everyone getting off the ferry about the same time and only 25 miles to drive we were kind of bunched up on arrival.
We have noticed since arriving in Nova Scotia and now in Newfoundland that the road signs are almost all in English. Some in Nova Scotia were dual language but I don't think we will see much more of those, as there appear to be much fewer French speaking people in this part of Canada. Another thing we have noticed is most home have a basement.
Our Wagonmasters told us last night that the Newfoundlanders are extremely proud of their heritage and crime is almost nonexistent here. They said for example, the fishermen take their lobster traps out of the water when the seasons ends (it ended a few days ago) and just stack them along side the road and no-one bothers them and then when the season reopens they just picked them up and take them back to their boats. A lot of the homes are heated with wood in the Winter and the people stack their firewood along side the road across the ditch and no one bother is. And since the land is basically rock there is very little topsoil so the residents plant small vegetable garden plots along the road in the topsoil that is brought in to build the roads. Many power line poles have to be supported with a box built around the base loaded down with rock.
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| Road side garden |
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