It started as a rainy morning and the rain would continue all day and all night. After breakfast and cleaning up, we left Whycocomagh in search of the Baddeck refuse transfer center. Why were we going to the dump?
On Monday afternoon, Ellen finally had the chance to get out her Macbook and work on some photo albums for the journal. When we setting it up, we noticed that it was not sitting flat. Upon further inspection, I found that the back was swelling. This was not a good sign. It meant the battery was swelling, possibly making for a dangerous situation. One possibility was that it could catch fire, not a good thing in the van. We decided to discard it as soon as possible.
As soon as Ellen was done and we saved the photo albums to our website, I started backing up everything on the computer. Fortunately, we had brought along an external drive and it had room to clone the laptop’s file system. It took most of the evening to backup and erase everything.
The Baddeck RTF has a special electronics drop off site and it was on our route, so we stopped and left the now useless Macbook. Ellen will be getting a new one sooner than she expected.
After Baddeck, it was a slow drive through the rain and fog to North Sydney and the ferry terminal. We were able to get a booking for Wednesday at noon, with the option of waiting in the “early departure” lane for the overnight ferry. We went off to do laundry and food shopping and returned to the terminal at 5:30. The woman checking us in said we would be able to go on the overnight ferry, but then made an error. She directed us to the wrong lane. We were in the early departure lane, which is for standby vehicles. We didn’t know it was the standby lane; we didn’t realize we had a confirmed reservation for the night ferry; we were the second vehicle in line.
Five hours later, after they had loaded the ferry, they got to our lane and only one vehicle, the one in front of us was able to get on. Disappointed, we moved over to the first lane for morning booked reservations and went to bed. About 30 minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was one of the ferry workers. She said that the ferry had been held up while they searched for us as we had a reservation and checked in for this sailing and we couldn’t be found on board. I explained what had happened and she was very apologetic, but it was now too late. I also had to go back into the terminal and rebook for the next sailing, Wednesday at noon.
So it was overnight in the terminal parking lot with an idling truck in the next lane. It is still raining and is expected to continue for several days…and it is blowing 20kts, gusting to 45 in the Cabot Strait. Should be an interesting voyage.
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