First, I should tell you that our main reason for going to Sydney was that the guys have a buddy, George, that lives there. However, after we'd already been on the road for a while Shooby got a call from George saying he was in Halifax for the weekend. Argh. LOL.
Anyway, let's just say that none of us was overly impressed with what we saw of Cape Breton. Admittedly we never went up north to the park or anything, but after a 4.5 hour drive we were slightly annoyed with where we ended up. Especially since we'd been told it was more like 3 hours. Grrrrr.
Sydney is a pretty small place, with not a whole lot going on. They do have a fantastic new visitor center (mainly for the cruise ships), but as far as touristy stuff to do there wasn't much. We arrived in the evening so our main goal was to get a hotel...which we did, but wound up with like the last two rooms in town and they were smelly smoking rooms. (We are part-time smokers, but that doesn't mean we enjoy the smell of it permeating our room...blech!) We took the advice of the hotel staff and tried out a restaurant not far away....it was mediocre at best, but obviously considered one of the better places in town.
The city had some sort of festival wrapping up that night, so there was to be a concert down by the water called Rock the Dock. This concert consisted of 3 cover bands....one for CCR, one for AC/DC, one for Bon Jovi. We actually thought this might be fun, but at $25 for just over 2 hours we decided we'd just rather spend our money at a bar or two.
As an aside... a couple of the training vessels from Halifax were in port and we contemplated trying to get on board for the cocktail party they were having... but alas the boys weren't in uniform so it wouldn't be acceptable. Sigh. How fun would that have been to crash their party?!
So instead we got drunk. Cuz apparently that's what you do in Cape Breton. The cab driver took us to a place called Daniel's. It was scary upon arrival, but they served White Russians for under $4 so we were happy for the moment. Almost immediately we were accosted by an overly friendly local guy that loved to talk.... thank God he didn't last long. But then he was replaced by another overly friendly guy from Yarmouth. He was annoying but not as oddball as the first dude. This led to us being invited to sit with the guy and a huge table of women. The women were all mothers/daughters/inlaws and it turned out they didn't even know the guy....they just happened to need extra seats and this guy offered up his. Ah well, only in Cape Breton!
We were having good fun with these ladies, so when a few of them decided to head to another bar they invited us to go along. In the spirit of the evening we said what the hell and followed along. It was called the Steel Steak or the Steel PorkChop or some bloody thing. It was a hole....but we found it fairly entertaining just hanging out with these CB ladies.
By about 1:30 or so we were figuring on shutting it down, but nooooooo.....Sydney's biggest bar is open until like 3 or 4am! So off to Smooth Herman's we go. This place is friggin huge! and expensive to get in to....cuz the band playing is actually famous or something...no that I remember who it was because after we paid the $15 cover charge the band finished like 15 mins later. Anyway, we hung out for a bit, but since none of us was interested in picking up a CB hoochie (well, I don't think the boys were, but maybe they just didn't tell me!) we decided to head out. After a long while chatting with the ladies and thanking them for showing us the Sydney bar scene we ended up walking back to our hotel. There had been about a hundred billion cabs, but all of a sudden there were none.
Saturday morning, we left. Straight outta town and headed for Louisburg. Didn't even stop for breaky until we'd been on the road for a while. We needed something touristy and war related to make Cape Breton worth our while. LOL.
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