Should Bikers Drive to Meat Cove?
If you drive home from riding the Cabot Trail without driving to Meat Cove, it’s not the end of the world…er, um, well, Meat Cove is the end of the world. If you were able to keep a straight course, your next stop would be Spain.
Every bike trip gives you different weather and luck. If you have lots of luck and time, might be an option to take a drive there. It is a unique experience. If you haven’t ridden dirt since a teenager, you might get that feeling on the drive there! It is clearly advanced riding. Not hard to drive there, but you’re stopping on weird footing and angles, and turning around at the end is a banked 12′ wide turn. For that reason, I don’t recommend it to groups of riders, unless all are experienced and can handle their machines in slow, tight, gravelly conditions. There is only 5 miles of the gravel road after miles of pretty good pavement. On a trip around the Trail, going to Meat Cove and back on the Trail again will set you back a couple hours.
Here are some photos I took the day I shot the video. It was in September, on a spectacular fall day. Out of a group of 13 bikers, 2 of us made the trip down the dirt road. In the first photo below, you can see Meat Cove in the background. It was great for the boys to join us for the drive to Bay St. Lawrence. This excursion, along with White Point, are two options for paved excursions off the main Cabot Trail.
If you’ve been, please help the next biker by saying whether it is a place not to be missed, or just a place to dirty the bike…
Someone wrote me once after dropping and scratching their brand new Goldwing. He said it was silly to have gone down because similar views are all over the Cabot Trail itself.