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All the tourists had made a fairly swift retreat, leaving a sudden, yet peaceful sort of emptiness in their wake.

They had crossed back over the causeway, their phones and iPads filled with enough pictures of fiddle players and famous fall colors to give them the Facebook likes they fancied. This beautiful island was all but abandoned now. Nights had gotten cooler, mornings frosty. The hardwood trees on the gently rolling hills of Cape Breton would soon bare their branches. The familiar sweet smell of decomposed leaves on the wet ground and change were in the air.

Cliché, I know, but seriously, how the hell else do you start a blog? ... This is my blog. I hope you like it... Nah. Besides, there's generally not much happening in Margaree at the end of October about which a fella might write.

So this is it. We went for a lot of walks, and this is the stuff we noticed on our walks. The trees, the quietness, the change of season, the echo of tunes. This, and enough coyote sh** to make a load of it in my dad's manure spreader. In fact, some of it was so big that we started carrying walking sticks to protect us (from the coyotes, not the sh**). If there was a lot of big sh** around, there was probably a lot of big coyotes, and there's nothing like an alder branch walking stick to fend off a pack of ravaging coyotes. In any case, I personally soaked in enough scenic rural family life over the last couple of months to get me through to the next time, which would always be soon.

Along with all of these geocentric rambles was a parallel change; the fact that my calendar looked as bleak as my bank account would, if we were to stick around. I had few gigs booked, and winter was looming like my next birthday, when I'd turn a year closer to possibly never being able to do something about this state of stagnation.

So in turning to the new "man's best friend," the Internet, I saw that the price of plane tickets looked good. Good, that is, until they would start quadrupling in price in less than a week.

We had five days to pack up our new little family.

- Seph Peters

Seph Peters is a 36-year-old musician from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. His blog chronicles the details of trying to move to Europe with his wife and 6 month-old, with minimal savings, on the false premise that it would be the same Europe he knew so well as a backpacker 15 to 20 years ago.