A whale of a good time in Nova Scotia

— -- Best experience: A vacation trip to Cape Breton Island at the tip of Nova Scotia stands out in my mind for what it lacked. During the week-long jaunt in August at the height of tourist season, we never hit a traffic jam — unless you count the pods of pilot whales that followed our Zodiac in Pleasant Bay, veering so close we recoiled from the fishy stench of their breath.

We never saw a fast-food joint — though I savor the memory of tearing into a 2-pound lobster on the back porch of a shack at Belle Cote harbor. We encountered no crowds — save for a standing-room-only performance by renowned fiddler Buddy MacMaster at the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou.

We stayed out late listening to live Acadian music in roadhouses and rose early to hike high coastal bluffs. We never felt threatened, except when we stumbled across a moose along the Skyline Trail in Highlands National Park. But he just glared and moved on. Other than that, the natives were unfailingly welcoming in a place that, to us, was a happy throwback to another time.

Worst experience: In a year when U.S. flights were notably tardy, timely departures were a crapshoot even on the best of days. But a snowstorm in March created its own special hell as I waited to board a 9 a.m. non-stop flight from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles.

My fellow passengers and I were held hostage on the tarmac for five hours or so, with an hour off for good behavior when we were allowed back into the terminal. When we reboarded the plane, we'd lost our slot in the departure line. Finally around 2 p.m., the pilot announced the flight was canceled, triggering a fall-of-Saigon-like stampede to the ticket counter.

I arrived in Los Angeles — via Seattle — at around 2 a.m., in time to catch a few hours of sleep at a hotel before returning to the airport at 7 a.m. for a flight to Mexico.

It was delayed.

Most unexpected experience: They're rare. They're elusive. And so, of course I assumed seeing polar bears in the wild, as I did in October near Churchill, Manitoba, would be memorable. But I was unprepared for the raw thrill these magnificent creatures would elicit as we tourists stared, like caged animals, from the confines of our tundra buggy into the bears' vast, frozen world.