Category: Ottawa to PEI 2014

It’s been a week since we left PEI. I think maybe I’m drawing out the blogging of our vacation so I can continue to relive it in real time. We haven’t really left until the blog posts are done, right?

You might remember that through a fluke of good timing our departure was conveniently scheduled for the very day Hurricane Arthur was skimming its way up the Atlantic coast toward the Maritimes. As we regretfully packed up the car and headed back across the Island to the Confederation Bridge and then across the southern boundary of New Brunswick, we kept a wary eye on the (generally benign) summer skies. Interestingly, the temperature plummeted 10C and fog rolled in as we passed through St John, and then just as abruptly burned off again as we continued on toward the border at Saint Stephen.

We’d chosen that route, as opposed to Google Map’s suggestion to cross at Houlton, Maine and zip down the I-95, because I hate to backtrack, and the idea of driving all the way back to Woodstock NB, where we had stayed our first night, and then continuing for two more hours on to Skowhegan Maine down the interstate seemed unnecessary repetition. What I didn’t account for is how desolate the highway is through Maine from Calais to Bangor – yikes! Very little cellular reception, lots of abandoned and derelict properties, and not a soul on the roads. With a hurricane pending. You can imagine our discomfort. Also, while the drive on the New Brunswick side of the border seemed a lot less, um, downtrodden, it was pretty much the same as every NB highway I’ve seen – trees, trees and more trees. No offense to my friends who live in or hail from New Brunswick, but something about the province just makes me itch to be able to get through it more quickly. Maybe that’s why the speed limit is 110 km/h?

Regardless, we made it to Bangor just as the rain started, and made it on to Skowhegan without much more ado. Of course, having arrived on Independence Day made it a bit more challenging to find an open place for dinner, but when we did stumble across the Whit’s End Bar & Grill (thank you Trip Advisor!) we found an excellent family restaurant with fantastic fried haddock. Yum!

With not much else to do, the rain becoming more insistent and a few hours to kill until bedtime, we entertained ourselves in the tiny convenience store appended to a gas station where we marveled over the selection of American candy. No, we don’t get out much. Beloved found candy for grown-ups too: a whole selection of Duck Commander wine! You find all the classiest treats in the gas bar!

Another thing I learned on this trip is that you get better service and a greater willingness to accommodate families of five travelers in smaller motels than in the big chains. The Belmont Motel was cheap, clean and more than willing to offer up a cot for an extra child into a room with two queen beds, and cheaper by half than the Best Western that would officially only accommodate four of us. Plus the owner and his cat were both charmers.

By Saturday morning, we all just wanted to be back home. The soggy remnants of Hurricane Arthur ensured a constant driving rain, although no significant winds in our neck of the woods at least, and the wet grey morning perfectly matched my mood as Tim Horton’s failed to deliver a restaurant in Skowhegan that was clearly indicated on the Timmy Me app. Luckily for everyone but me, there was a WalMart with a Dunkin Donuts directly across from the motel, so our most basic coffee needs were met and Beloved managed to collect some of his favourite American sugar bomb cereals to bring home.

The last lesson we learned on the way home is to be careful when travelling through rural Maine and following a printout of Google Maps because of the spotty cellular coverage that you don’t veer left when you were supposed to forge ahead. Although we had passed a few signs assuring us the Canadian border was less than 50 miles ahead, when we’d driven for more than an hour up and then down and then up again on twisty mountain roads and we suddenly found ourselves in Hillbilly Hills, New Hampshire instead of Canada but still with no cellular signal – well, you can imagine our dismay. This is the route we should have followed.

This is the route we actually followed, which added not the optimistic 30 minutes that Google Maps supposes, but I’m guessing at least 90 minutes to the full trip.

The good news is that our little detour was truly gorgeous – we passed Sugarloaf, the Green Mountaints and the Dixville Notch (population 12) as well as endless hunting and fishing camps, but alarmingly few gas stations and other signs of civilization. And did I mention no cellular signal? Yeah. We did see a moose, though, so that was kind of cool!

Sadly, he didn’t know the way to Canada, either. Eventually, blessedly, we picked up a signal and oriented ourselves to a small border crossing at Canaan, which may have been in either New Hampshire or Vermont – by that time, I’d lost track. We pointed ourselves in that direction, figured out the most direct route, and promptly got stuck in Colebrook NH as we tried to turn on to Route 3 N, aka Main Street Colebrook, and got stuck watching their Independence Day parade, delayed by a day by Hurricane Arthur. Vexed yet AGAIN by a hurricane! So that added another good 20 – 30 minutes to the trip, but by that time all we could do was laugh. Well, Beloved and I laughed. The kids were not nearly so amused by the parade as one might have expected. Even kid nerves can be worn a little thin by excessive amounts of travel delays and mishaps, I guess.

We did eventually make it back into Canada, and were delighted by the four bars of cellular access and the wide, flat, well-populated highways of the Eastern Townships. Such amazingly gorgeous countryside that is – and all we wanted to do was zip through it as fast as the speed limit would carry us. We finally did make it home about two hours later than I’d estimated leaving the motel in Skowhagen, but we made it intact and without serious mishap.

And hey, it’s all good when it makes for good bloggy fodder, right?

When I was endlessly googling PEI cottage rentals in the cold dark heart of winter, there was a very short list of things I wanted to get out of our PEI vacation and at the top of that list was morning coffee watching the sun rise over the ocean.

Pretty much exactly like this:

And then Tristan and I walked down our personal, private beach for a while, admiring the islands and the rocks and the unbelievable quiet of just the water lapping the red sand shores and the birds. It’s a good day when you get your to-do list accomplished by 9 am. It was a little early to call it a day, though, so we decided to go on a bit of a drive following an agenda mostly comprising “which way?” “Um, how about that way?” “Sure!”

Our first stop conveniently checked another item off the mental to-do list: Panmure Island and its 161 year old lighthouse, the oldest wooden lighthouse in PEI.

It was worth the $12 family rate to climb the stairs up the five floors to the top. Our guide Leona was the daughter of a man who was the lighthouse keeper for 35 years and she shared lots of interesting tidbits from how the lighthouse worked in the days before electricity (it involved a process I didn’t quite follow involving a bowl of mercury, a flame, a magnifying glass and weights that slowly lowered to keep the light turning through the night), shipwrecks, and the life of a lighthouse keeper.

We all made it to the top!

We coffeed up in Montague (one of only two Timmies on this side of the Island!) and headed on to Georgetown. At first we were a little underwhelmed by Georgetown, although it does have a lovely little waterfront park.

And then we discovered Shoreline Designs and had one of my favourite PEI experiences so far. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but if you travel to this end of PEI you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t stop in for a browse in Peter Llewellyn’s workshop. He crafts the most beautiful jewellery and art from seaglass, silver and PEI’s red rocks. He started talking to Tristan and before we knew it, Tristan was getting a lesson in how to hammer copper. Then we were invited into his back workshop where he showed us how he refines PEI’s red sandstone to give it a granite-like shine. He picked up a piece off his worktable and showed us the fossils and sediment lines, then handed it to Beloved told him to keep it. He started describing how you can put it in the microwave to heat it up and use it as a hot rock for sore muscles, and when I joked that he was trying to get me to blow up my microwave he took it back and demonstrated how it not only holds but retains the heat. While we chatted amiably with Peter, Lucas petted his patient old black dog on the porch. We left with huge smiles, hammered silver rings for the big boys, a new copper and silver cuff for me, lessons in metallurgy and geology, and the feeling that we’d found one of the best treasures on the Island.

(He has an online store – check him out for affordable and incredibly beautiful handcrafted jewellery!)

My friend Sarah had shared her favourite PEI vacations with me over coffee one day, and one recommendation she’d made was PEI National Park. The idea of dunes, boardwalks and ocean beaches was more than enough to lure us up to the north side of the Island. On the way, we stopped for lunch in the picture-perfect community of St Peter’s Bay. We noticed a place called Rick’s Fish and Chips seemed to have quite a few cars in the parking lot, a good sign of a local favourite, so we made our way in. To our delight, we found out that Rick’s had been featured in the Food Network show Ya Gotta Eat Here a few years ago – another show I watch a lot at the gym when Chef Michael Smith isn’t on. 😉 The menu helpfully points to the seafood pizza that was featured on the show (mussels, shrimp, lobster and fish, if I remember correctly) and so Simon and I decided to share one. It was the best thing I’ve eaten so far – yum!

One thing I was not anticipating for our PEI vacation was this blazing heat. I’d been watching the forecasts and expected coolish ocean breezes with sunshine and temperatures around 20C. It’s been at least 10C warmer than that, and with bellies full of clams and seafood pizza, the 5 km hike to the dunes of PEI National Park in the blazing late afternoon sun held increasingly diminishing appeal. In the end we decided that a walk on the beach would be more our speed, but we brought out bathing suits and towels just in case.

Good thing we did. Turns out the boys like the white sands of the northern Island beaches just as much as the red sands of the south shore!

Given it was the beginning of the tourist season in Canada’s favourite vacation destination and a sweltering heat wave, you can imagine that the day-before-Canada-Day crowds on the beach would be intense – we had to elbow our way through the crowds to get some breathing space. 😉

And dunes! Maybe not the sweeping dunes for which Greenwich is known, but pretty impressive dunes nonetheless, and plenty fun for climbing and then sand-surfing back down again.

Sadly, just as I was taking these, a woman approached me and informed me that climbing on the dunes is not permitted as it is bad for the grasses that grow on them and contributes to erosion. A part of me wanted to tell her we had driven many many MANY hours to climb on those dunes and dammit, we were going to do it… but that felt like an ugly tourist sort of thing to do, and so I simply nodded and thanked her for the information. The boys were pretty happy to go back to doing this, anyway:

So there were dunes, just not big ones, and not ones you could climb on. And there were boardwalks, too!

We were overcooked, overtired, salty and sandy by this point – exactly how you want to be after spending time at the beach! We stopped for a quick dinner on the way home in Montague at Gillie’s Drive In Diner. They have old-fashioned car hop service, but it was waaaaay too hot to be sitting in the car and we were grateful for the air conditioned diner seating. And the ice cream, of course. We’ve sampled a lot of PEI ice cream so far, and we haven’t even hit the Cows factory yet!

So while it has been a picture-perfect (pardon the pun) trip so far, there have been three things we could have done without on this trip.

One is the mosquitoes and black flies and deer flies. They’re fierce and they’re hungry! We’re bathing in sunscreen and bug spray several times a day, but we’re all still a little bug-bitten.

The second is the jellyfish. Yeesh, and I thought the Luna moths were creepy. We saw one on the shore at the cottage while walking the beach, and saw quite a few in the water at PEI National Park. After a crash Google course, I now know what we saw were the relatively common Lion’s Mane jellyfish, which can grow up to 2m in length with tentacles of more than 30m. *faints* The ones we saw were considerably smaller, about the size of a softball, though one was closer to basketball sized with zillions of *shudder* tentacles closer to 30 cm in length. I also know that stings from these jellyfish are on par with a bee sting (uncomfortable but short-lived) and how to treat a sting, and I know that I will never ever visit the waters of Australia, where the box jellyfish can sting you to death. Beloved already has a big red X over Australia as a potential vacation destination due to the preponderance of deadly snakes, so I suppose that was no big loss on our part.

The final inconvenience? Talk about first world problems. The boys can’t find a version of Treehouse or Family or other kids’ channels that don’t have Described Video turned on. If you thought SpongeBob SquarePants was annoying before, you should try an hour of the DV version! 😉

So if that’s as bad as it gets, it’s pretty darn good.

Today, we’re off to celebrate Canada Day in Charlottetown, including a matinee performance of the Anne of Green Gables musical. I can’t imagine a more perfect way to celebrate the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of the signing of the Charlottetown accord, which led to the formation of our beautiful country in 1867.

But first, I think I need to go walk on the beach with my coffee and my camera. Again. 🙂