Photo(s) of the day: Postcards from PEI

We made it!

Prince Edward Island - day 1

We nearly ran out of gas in rural Nova Scotia (that would have been an adventure I could do without) and I underestimated the first day of travel by about 90 minutes (which coincidentally was 90 minutes more patience in the car than the boys could achieve).

Prince Edward Island - day 1

We saw the the most terrifying moth I have ever seen, which has been identified as a Luna moth, and no matter how many people tell me we were lucky to see one is an experience I could have done without. A follower on Instagram helpfully informed me that they have no mouth or digestive tract – they live to procreate and then die. This makes them even more horrifically terrifying than I originally found them.

We cruised through New Brunswick in blazing sunshine, which was a lovely change from the hydroplaning ride of death from our last Maritime adventure in 2010. And the Confederation Bridge really is a spectacle to behold.

We’d been in PEI for about 10 minutes when we’d experienced lobster (thank you Subway), had our first Anne of Green Gables sighting, and enjoyed the ambiance if not the taste of Cows ice cream. Then we spent another hour and a half traversing the province to the southeast corner, down increasingly rural roads until we had to follow a rutted grass lane through the bush to get here, our home away from home.

cottage

From the same spot I was standing to take the middle photo of the cottage above, I swiveled and took this photo of the big boys playing in the ocean (and nearly doubled over laughing at Tristan sputter and cough “oh my god, the water is SALTY!” ha!) – it’s about 75 feet from the front porch to the sea!

Prince Edward Island - day 1

And as if that weren’t enough adventure for one day, we decided to explore the nearby villages for dinner. Apparently it is still lobster season, because the traps were piled high on the docks in Murray Harbour beside the fishing boats, looking ready for business.

Prince Edward Island - day 1

Prince Edward Island - day 1

Prince Edward Island - day 1

And finally, the one thing I’d been hoping for, planning for, dreaming of during six long months of waiting. Morning coffee in salty seaside air, watching the sun rise over the ocean. Mother nature sent me a pretty good sunrise for a welcome gift, don’t you think?

This is the sunrise over the ocean I watched with my morning coffee. :)

Let’s see: Confederation Bridge, lobster, seafood chowder, fishing village, boys in ocean, morning coffee watching the sunrise over the water… it hasn’t even been 24 hours and I’ve got most of my PEI to-do list accomplished! 🙂

Stalking Chef Michael Smith

I was at the gym on the elliptical machine quite a few months ago, some time in the autumn. One of the overhead TVs was broadcasting Chef Michael’s Kitchen on the Food Network, and Chef Michael Smith was talking about salads. I’d seen bits and pieces of his show before, also while sweating away on the elliptical, so I knew loosely who he was and what he was about. I’ve always liked him. He seems like a nice guy and I like his laid-back style. I read somewhere that his is the only instructional food show left on the Food Network these days.

That particular episode caught and kept my attention. He was talking about his simple but flexible ratio for making your own salad dressings: two parts oil, one part vinegar, one part sweet, with a dollop of mustard as an emulsifier to keep it from separating. At the time, my salad repertoire consisted of caesar and garden salad, but that day I went to the grocery store with his ratio rattling in my brain and that night we had a yummy harvest salad with kale, apples, toasted pecans and an apple-cider-maple vinaigrette. Fancy sounding, but dead easy and so good!

Over the next months, on Saturday mornings I started making sure I left the house to get to the gym to coincide with the beginning of Chef Michael’s Kitchen. I found his methods easy to follow and he cooked food that I knew the family would eat. Real food! One day I found myself doing an extra 10 minutes on the elliptical so I could watch the end of an episode featuring a fruit crisp that made me drool.

I loved the concept of the show: here’s a simple cooking technique illustrated in one recipe, and here’s how to add a twist. Beloved and I started watching back episodes on the Food Network On Demand, and I tried out more and more of his recipes. The Speedy Tomato Pasta Bake was the first one I tried, and we’ve had it many times since. One day this spring I tried something that had always seemed way too intimidating for me: I baked whole wheat biscuits from scratch. They were dead easy and oh my god, they were fantastic!

I became such a Chef Michael fangirl that the kids started asking me any time something new appeared on the table if it was a Chef Michael recipe. Even if it wasn’t his recipe, though, most of the new things I was trying were at least inspired in some way by the methods I’d learned obsessively watching each episode of Chef Michael’s Kitchen. One day Beloved came home from the library with Chef Michael Smith’s cookbook with “100 of my favourite easy recipes.” A paper cookbook! How quaint! I can’t remember the last time I used an actual cookbook. As I flipped through the various recipes, though, I think I actually started to salivate. I started marking pages with recipes I wanted to try, and by the time I got to a dozen I knew I had to have my own copy. Who the heck buys paper cookbooks in the Pinterest age, I’d often wondered as I breezed through the cookbook section of Chapters on my way to Starbucks. When it’s the right cookbook, apparently the answer is me.

Love this cookbook! We’ve tried half a dozen recipes in the month or two since I picked it up, and every single one has been a success. Two of our particular favourites are the potato, bacon and egg breakfast bake and rustic cherry tomatoes and sausage with penne. Really good REAL food that even the kids will eat.

Seriously, did I mention Chef Michael fangirl?

You might remember one of our first family trips involved stalking another celebrity of whom I am an avowed fangirl. Remember Stalking Stephen King? My mom recently pointed out that maybe we could call this trip to PEI “Stalking Chef Michael Smith.”

I can’t say that we planned our trip to PEI because it’s the land of Chef Michael Smith. I had really only just started to adore him when we booked the trip in January. However, I do admit over the course of planning I did Google to see if he is still head chef at The Inn at Bay Fortune (he is not) and was incredibly disappointed to find out that he is the celebrity host of The Village Feast in Souris, PEI, a community event that feeds 1000 dinners in an afternoon to raise funds for the local foodbank and school cookhouses in Kenya, TWO DAYS AFTER WE LEAVE. Rats!! I even e-mailed his “people” asking if there would be any public events in the week we are there, but no such luck.

We were planning to visit Souris anyway, as it’s really only a short drive from where we’ll be staying, and I read just yesterday on his Facebook page (I wasn’t kidding about the fangirl thing) that he has just this week opened a store called the Flavour Shack right there. I also read that the man himself is jetting off to Paris this week so he won’t be around, but I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled just in case.

What, you don’t plan YOUR family vacations around stalking your favourite celebrities??

PS Ahem. #squeeee

Planning for PEI: the hunt for the perfect seaside cottage

A couple of you have asked why we chose PEI and where we’ll be staying.

We chose PEI the same way and with the same lack of intention we chose Nova Scotia a few years ago – a vague idea that it seemed like a nice place, a proximity to the ocean, a sense that we should show the boys as much of our beautiful country as we can, and some rave reviews from people who had been there or were from there. Oh, and the possibility of taking a pretty picture or two. (What, you don’t plan your family vacation around potential photo ops?!?)

It was in the frozen heart of January, in the very depths of a relentless winter, that we started making our plans. Other people were talking about island vacations to escape the miserable winter and we joked we were planning an island getaway, too – for six months hence.

PEI just seems like a lovely place, doesn’t it? People get this nostalgic happy haze around them when they talk about it. Narrowing down a region was easy – we avoided the far north western tip as a bit too remote, and everything else was accessible. Heck the whole island is less than 300 km tip to tip and only 64 km wide at its widest point. And I love the fact that the tourism brochures brag that no point in the province is further than 16 km from the sea. I must have been a fishwife or a sailor in a past life, because for a girl who grew up landlocked I am drawn viscerally to the idea of the sea.

We sorted through dozens and dozens of cabin and cottage rentals, considering every region of the province. We had a short list of must-have amenities:

  • must have ocean view, preference for ocean access
  • minimum three bedroom, five separate beds preferred
  • must have cable TV
  • must be within 3G coverage range
  • needs full kitchen, washer and dryer on site preferred
  • a little bit of elbow room from the neighbours – no cottage clusters

After some discussion and soul-searching, we added a final criterion: must have wi-fi. I tried to convince myself, and Beloved, that it would probably be fine if we didn’t have wi-fi access, that we could get by on a bare minimum with me occasionally checking my messages via 3G and letting the rest of the family go on an Internet detox, but I now see that I was deluding myself.

If I were to fall in love with PEI, which I fully expect to do, to the extent that I wanted to quit my day job and move the family out there on a permanent basis (don’t worry Mom, just speculating and spit-balling) then I really think I could make a career for myself as a cottage web listing consultant and photographer. Oy. I know I’m a webby sort of girl, but after sifting through dozens (it felt like hundreds) of web listings for cottages, I have a few recommendations. First, you don’t need more than one photo of Anne of Green Gables in your listing. We get it. Second, while the photo of your lawn furniture is nice, I would really rather see the kitchen. Third, if you printed your photos out at the PhotoHut in 1993 and you have a date stamp printed on them, you might want to consider something from this millennium. (Not kidding on that one.)

These were a few of the early contenders:

I have a soft spot for quirkiness, and this little cottage near Savage Harbour had high quirk factor. I loved the idea of being in a fishing village but was afraid this one would be a little far off the beaten path and a little cramped for us.

We were all ready to rent this lovely log cabin on the south shore when we found it for sale on a real estate listing. I just couldn’t see us risking having the cottage sell some time between when we were looking at making our booking and our planned vacation six months hence. Ironically, it looks like it’s still available. Oh well.

This one scored high on quirk factor as well – the main bedroom is in a little gazebo separate from the main building, on a cliff overlooking the sea.

In addition to being a fishwife in a former life, there’s a good chance that I might have been a farmer, because I find farms *almost* as fascinating as the ocean. I really loved the idea of staying in a cottage on a working dairy farm, with an open invitation to visit the barns during milking time, but Beloved was less enamoured with the idea.

In the end, we fell in love with a three-bedroom cottage overlooking the point where the Murray River opens into Northumberland Strait. We’ll be there at the tail end of lobster season, so I understand we’ll be able to see the lobster fishers heading out and in with their daily catch, and the islands in the harbour are apparently home to PEI’s largest seal colony. The cottage itself looks small but tidy, with neighbours half a kilometer away on either side and 75 feet of open lawn leading to red sandstone cliffs overlooking the ocean with beach access. Morning coffee watching the sun rise over the ocean? Hells yes!

It’s a 10 minute drive to the booming metropolis of Murray River (population 358), featuring “a gas station, a fire/police station, a grocery, a restaurant, a number of churches, and a number of wharves.” Not to be confused with Murray Harbour, just 10 km around the bend, or North Murray Harbour, which is up the coast a bit in the other direction.

Photo courtesy of PointsEastCostalDrive.com

I. am. so . excited!

Okay, one more post in this series to talk about some of the things we want to do and see (and, erm, photograph!) while we’re there. Less than a month to go!

Roadtripping: Crowdsourcing a route from Ottawa to PEI and back

I love that it’s finally May so I can say NEXT MONTH we are going to PEI. *insert happy dance here* It will be late next month, true, but it makes it seem so much more immediate now than it was six months ago when we booked the cottage rental for our first ever trip to Canada’s most lovely province.

I’ve been trying to get a big blog post out with all of our plans, but my busy schedule utter inability to focus on more than a paragraph at a time dictates that I parcel this out into smaller bites. And I am so paralyzed by all the possible route choices to and from PEI that I can’t get past them to think about the actual PEI part!

So, let’s talk about driving to and from PEI, shall we? This is my working route so far, but I would love your input.

I know it’s theoretically possible to drive Ottawa to PEI in one day and have a few friends who have done it. If it were just Beloved and me in the car, I’d do that for sure. The boys, although they are pretty good road-trippers, I think need that little bit of a break, so we’ll push as far as Woodstock, NB on day one, which is 9.5 hours, and then do the final 5.5 hours to the cottage on day two, leaving us plenty of time to explore PEI as we arrive. That part is pretty much locked down, but I am open to your suggestions. We stopped at Grand Sault when we drove out to Nova Scotia a few years ago, but I wanted to push just a little farther down the road for our first day of driving.

It’s the trip home that has me stymied. I hate to backtrack on the best of days, and we love exploring, and the Trans Canada drive is b-o-r-i-n-g, so we thought we’d shake it up by driving back through the United States. This is where you come in. I need your suggestions and advice, especially if you’re familiar with the New Brunswick-Maine-New Hampshire part of the drive.

Currently, if for nothing else than to put a pin in my endless dithering, I’ve got us booked at a place near Berlin, New Hampshire on the last night of the trip, so we drive 10.5 or 11 hours from PEI through NB, across Maine and into New Hampshire on the first day, and then home on the second day. Google Maps suggest I follow the Trans Canada past Fredericton and enter the US at Houlton, Maine but that seems like it’s superhighway all the way. Great for efficiency, lousy for scenic. My instinct is to dip down and go through Saint John. It only seems a difference of a few minutes but looks like a more straight and less super-highway route.

When we drove out to Bar Harbor in 2007, we followed Route 2 the whole way, which is pretty much Main Street of every little town in Maine. We loved it, but it was the opposite of efficient. I was thinking about doing it again, but then feared it might be the equivalent of driving from here to Windsor on Highway 2 so you could avoid the 401 – you could do it in theory, but why on earth would you torture yourself like that? So maybe we’ll pick up the I-95 and follow that around, which is longer but faster because you don’t stop every 10 minutes for a red light or duck crossing. Your thoughts on i-95 versus Route 2 straight across?

I’ve also been agonizing on places to stop in the US on that last night. I seriously considered Bangor, Maine as it is more or less half way. Okay, truth, I actually considered Bangor mostly so we could revisit the stalking of Stephen King. Mea culpla. Bangor’s also nice because we don’t have to haul ass quite so quickly out of PEI and can meander a bit on our way, but it leaves us with hella drive from Bangor to Manotick on the last day. I’ve tentatively settled on staying in New Hampshire largely because the hotel had a nice family suite with a pull-out couch as well as a couple of queen beds, not to mention an outdoor pool and a bouncy caste, and we’ll put the lion’s share of the drive behind us on the first day driving out of PEI, but I’m open to the idea of stopping earlier in Bangor or Augusta or just about anywhere else loosely on the route. Thoughts?

And as if those weren’t enough choices, on the final day I still have to decide whether we follow the Google Maps advice and head home via Montreal, which seems about the equivalent of stabbing a hot poker into your eye, or take the longer way and ramble up through upstate New York and cross at Cornwall. My instinct says avoid Montreal at all costs. Nancy or Angela, you got thoughts on that?

I have a sneaking suspicion that I am making this far harder than it has to be. I love the car and driving but have no particular love for “the slab” as the bikers call it, so I’m amenable to a scenic route – but adding hours on to the trip doesn’t seem fair to the kids.

Any experience here? Would love to hear your favourite routes to PEI and back, or any amazing places you might have stayed anywhere between Lake Champlain and Bar Harbor. Would you stick to the slab or put up with the stop lights on Main Street every couple miles down the highway? And stay tuned for more about planning for PEI, including one 15th anniversary and one 150th anniversary and a whole boatload of Anne of Green Gables!