Category: Ottawa to PEI 2015

Three rowdy boys, one fine dining experience – what could possibly go wrong? Absolutely nothing, in fact. Everything was perfect!

You might have heard that earlier this summer, my culinary hero Chef Michael Smith announced that he and his wife Chastity had purchased the Inn at Bay Fortune, the very same place that had launched Chef Michael’s television career back in the 90s when he was The Inn Chef. For weeks leading up to our trip, I agonized about making reservations: I dearly wanted to go, but I couldn’t quite get comfortable with the idea of leaving the boys on their own in a strange place for several hours while we were a 30 minute drive away. I also had a bit of trouble wrapping my brain around a $500 meal. When I found out that kids could join the “FireWorks” feast (everything is cooked over open flame in a stone oven) for half of the adult price, I couldn’t resist and asked Beloved if we could make reservations to celebrate my birthday.

Here’s a small list of the things I worried over in anticipating the dinner:

1. What to wear. Not so much for me – I have lots of pretty summer dresses perfect for a semi-formal dinner out. But the boys don’t have any pretty summer dresses, nor do they fit into mine. I managed to scrounge up some shirts with collars and no (obvious) stains or tears, although I did not realize until it was too late that I’d packed Lucas’s soccer socks instead of more moderate length sport socks.

2. Whether the boys would eat the food. I wasn’t as worried about this as I was about the clothes. More than half the meals we eat come from a Chef Michael cookbook, and his family tastes seem to align perfectly with our own. But still, I worried. Seven year olds have notably capricious palates.

3. Whether we’d make it through four hours and seven courses of food. When you are comprised largely of wiggle, four hours is an excruciatingly long time to sit at a table for dinner, especially when it runs two hours past your bedtime and you’ve been playing in the sun and sand all day. And I was a little worried about the boys’ behaviour as well.

4. The cost. The final bill was well over $400, which is a breathtaking amount of money for a meal in our world. However, it is on par with some of the other Island Experiences we’d considered like renting kayaks and canoes or deep sea fishing. One lucrative photo contract came through just before we left and helped pay the way, but the Scottish-Dutch DNA in my genes harangued me for even considering such an exorbitant meal.

5. That we would, and that we would not, actually meet Chef Michael himself. Of course, it would have been absolutely amazing if we did. We cook from his cookbooks, we watch his TV shows, and our favourite family photo hanging over our dining room table is a picture taken at his FlavourShack in PEI last summer. To say he is a major celebrity in our lives is a bit of an understatement. I think an IRL meeting with perhaps only Steve from Minecraft or Link from Zelda would make more of an impression on the boys. So I was worried that they would be disappointed if we did not actually get to meet the man himself, but also a bit nervous that we actually might, because (whispers) I have a bit of a crush on him.

As usual, I needn’t have worried about any of it. The boys were nothing short of amazing. They’re drinking Anne’s raspberry cordial, of course!

Lucas loved that he could help himself.

When I saw the menu, I heaved a massive sigh of relief knowing they’d eat almost everything that was being served. Simon was most excited about the 36-item house salad, but it was the seafood chowder and smoked halibut that had me drooling.

A more formal layout of the evening’s courses.

Kids are gobbling up the food faster than I can take photos. Up to the chowder course and everything is spectacular! @innatbayfortune #InnStyle

A photo posted by Danielle Donders (@dani_girl) on Jul 30, 2015 at 3:45pm PDT

I can’t think of a more lovely setting for a birthday dinner – and note the personalized chalkboard trivet in the middle!

We started the evening with oysters in the actual kitchen where the Inn Chef was filmed. None of us had ever tried them before, and to be honest I probably would not have tried them under other circumstances. But heck, when on the Island, do as the Islanders do, right? To my delight, they were delicious, especially with a little signature Bloody Mary ice on them. And to my even greater delight, Lucas was willing to try them as well. He prefered the brine over the actual oyster, though.

Oyster course at @innatbayfortune – he liked the salt water, and I ate the oyster. Proud he was willing to try it. #InnStyle

A photo posted by Danielle Donders (@dani_girl) on Jul 30, 2015 at 2:53pm PDT

The whole evening was a surprisingly family-friendly affair. We were welcome to inspect the grounds and gardens, which we did.

We were also welcomed (as were the kids) to get up and talk to the staff throughout the meal. Here, Chef de Cuisine Justin Miles rakes the coals under some roasting broccoli for the main course. (And I am absolutely adding flame-charred broccoli to our menu at home!)

I had every intention of being that obnoxious person who instagrams every course of a meal but the food was so amazingly delicious that the kids (ahem, and adults!) gobbled it up as quickly as it came out. The charcuterie was a massive win, and while I practically licked my mason-jar bowl clean of the seafood chowder that had been served in it, the kids liked that course less. They also surprised me by loving both the mussels and the smoked halibut. Lucas said the mussel shells looked like a heart and held them up and said, “Happy birthday, mommy. I love you!”

I also spent most of the meal re-imagining my dinnerware back home. Much as I love my reclaimed barn wood dining table, I think we need to trade it in for a butcher block table like the massive one we dined on. And we need more mason jars – both for drinking and for soup. And how amazing are these colourful pails – that’s the salad course!

As well behaved as the boys were, and they were in fact so well behaved that three separate servers complimented their behaviour and their manners, I am supremely grateful for the gift of the two women who were by chance seated beside us. We were wedged in between two parties, in fact, and when the boys saw the long table and realized they would be sitting beside strangers, they scrambled for the safe “inside” seat. One large party seemed to be comprised of an extended family of Islanders come home from across the country to have dinner together, and they were loud and cackled with laughter and turned their chairs inward toward their group and away from us.

On the other side of us were a woman and her mother, and by the end of the evening I wanted to go home with them. I can only imagine how some people might react to arriving at an expensive fine meal to find themselves sharing space with three young boys, but this lady sat down beside Simon, smiled a massive smile and said, “Hi, I’m Sheila and this is my mom. What’s your name?” Turns out Sheila grew up on PEI and her mother still lives in Georgetown, and they were two of the nicest people we have ever met. They regaled us with stories about growing up on the Island, shared insider secrets about locations for beaches and cottages and where to find wild sea asparagus, ribbed Beloved for not letting the boys jump off the bridge at Basin Head, and generally treated us like family. I truly thought the mother was going to ask to adopt Beloved – she was sitting at an angle where I couldn’t quite hear what she was saying most of the time, but her laughter rang out like a bell as she laughed loudly at each and every one of Beloved’s jokes and quips. When the evening drew long between the main course and dessert and the boys began to get silly, Sheila took one of the markers I had pulled out for the boys and showed them puzzles and mazes. They truly made the meal a memorable and delightful occasion for us, and I am forever grateful for their kindness.

So in the end, we did not get to meet Chef Himself at our dinner out. We did, however, eat the most amazing meal of our lives. There was so much food we could barely move by the time it ended. I was incredibly proud of my boys, who gamely tried a little bit of everything and embraced more than a few new tastes. A visit from “the world’s tallest freestanding chef” would have been the icing on an already delicious birthday cake, but meeting sweet Sheila and her charming mother made up for his absence. I’ll leave it to people who write about food for a living to offer a more serious critique of the menu, but I can tell you this much: we loved it, and it’s an experience none of us will forget.

What more could you ask for a birthday dinner out with your favourite menfolk? And maybe we can plan next year’s vacation to coincide with the Village Feast? Because oh yes, there will be a visit to PEI in 2016. 🙂

One of the things that most amazes me about the beaches on PEI is not the sheer abundance of them, nor their beauty (both of which are, indeed, amazing) but the vast differences in the character of various beaches. Each one we’ve attended (Brackley, Basin Head, Thunder Cove, St Peter’s Harbour, Covehead Harbour, Greenwich, and now Argyle Shore) has had its own personality. The first six are all on the north shore, known for wilder seas with waves and steep drop offs, but the southern shore is known for a far more gradual slope and its distinctive red sands. It’s also a lot easier to see the critters of the sea as the tide recedes and leaves little pools in the red sand where you can see crabs, tiny hermit crabs, mussels, snails and lots and lots of jellyfish.

Argyle Shore is a provincial day use park, which means no admission fees but on-site (and clean!) bathrooms, picnic tables, a parking lot, and in this case, play structures. No Argyle socks, though. We looked!

As you can see, in the height of tourist season it’s as madly crowded as the rest of the beaches. I continue to be astonished by the uncrowdedness of the place, even in peak season!

There’s a steep set of metal stairs embedded into the red cliffs to the rocky shore below. To your immediate left, a little spring-fed waterfall tumbles merrily down the cliff. You can see them both about mid-way along the cliff in this photo.

The rocks give way to sandbars with amazing ripple patterns from the waves. I was more fascinated by the ripples than by the critters in the tide pools!

The tide pools did make for fun with reflections!

The forecast had been calling for thunderstorms and rain in the afternoon but with a relatively clear morning. As we drove across the Island to the beach, it had been grey and rainy and we made resigned jokes about a redux of our rained-out visit to Victoria by the Sea, which is just down the coast from Argyle Shore.

And yet, when we arrived, the heavy gloom lifted and we were treated to patches of blue sky, just in time for our picnic lunch on the shore.

We are getting a LOT of mileage out of our picnic cooler this trip. It’s a great way to keep the expense of meals on the go under control and ensure the kids are only eating ONE serving of chicken fingers and fries each day. (Seriously, what IS it with kids’ menus at restaurants? Don’t get me started!) And there is something about food eaten outside in the fresh salty breeze that makes even the most humble sandwich a little more yummy. We’ve eaten ALMOST as much hummus and watermelon (not together!) as we have chicken fingers and french fries. Finger foods in ziploc boxes FTW!

So the idea behind exploring the tide pools was a bit of a bust. I’d hoped to find starfish and sea cucumbers, which we didn’t, but we did see an astonishing number of snails and the ubiquitous jellyfish. We saw tiny hermit crabs (I thought they were bigger!) and I may have shrieked like a girl when a palm-sized crab scuttled too close to my feet in a tide pool, but the kids weren’t as into poking around in the tide pools as I would have expected. The fishy smell of seaweed and rotting jellyfish may have biased them, as well. It was still a fun adventure, but the boys didn’t get into it as much as I’d thought they might.

Now we know. Next year, we stick with a cottage on the north shore. Because oh yes, there will be a next year on PEI. 🙂

Last year, we drove past Sandspit Amusement Park on our way home from Green Gables and Cavendish. Lucas saw it, begged to go and and being more than a little tired, cried fat tears of dismay when we said no. We did promise him we’d go during the trip we were already anticipating for this year, and he never forgot about it through the year.

To be honest, I was not really looking forward to it – but the boys certainly were. And then the forecast never really cooperated with a definitive clear day. Who wants to visit an amusement park in the rain? With two days of thunderstorms in the forecast, we finally gave in on Monday despite the forecast for cool temperatures and intermittent rain.

We LOVED it. All five of us loved it, and to be honest, it was worth every penny.

It’s just a tiny little park – it reminds me of the kiddie section of Canada’s Wonderland. We went almost all of the rides at least once, and many of them several times. The Cyclone is an zippy little roller coaster with a killer hard stop at the end, but the discovery of the day for me was bumper boats. Growing up, I used to see television commercials for the bumper boats at Ontario Place and have always wanted to try them. I could have seriously spent five hours just riding the bumper boats over and over – except my arms and wrists might still be vibrating from the motors!

And if you visit on a drizzly day, you won’t have to wait more than five or ten minutes in line for even the most popular rides. I was quite won-over by this sweet little park and there’s definitely a return visit in our future.

The young woman at the cash register of the gift shop regards me blankly. Then her nose crinkles, as if I’d asked her where one might go to see the lobster fights instead of a suggestion for family activities in Summerside and she shrugs. “There’s not much to do here.”

So we’ve discovered. It took about 90 minutes to drive to Summerside, and you’d think in all my obsessive researching, I’d have thought to look up whether it was a place worth visiting. I knew it was PEI’s second-largest city, home to the local tax office, and had a nice place on the waterfront called Spinnaker’s Landing. I figured as the second largest city, it would have half as much interesting stuff as Charlottetown, and that would keep us busy for a couple of hours at least.

Not so much.

We asked two locals for advice on family-friendly activities nearby, both of whom looked at me with the same expression of “what, here?!” before shrugging and offering no helpful advice whatsoever. So we ate our picnic lunch on the boardwalk at Spinnaker’s Landing (as the rain started to fall, again) and debated whether we should go further west toward the Bottle Houses at Cap Egmont, or north toward Thunder Cove. I’d wanted to go to Thunder Cove since I read about it last year, and it was cheaper than the bottle houses, so off we went.

Best decision of the day!

Thunder Cove is like many of the beaches on the north coast of PEI – the water is rougher, and gets deep quickly. The sand and sea stretch out as far as the eye can see.

If you’re taking pictures of the surf, and you’re squatting down on the sand, you should be wary of the Universe and its playful sense of humour, as that surf will rush right up over your feet and soak your hiking boots from the top down. Just sayin’. It was a long, squelchy six hours later before those boots came off.

(It is also a testament to the weather our first week here that I was wearing hiking boots on the beach. I brought two pairs of shoes on this trip, and grew ever so tired of getting my feet soaked in the endless rain while wearing sandals. Joke’s on me, apparently I am just destined to have damp toes this vacation.)

But ahem, back to Thunder Cove. To our right, endless beach – but to our left, these wonderful red sandstone cliffs and caves and cubbies.

And just beyond these caves, I knew there was a famous rock formation called the teacup and a very cool sandstone arch. Unfortunately, we arrived just as the tide was coming in.

Hmmm, we wondered. Could we climb up these cliffs and over the dunes to get to the teacup and arch?

*cue ominous music*

Up wasn’t too difficult. Up was a breeze, in fact. I almost got even more of a soaker than I already had as the tide chased me up a few easy steps and slopes in the sandstone. Tristan, ever the adventurer, scampered like a mountain goat around and confirmed that he could get to the teacup easily. And in case you are wondering, “easily” by definition to a 13 year old boy includes a narrow, scree-covered six inch wide ledge 20 feet above the tide crashing in over sandstone rocks. Lucas was half way through the loose rock scree before I came around the edge of the cliff and saw him and it was five breathless minutes of chewing on my heart while alternating between cajoling, ordering and shrieking him back to the safer edge of the cliff.

So, here’s a lovely picture of the time the boys did not plunge down the rock face into the crashing tide below. Note the lovely rock formations in the background, and we are plenty close enough, thank you very much.

And then we faced one more small problem, which was actually two small problems. The first was getting down again. We walked back along the sandstone shelf and looked down at the tide below. I looked at Beloved, and saw my concern reflected on his face. “Um, how did we get up again?”

Did you see this one coming? Sadly, we did not. Remember that thing I said about the tide coming in and chasing me up the cliff? In the 15 minutes or so it had taken us to explore the not-path to the teapot and have a heart attack and celebrate the not-untimely-demise of any of our progeny on the crashing rocks of death, the tide had come in behind us, blocking our access to the beach.

Did I mention the waves, and the wind? It was seriously so loud that we had to shout to hear each other. So we v-e-r-y carefully picked our way back down the ledges, scootching on our butts when necessary, and trying to time our final leap to the sand to coincide with the retreat of the surf. Except for Tristan, who hopped down like gravity and the laws of physics disdained him.

And then we took a celebratory selfie.

With no particular destination in mind but several hours of daylight left, we set off in the general direction of Morell, which brought us through the heart of what I think of as the tourist zone – New London, Rustico, Cavendish and New Glascow. When we came into French River, I mentioned to Beloved that it was one of the most picturesque and photographed harbours on an island lousy with picturesque harbours. Sure enough, as we crested a hill I saw exactly what I’d seen in a hundred photographs, so of course I stopped the car so I could collect my own. I personally think it’s the most beautiful one yet. It has a little je ne sais quoi that the others lack. And by je ne sais quoi, I mean Lucas.

As we drove eastward, in my mind I ran through the pages and pages of tourist pamphlets, blog posts and review sites I have perused over the years. Beloved was navigating. “Look on the map,” I told him. “Do you see a little town called New Glascow anywhere nearby? I think they have a toy store or something there.”

Second best decision of the day!

The Toy Factory is tiny, comparatively speaking. It fills the main floor of a house, but it’s packed to the rafters with interesting things and, on the day we arrived, people. There seems to be a theme of toys for imaginative play: pirates, knights, fairies and gorgeous handmade wooden toys that hearken back to a simpler time.

The very first thing I saw as I walked in was Tristan staring with naked covetousness at a Master Sword and Hylian Shield behind the counter. If you don’t know what that means, you haven’t been obsessively playing Legend of Zelda (and reading the books, and learning to play an ocarina) for the past few years of your life. And if you do have an idea of the DEFCON-5 level of covetousness we’re talking about, you’ll understand how close to his head actually came to exploding when they let us play with them for a photo op.

^^ Actual metal sword. He has been asking for one consistently for more than a year. The only thing that kept me from fulfilling his heart’s deepest desire was not any sense that perhaps a sword is not an appropriate beach holiday souvenir, but the $100 chunk out of our vacation budget. They do have an online store, though, and Christmas is coming.

As if that weren’t cool enough, there’s a toy workshop in the back. And as if THAT weren’t cool enough, they actually let you make your own little wooden toy that you can purchase for the princely sum of $4.95 or leave behind to add to the store stock. We did one of each.

And though we’d been there for nearly 90 minutes at this point, and I was beginning to wonder if we would ever leave, I was still utterly charmed by this Islander’s laconic interaction with Lucas. There were kids everywhere, and I could overhear the workshop folks talking amongst themselves about how it had been a busy day in a busy week, but to this fellow there was no need to rush. He had a wood-burning wand, and they were personalizing each child’s wooden toy (there were magic wands and race cars being made) by burning over the child’s name written in the child’s own handwriting. And then he added a PEI 2015 “license plate” and a decorative star on top. He even asked Lucas what kind of star he might prefer – a traditional five-point star, or the asterisk kind. And then he added a circle around the star at Lucas’s request. It was like Lucas was the only person in the store on a quiet day – I was seriously charmed.

Did I mention the playground out back? Or the bunnies? Or the curiousities spread out over the grounds? Heed this advice: go to the Toy Factory. No matter where you are staying on PEI, it’s worth the drive if you have kids who love imaginative play.

TL;DR? Summerside, not so much. However, Thunder Cove and the Toy Factory at New Glascow were two wonderful new discoveries that made for an amazing day of adventure. As Tristan said, any day with leaping from cliffs, a Master Sword and a Hylian Shield is an amazing day.

Exactly.