#SundayStills Wheeling Away

The Sunday’s still theme this week of vacation or staycation so was an easy one for me to peddle on with. We are on a bike vacation on the province island of Prince Edward Island.

There is something so exhilarating about traveling to sites previously unseen. The adventures that awaits. The interesting things to be seen and friendly folks to chat with. Add in local beer and, in this case, fresh seafood and what more could one ask for!

On a staycation we just do projects and forget to go do fun local things. So here’s to our bike trip. The first in so so so many years that I think both the Czech Republic and Portugal were before I started blogging. I’ve done power point presentations about them but they’ve never had a staring role like PEI is about to have.

We meet our trusty wheels this morning. We are doing self guided but have used a local company for bikes and luggage transfer. He thoughtfully dropped our bikes off this am in case we wanted to use them today.

Let’s call it an introductory 16.8 kms of Confederation Trail, quiet suburban streets, the #1 Highway and city riding. Quite the mix of conditions and me with zero sense of direction at this moment. The trusty engineer is in the lead and in control of the map so we did not go the wrong way. It was a beautiful afternoon for a ride and we were never far from that wonderful salty smell of the ocean (even though parts of it are tidal rivers).

In the late morning (jet lag was more intense than we anticipated) and early afternoon we did a 7.5 km self guided walking tour of Charlottetown. The guided one was not available today so we grabbed a map, read signs, took interesting detours and generally got a good feel for a very unique city.

Such a colorful city. Each house, yard and street are like chalk and cheese. Such variety and so many old houses it was like endless eye candy! Lots of different eras and styles. A friendly driver stopping to see if we were lost when we did a map consult. The old gas lamp posts had wonderful hanging baskets. All the street corners downtown have been “adopted” by local businesses and each one hosts an individual floral display.

An old cemetery sidetrip. And I mean old for Canada. In fact it predates Canada while being inside what is now Canada. They started using the Old Presbyterian Burying Grounds in 1784 and closed in 1873. Which technically was the year that Prince Edward Island joined Confederation. This was due to the fact that building the railroad pushed them into a nasty debt situation. The ironic part of that is that now said railroad line is the Confederation Trail that we are going to bike and which brings in loads of tourist dollars. But I digress – back to the cemetery. It had 5000+ graves back then but a rough estimate would say that maybe only 500 remain.

All in all it was a stellar day. Oh gosh I forgot the specific destination for the bike ride. We headed to Cows. The ice cream that ranks #1 in the world. I kid you not. My brother told me I had to try it and so we did after we’d done the little tour. It’s pretty deadly good. Quite certain we might end up indulging it that treat again.

This photo was taken by an islander who turns out to be just as friendly as I anticipated. Her grandmother grew up in Gravelbourgh (quite near my home town) and they had just hosted company from Bladworth (which is where we turned to go down to the Eaton’s Eager that we moved). She’s a big time Geocacher and was telling me about how many there are on the Confederation Trail. This was odd as Ron had just read about it this morning.

All right that’s enough for today. Tomorrow is an earlier start. Up island tomorrow- just don’t ask me yet what direction that is.

Bernie