A tad bit cloudy today, and chilly, but not altogether awful. We meet early at our now routine meeting place (Aqua 7!) and await our release from the ship on the outside decks.
We are in the first tender (actually the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th people on the tender!) and walk out of the pier to find our rental car. It’s a quick walk into town – passing by a magnificent church with no fall colors even beginning to show! Strange how the cycles change with each port!
We grab our car (not as nice as in Halifax, but still quite pleasant) and head out on what I’m calling a circle the island tour – but what is actually just a southern coastal drive! We don’t have time to circle the island – it’s that big!
First stop is Victoria by the Sea which is famous for the 2nd oldest lighthouse on the island and the largest tree.
It is very quiet and sleepy here – as a matter of fact, nothing is open. But it is a gorgeous little old village (also famous for sending out boats to help the Titanic, and there is a candy maker here who has Titanic shaped chocolates, but alas, they are closed as well!).
After picture taking and leg stretching, we head off up to the coast to Borden-Carleton, made famous as the gateway city with the Confederation bridge. The bridge spans 8 miles of ice covered water (not now, but in the winter!) and is the longest bridge to cover iced water. Its design was developed specifically to repel the ice as it forms by breaking it apart so that the ice chunks don’t damage the spans.
We press forward through the little lanes and back woods villages, following the inevitable potato trucks (there is a huge Irish influence here and they’ve brought with them their farming of potatoes. There are enormous farms on all sides of the road, and it being harvest time, innumerous trucks hauling potatoes, making our drive a bit slower – and hazardous when the potato loads aren’t covered!). Past the larger town of Summerside (2nd largest town in PEI) we drive, and after a couple of wrong turns finally find our way to the Neo-Gothic Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel church. It’s a beautiful example of architecture – and quite huge considering it is literally out in the middle of nowhere. We can’t figure out who – or how many – actually come here. But it is spectacular.
The graveyard accompanying the church is also quite picturesque, perched on a little knoll above the sea.
A few miles (or kilometers I guess I should say) down the road, our furthest western stop appears – the Cap-Egmont Bottle Houses. These things are amazing! There are 3 houses that the owner built as a hobby. His daughter (who now owns and runs the place) went to Victoria. BC and saw the bottle house there. She brought a postcard back for her dad who said – well if they can do that there, I can sure do that here! And a legacy was born! He became one of the first recyclers on the island, collecting bottles from local restaurants, stores, friends, even the dump. He ended up creating the 3 houses with over 30,000 bottles. It is truly a labor of love – and of astounding engineering feat!
There is the chapel:
The six gabled house (the first house built):
Then finally the Tavern:
And the gardens complete with a replica of the Cap-Egmont lighthouse!
Completely worthwhile stop! Next it is on to lunch – we’ve picked out an Oyster Barn in Malpeque that sounds wonderful – but sadly we are way too late in the season. They are closed for the winter. Darn! But the little Malpeque harbor is at least picturesque!
We head back to Kensington (a little crossroads we passed) looking for a restaurant. Stopping at the information center, we ask for a good seafood restaurant – and there aren’t any that are open in the town anywhere! Darn. The information lady points us back to Summerside to Gentleman Jim’s where we grudgingly (well, I grudgingly) go. (I had wanted to go more north and do a little circle of the island, but there is no way to do it with the timing- and it is rapidly passing lunchtime now as it is – so off to Gentlemen Jim’s we go). It’s a nice family type restaurant and we end up with Fried haddock and lobster rolls that were quite good.
But by that point, we had to ditch the rest of the circle tour because we simply didn’t have enough time. At least we began to see some fall colors on our drive back into Charlottetown.
And we did end up with time to stop at the Dollarama in town and pick up awesome $1 candy bars (maybe not quite in the shape of the Titanic, but a much better buy for certain!).
Sweet tooth salved, we hopped the rental car shuttle and arrived back to the ship unscathed and with plenty of time to relax before dinner.
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