7.1.18. Sunday. Georgetown to Tignish, Prince Edward Island.
Canada Day! (More on that later). Sunday morning in Georgetown is quiet, but it turned out to be quite fun. We had a huge over-the-top breakfast at the inn and then decided to hunt for the three geocaches near our hotel.
The first was at a store right across the street. The description warned that it would be out of our reach, but said we could borrow a ladder from the store. Sure enough, the sign outside had a horizontal hollow supporting beam, about 10 feet off the ground, with a bird nesting at one end and a geocache inside the other end. So, we wandered into the store, Daryl’s, to ask for a ladder. This small-town general store was a cross between a corner deli, a five-and-ten, a hardware store and agricultural supply store, all behind a gingerbread trimmed screen door which served as the main entrance. It was wonderful! The guy behind the counter did indeed lend us a ladder (otherwise used to prop open the side door for air) and Jeff climbed up to retrieve the cache.
The next stop was at the dock. We passed a group of colorful huts used to store fishing equipment and walked out to the town wharf. There was a little deck, meant for sightseers, with some benches and signage and working boats moored off to the side. Despite vigorous searching, this cache eluded us.
We continued on to the next one which was behind a private residence on the shore. We skirted along the shore line, scrambling along the water, rocks, mud, and rotting timbers of a small sea wall, and passed behind an old house under restoration (really re-construction), until we came to the remains of an old rowboat, that was beached and overgrown. The cache was in the boat and easy to find.
Rather than returning as we came, we decided to take the driveway of the house that was under reconstruction out to the road. We came out near a shop, Seaside Designs, that had been mentioned in the cache description. I suggested we walk past it, although given the early hour on a Sunday morning (maybe 8 a.m. or so), I didn’t expect it to be open. I was wrong! The owner and his dog were on the deck outside and greeted us warmly, and invited us in. What a wonderful stop!
He gave us a tour of the shop, including the incredible view from his back deck where he often works. I bought a necklace with what I thought was a black stone, but that he explained was a piece of black glass from an ancient rum bottle. The many shipwrecks off the coast scatter the glass all along the shore. In addition to talking about the town, what brought him there, and the shipwrecks, he asked if we had also gotten the cache on the wharf. When we said no, he gave us a hint. After leaving his shop we went back and Jeff quickly spotted the non-functional “bolt” on the side of a signpost, which turned out to be a very carefully and cleverly drilled out hole just large enough for a bison tube. What a great morning walk around Georgetown!
After leaving Georgetown we meandered through small towns to the East Point Lighthouse and Welcome Center. Adorable small birds had drilled holes into the red cliffs to nest. We picked up a ribbon at the lighthouse, expecting to turn it in later for a tip-to-tip certificate verifying our travels to the ends of PEI.
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| East Point Lighthouse |
We continued to criss-cross the island, including a cruise through Charlottetown. We also encountered a few traffic jams in Charlottetown and North Rustico, as the Canadians crowded local parks to celebrate Canada Day. Even the buses, were marked for celebration.
We stopped at a city park at the Province House in Charlottetown that had samples of stone from each of the Canadian provinces, all very different from each other and some very unusual in any context.
We continued on, stopping for more lighthouses and geocaches. We breezed through the parking lot of the Anne of Green Gables house – not our thing, but we wanted to take a picture for Jeff’s sister – and also passed the Lucy Maud Montgomery birthplace and the Anne of Green Gables Museum. (We were on the Anne of Green Gables Trail.) There were tons of campgrounds, hotels, water parks, and other touristy stuff to keep families amused. We also stopped for a geocache hidden (by the proprietors) under Grandpa's Antique Photo Studio, one of the many kitschy tourist traps along the road.
We also saw lots of lobster traps or fish farms in the bays, colorful huts lining the wharf, and lupine, lupine everywhere in shades of pink, purple, and white. And wind farms! In addition to the fishing industry, the island is very agricultural. Plowed fields, grazing cattle, and processing plants were everywhere.
We ventured out to the tip of the island to the wind energy center and the North Cape Lighthouse (the relevance of which we did not realize until the next day). The approach was crowded with wind turbines, but the exhibits at the Center had closed due to a flood. We were able to get dinner at the restaurant. Jeff enjoyed his. But the restaurant’s concept of a vegetarian entrée was to just heap anything that wasn’t meat on a plate, so I got all the side dishes including several kinds of potato dishes. All on one plate. Then we rode to Tignish, our destination for the night.
