PEI looks
like it does not have a rock or a decent sized stone on the whole island; to us
it appears like all the silt from the Great Lakes flowed down the St Lawrence
River to form PEI where all the land is red, as is the sand on the beach (flower
pot or adobe red). We spent a day in Charlottetown named for Queen Charlotte
wife of George 3rd. This is a fairly large town with some nice old
buildings and is as flat as the island. PEI must be heaven for fans of "Ann
of Green Gables" there’s a theme park for her in the town of Cavendish;
as we walked around Charlottetown we passed several "Ann of Green Gables"
shops and a theatre running a nightly "Ann of Green Gables" show. PEI
has a population of 140,204 and is 121 miles (195KM) long; its 38 miles (61KM) at
its widest narrowing down to only 4 miles (12KM) in spots.
An interesting
tourism initiative on PEI is the development of an old railway line into a biking/hiking
trail on which of course Adele cycled every day during our 4 day stay. Day one Adele
recommended to Tom that he should follow her by hiking east on the trail and she
would meet as she returned. 40 minutes into his hike Tom receives a call to drive
and pick Adele up from outside a blue house on road #113! Tom could not find either
road #113 or the blue house however after many phone calls and U-turns later we
happily found one another; the problem - was that the trail (railway line) does
not always follow the road, as a result Adele was in the middle of the island
on farm land - the main roads follow the coast so road #111 was hard to find!
We visited
another smaller town called Summerside where on reading the information boards
and learned that it has a Fox Museum, we would have been very interested to
visit it, but it was closed. Believe it or not PEI had what is called a
"Gold Rush" some local entrepreneurs succeeded in breeding and rearing
silver foxes in captivity; PEI was the only place in the world to do this. It
became a booming business, at one time in 1913 a fox pelt (yes one) was worth
in excess of $2,600 and a breeding pair of first class silver foxes sold for
$25,000 - truly a Gold Rush! So find all those photos of your Mothers or Grannies
wearing fox stoles around their shoulders; it’s probable that PEI is where the
fox came from. Then we remembered that as we were passing through Charlottetown
on our way to the RV Park Adele spotted a red fox standing in the rain at the
corner of the university.
For our
return trip to New Brunswick we drove over the nine mile long Confederation
Bridge after paying a toll of $49 which included the ferry trip. Either way one
pays to get off the island! A neat way to stop PEI residents from shopping in
New Brunswick!
This is as
far north as we are going; well Cape Breton was really and now that the weather
is turning to autumn/fall the time when whales and birds head south so must we!
The leaves on the trees are beginning to change and we’re looking forward to
seeing spectacular fall colors as we travel through New England and the
northern states back to Saint Augustine.
And, of
course we’ll post some amazing photographs. 
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