I’m writing from a rare space for me: a warm bed. I found a Bed & Breakfast on the northern peninsula of Newfoundland (NL) and the proprietor told me I could stay an extra night for free since it was raining all day. That’s the kind of thing that seems to happen on this island.
People are ruggedly self-sufficient, but partly due to the fact than any one of them seem ready to drop what their doing and help out their fellow man.Wildberry Country Lodge is a pretty simple building, sitting alone along highway 430 in the Vinland area, not too far from Pistolet Bay and about 30-min from the oldest known site of European settlement in North America.
The owner Lynn is a Newfie local and has owned this place since the late-80’s. You get a simple room and a clean bed and bathroom, but also a dining area and lounge with a great view out into the low hills across the highway.
You also get fed…a lot. Lynn puts the proverbial Italian grandma to shame, and has plied me with every cookie and tea and fruit and jam imaginable since I arrived. Breakfast is the only meal actually prepared, but there’s so many chips and snacks and bread and cereal around you are in no fear of going hungry. And there’s wifi, so I can finally upload some photos, write a little bit, and try to catch up on things that you just can’t do on your phone. But let’s get back to the other island — Prince Edward Island (PE).
Prince Edward Island
I had another crisis of hospitality while in Canada’s smallest province. The Cumberland Bay Campground was so warm and inviting that I was struggling to pry myself away and actually go see things. Owner Doug and his wife Misha are genuinely interesting and kind people so I spent time chatting with them when they weren’t doing their daily work.
Their adult son George was also there and staying for the season, so we ended up partying a lot, going to a dart tournament at the Canadian Legion, and exploring the coastline. I did eventually break away though, heading to the far west end on the island for a few days. There isn’t much in the far northwest corner but there is an old Catholic church that I stopped at.
Not the church from my previous post, this is Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish Church, serving the French Acadian people since 1898. Made from ~450,000 locally sourced bricks, it cuts a stunning silhouette on the coast.
I shared that in my last post though, so I’ll just mention the Canadian Potato Museum. Now, I just went for a laugh, because why would someone make a museum about potatoes? Well, PE grows most of Canada’s potatoes despite being the physically smallest province, so it makes some sense. Add to it that the Irish settled a decent chunk of this half of the island and you see right away why the museum is there.
It;s insanely popular too. Tourists from Europe and Asia were there along with my American butt, learning not just about the spud itself, but the industry, farming practices, technology and how it changed things, and some of the people who made it all happen. You may know the potato isn’t from Ireland, it just grew well in the crappy areas the British kept forcing them to populate.
It’s from South America and likes the rocky soil and cold weather of the Andes. So, being adapted to cold means it can grow in these far north climates too. They don’t loot the soil, don’t crave water, survive being stacked in bags and pallets and being machine sorted, and they don’t wilt on their way to market. Once in the home they survive damn near anything, stick to the ribs, are calorie dense, and can be used in everything from breakfast to dinner to desert (potato fudge is a thing here, yes).
I also got seaweed pie while I was there. It’s actually made with Irish Moss, which the Irish settlers used to harvest up until about the 1960’s or 70’s. No longer a thing amongst the locals, the museum keeps the recipe alive. It doesn’t taste a thing like sea weed or moss or how a bog smells, so I reckon the only reason it fell out of fashion was that it isn’t easy to commercially harvest, and people got too busy as the jet age gave way to the space age.
Seaweed pie is only available at the Potato Museum, but you don’t need a ticket to enter the gift shop and cafeteria.
The final loop
I was on the island too long at this point. I still had to see Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and the fall is rapidly approaching. Newfoundland is out there. It’s not at Greenland latitude but it’s further north than you realize; maps have to distort more the further north or south you go on the globe.
I also visited an abandoned track that only managed to operate for about two years before closing in the 1990’s. It is far in the northeast corner of PEI.
What this meant was there wasn’t much I was willing to delay my trip for. Despite that edict, I couldn’t leave without a run to the eastern part of the island. I had to see Canada’s smallest library. Yeah, sound underwhelming and in reality it is, but I have a strange attraction to libraries. They are one of the few things that actually give real value for our tax dollars, and yet they are criminally underutilized.
This one of course was more of a book repository, not offering services like internet and tool rental or classes on resume preparation. Heck, this one isn’t even staffed. It’s about 1,800 books in a small building about 16ft x 16ft. The internet said 180,000 book but I’m certain that’s a misprint.
It’s in the town of Cardigan, which really seems to be a small cluster of houses, two gas stations, a closed restaurant, and small bridge. Seems a good spot for the country’s smallest library I reckon. That was about all there was to see, though I did daydream about buying that restaurant and starting my own business. It had living units, a bar, a separate dining area, a downstairs bar and dance hall, and a large back patio with an outdoor bar and a riverfront view. I could have lived out my days offering lobster suppers to the tourists and Texas style barbecue and Sonoran tacos to the locals.
I let those dreams coalesce in my head as I made my way back toward the Confederate bridge, but Cumberland Cove called out to me once again, and one night turned into two, but then finally I extricated myself from the island. You pay a friggin’ $20 toll for the privilege of leaving the island, and after paying I immediately got stuck behind a truck forin about 70kph in the already slow 80kph zone over the 6-mile(!) bridge.
Another thing I don’t like about cruiser style motorcycles is the low seat height. It means you can’t see over the concrete barriers on bridges, and you have less of a command view of the traffic ahead. And so I got to stare at the back of a truck the whole way, eventually landing on the New Brunswick coast and realizing I was stuck behind a line of about 20 cars who didn’t have the balls to pass each other, and the lead vehicle was going at least 10kph under the limit.
I don’t like to think about how much gas I wasted passing those bastards one at a time, because by the time I reached the interchange in Port Elgin, the low fuel light was on. At least I didn’t spend the entire time in a traffic slinky. I spent a few nights near Truro, then ran along the Fundy coast to get to Anapolis Royal, which is next to Digby, home of the Wharf Rat Rally.
It’s true about the Bay of Fundy. The tidal change is dramatic. I’d already seen some of it from the north shore, but around Wolfville the highway moves slightly inland. That lets you cross many bridges of different rivers, which reverse course four times a day with the tide. It was low tide so there were mud flats everywhere, with thin trickles of water in their center, running slowly toward the bay.
Wharf Rat Rally and more
I had planned to camp during the rally but the forecast was for constant, and sometimes heavy rain, all weekend. I happened to know a fellow sidecar racer by the name of Chris Wells. We’d been internet buddies for way more than a decade but had never met since we raced on opposite coasts. Still, it was like I knew the guy, so despite it being the first time I met him, he offered me a space at his home.
His wife runs the gorgeous home as a B&B (I think she said it dates back to the 1600’s, but at least the 1700’s) so she was great at hosting. The place was booked so I stayed in a converted cargo trailer, but it was well appointed. Chris uses it himself and it was set up for a trip he ended up not taking. I never even needed the space heater: it was downright swanky.
The rally though was a bust. Even thought the rain was only a light drizzle, it was quite persistent, and to the east (where many people would have been coming from) Saturday was bad enough to close roads and damage bridges. Attendance was abysmal. When we finally went into Digby on Sunday the vendors were closing up and it was only mid-morning.
The Tim Horton’s parking lot had about 20 bikes, most likely riders trying to warm up and caffeinate before slogging home. On the strip there were even fewer. People walking around counted in the dozens, not thousands (the rally had as many as 20,000 estimated just two or three years ago). We still walked around and I looked at some Canadian brands of biker gear, we checked out the wharf and all the fishing boats, with Chris dropping local knowledge.
Rained out. There wasn’t much to see at this year’s Wharf Rat Rally.
Both lobster and scallop boats (and cod fishers too for that matter) are strangely short, looking like the back 1/3 of them was hacked off,leaving them cartoonishly wide. This is because of regulations on boat size made by the government. The only way to hold more fish below deck is to have more deck, so they grow wider.
Chris could also tell by the hoists and rigging whether a boat was set up for pulling pots, pulling a dredge, or trolling with nets. It’s kind of how I know what a skag on a surfboard is for; even though I never got into surfing, I’m from “surf city,” Huntington Beach, California.
In the meantime
Despite the failed even, Chris took me around some local spots. We walked around Annapolis Royal, where every building is historic, but we also stopped at one that was literally a museum. Built in the 1600’s it had been renovated so many times that as they tried to restore it, they realized it was layers of history they were uncovering.
It was two buildings joined together, with the front half built about 1708 for a gunsmith for the French garrison there, making it a rare pre-expulsion building of the French, and about the oldest standing wooden building in Canada. The back-half was added on by a tavern keeper looking to expand, built around 17981.
It ran as an inn for about 150 years, before being closed in 1950. The Annapolis Heritage Society took control of the building during a period when the town was sick of watching all its old buildings collapse and decay, so the original plan was to do just like the others and restore it to a period look. Instead, they cut away sections of the walls and floors, then installed glass viewing windows.
This exposes building techniques and materials over 100’s of years. Wall paper over paper as styles changed, different timbers and nails, mud and hay used as insulation, and timbers that are hand hewn next to ones that were milled. It gives a true appreciation for what’s behind the freshly painted facades on main st.
We also saw Fort Anne, with some restored storage houses that were at one time just a place for teenagers to smoke pot and set off fire crackers. Now they tell the story of early French settlement, trade, and defense before the Great Expulsion of the 1750’s and 60’s. I also sampled some local beers, which is turning into an expensive habit.
Bluenose 2, replica of the famous racing ship, still sails from Lunenburg twice a day. Commissioned in the 1960’s by a Brewery, it was built in the same shipyard as the original 1921 schooner.
You see, microbrews are only a few dimes or so more than macro-beer, so it makes sense to just drink the good stuff. That doesn’t make it cheap though. You’d be better off as a crackhead than a drunk in most of Canada. Also, they make their IPA’s actually drinkable. I gave upon India Pale Ale almost 20-years ago, as they got less balanced and became bitter hop-bombs.
The original recipes called for that strong taste because they took about four months to sail around Africa to India from Britain, so the beer would mellow and age before it was consumed. What they drank back then tasted more like a session IPA today, or what is sometimes called an East Coast IPA.
The simple truth is, they’re good over here, and I am drinking too many of them, damnit. But beer certainly hasn’t been the worst of my problems. The biggest money problem actually started in Newfoundland, which is where I’d like to take this story.
However, the story so far has run long enough. Next installment will put us on the six-hour ferry ride to Port Aux Basques and begin what feels to be the final leg, even though I’m still about 4,000-miles and four time zones from my usual winter retreat.
Until next time,
Johnny
The bottle houses of PEI. This one is the chapel, made in the 1980’s with hundreds of discarded bottles.