Finally a day for a bike ride on the road: clear sky, little wind, and a good route available. We rode on the gravel Confederation Trail just a mile to St. Peters at the head of a bay, then on the road out the peninsula on the other side of the bay. At the end was a section of PEI National Park, and we spent a good while at the visitor center, learning about parabolic coastal dunes and the Miqmaq (pronounced MIGma) Indians, known in Canada as First Nation people. Interesting people, with two remaining towns, one of which, Lennox Island, we visited Thursday. They have a written language still in use. They've been Christians since 1610. That's right, 1610. We couldn't get out to the dunes because our bike tires can't handle loose gravel, so we rode back to St. Peters and then across the peninsula to the ocean by a different road. Back to camp, 27 miles of excellent road riding. The rest of the day we took it easy and did chores. I hunted down some contact cement to fix S's bike shoes which had protective pads on the soles coming loose.
Also learned today about mussel production, which is a major industry in the bay here. They hang little mussels in tubular nets in shallow water. The mussel beds are marked by colorful floats, and some of them must cover 50 acres of water. When the mussels grow up they are harvested by small boats, or in winter even by divers who cut holes in the ice to gain access to them.
Random observations I realize haven't been mentioned before:
Flags- Homes and businesses fly the Canadian flag more than the American flag is flown at home. Along the north coast of New Brunswick the Acadian flag is more common than the Canadian flag, but isn't shown much on PEI.
When the sky is clear it is a very light shade of blue. Not like our sky at home at all.
A flower called Lupin is abundant along the roadside all over PEI. It usually is a spike with many purple blooms, but the color can also range from white to various shades of pink and on to purple, with multiple colors even in the same patch. We are told they bloom about now and are gone by mid July. Makes the roadside so spectacularly colorful I thought maybe they were planted, but turns out they are wild.
We spent the evening making a rough estimate of where we want to go when between now and Sept. 17, when we want to be in Richmond. The result is a leisurely rough itinerary which still leaves some slack days. From here we plan to go to Cape Breton, then over to Newfoundland and maybe even a bit of Labrador, back over to the rest of Nova Scotia, around to the Bay of Fundy, along the coast to Maine, on to Cape Cod, and then down to Richmond. No surprise we have time for it all, since we are taking the whole summer for the trip. Years ago we covered most of the same territory in a three-week vacation from New Jersey.
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