- coming back from vacation is never easy
- short weeks always perversely feel longer
- I have trouble getting going in the morning
Yeah. So it was very extra-hard to get up, and make myself get ready for work. And my commute was wretched from beginning to end, with the rain and the back to school and the streets flooding. It usually takes me 35-45 minutes to get to work, and today it was 65. I scraped up gratitude to be in my own car, not on public transit (a year later and I'm still grateful for that!), but otherwise yuck.
They said this morning that it would stop raining later in the day, but I was skeptical. It did, in fact, so maybe they're also right that it will be warmer tomorrow, 70s at least instead of 60s. How I hope it does. Meanwhile, it's a great day to go back to last week in PEI!
Our first stop after leaving the hotel was the farmer's market. Doesn't this make you want to eat carrots?
What great colors. And then there was this guy, who looked more like an undersea creature than a relation of broccoli. It's called romanesco. Have you ever seen anything like it?
From the healthy to the mentally-healthy ... our next stop was the Cows factory. We'd stopped by earlier, on Monday afternoon, thinking to take the tour, but when we learned that production was done that day, we decided to come back. Now, with the tickets from our Hippopotabus tour the day before, we had free entry to the factory making Canada's best ice cream!
If you didn't know it, Cows is secondarily famous for their fun t-shirts. The tour began with the story of how they're made, which was quite interesting. There's a video, but you also watch the process itself, going on behind the glass.
The decor is part of the charm.
Next stop: another video on the making of the ice cream, and again, a view of the actual process.
The making of Wowie Cowie.
We got to sample it later: super-creamy vanilla ice cream with caramel, and chocolate chunks, and heath bits. Divine. (I would weight 400 pounds if I lived close to Cows. But I'd be happy.)
The final stop before tasting was the cheese-making; not my thing, necessarily, but interesting all the same. This is the cheese cave.
They age for a year! Not an occupation for the hasty-minded.
The tasting room had posters of lots of the t-shirt designs! I wanted to spend lots of time, but they were pretty firm about moving us along to make way for the next tour. I encourage you to click on the photos to make them bigger, so you can see the fun they have with cow jokes and pop culture.
The tour was a very mooooving experience (sorry), and I highly recommend it.
Our next destination was in Brackley Beach, home of the Great Canadian Soap Company. It's comforting, when visiting a place making products from goat's milk, to see some of this in the yard:
We also saw this sign:
And then we saw this goat, which made some sense of it. He really is a little startling.
Very friendly, though. Just hanging out by the oat bucket, in case anyone wanted to indulge him (which clearly people had, for the bucket was empty).
This goat's goatee was waving in the breeze!
We had a good time inside, and came away with a bundle of things to try. So far all I've used is the Dot Calm, which I had to get for the name alone, but it sure seems to be helping minimize the zit on my nose!
Our next stop was a return, for we've been to The Dunes on several previous trips. It's a gallery/store with a wonderful cafe.
Outside was art and flowers:
And by the door, these guys were hanging around:
The lemonade was delicious:
And the view beautiful--if you like that sort of thing, which we do.
I liked how the sunflower on the table looked different out of direct sun:
And in it.
More driving, more views. A beautiful island.
We stopped in Kelly's Cross to see the prayer garden there, which I had read was beautiful. It really is, and very peaceful. The flowers were lovely.
I particularly liked this one:
The floral equivalent of a firework!
We were seeing Anne of Green Gables: The Musical that night, the very last show of the year (a lot of things are not on in September). We therefore had dinner at the restaurant in the Confederation Centre, Mavor's. The menu had a fun attitude:
The food was good, too, which is nice. It did strike us as a little off, in such a nice place, to have the soda bottle brought to the table, but it allowed me to get this shot of my bilingual root beer:
And dessert was divine: creme brullee accompanied by a fresh, hot cinnamon donut. Out of this world.
The show was good, though not (we thought) the dramatic reimagining of the show that the program indicated. Still, it was well cast and well acted--and sung, particularly by Anne! And what more could you ask?
And that was Wednesday.
