Thursday was Our Anne Day in PEI

Ahh, Friday night, how I love thee. My beloved weekend is here.

Still working through the adventures of last week in PEI. Thursday was the big day, the day for Anne, who led us to the Island in the first place (in 1985, whew, what a long time ago).

Of course, we started at the mother ship, Green Gables.


We go every time. They've done more to the place every time, movies and artifacts and so on, but the essentials stay the same.


The typewriter, for instance.


Not everything is beautiful or meaningful, of course.


What, you haven't seen a turkey-in-an-Anne-wig lollipop holder before?
(No, I don't get that, either.)

Still, there's honeysuckle growing on the house.

And the usual old house/museum artifacts inside.

I can't quite picture using this stove.

Spinning!

Reminds me of my great-grandmother's sewing machine, which my mother still has.

Knitting! And a swift, even!

There's a beautiful walking path in the woods, which I highly recommend.

The woods and brook are wonderful.

And my mother commented how nice it was that they didn't try to pretty it up. It's a real woods. Things happen.

Photos can't capture how wonderful it smelled. I took this picture to remember to tell you, it was marvelous.

It wasn't cold, but summer was definitely on its way out.

See the little chippie "hiding" behind the fern? He must have been a young one, who needed to learn that running away from, not closer to the big scaries is the better tactic.

We also saw a small squirrel. I don't know if he was young, too, or just a smaller variety than we have around here.

We noticed these trees all over the Island. Mountain ash, my mother said.

The dew had landed heavily, to be lingering late morning.

At the time, I didn't want to know if this was more dew, or some kind of ... oozing. I'm kind of curious now, though.

We also walked through the haunted wood to the site of LMM's grandparents' home. I wouldn't say it wasn't worth doing, but it was kind of a long walk, and turned out to be a site we'd seen before and didn't really feel the need to see again. Live and learn. Should be seen once, I think, but if you don't feel like a longish walk, drive over.

We walked back via the cemetery where LMM is buried. I noticed this unusual stone as well. Do you suppose he was a lumberjack, or merely liked trees?


For lunch, we went to the PEI Preserve Company and ate at their Cafe on the Clyde. This is the front of the menu:

I share their sensibility. I did have a sandwich, in fact, and it was good, but then I had this:

Mmmm.

If you go there, don't forget to look up; interesting light fixtures and quilts on display.

And art in the garden, as well.

After lunch, it was time for a return visit to the LMM Birthplace, which is in New London, and then on to Park Corner to the Anne Museum, which is in the house that her cousins lived in, and was where she got married. Both places that we'd been before, and were happy to go again. We're funny that way.

Perhaps by now, you are done with the "isn't PEI pretty?" pictures, but I am not. Most emphatically.

This barn color was just wrong, though. Red, yes; persimmon, no.
Just say no to painting your barn persimmon!

Still, red roads make up for a lot with me.

Back in Charlottetown for dinner (good pizza at Castello's, by the Confederation Centre), and I saw this on a car as we walked over to Cows for dessert. It had a PEI plate on the back; I suggested that it could be a friend or relative of Adam McQuaid's, and my mother pointed out that it could actually be his!


It is nice, as a hockey fan visiting Canada, to have hockey references be so much more common. Though I also saw at least two Red Sox shirts that week; they're everywhere. But at Cows, there was this flavor (and wait until you see the shirt I got there):


And in the liquor store, the Red Sox were absent, while I learned that Wayne Gretzky has put his name to wine.


So that was Thursday. Now I'm off to dream of visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame. Have you been to Toronto?

PS Happy birthday, my brother!

All the Way Back to Last Wednesday, in PEI

Some general truths to start with:

• coming back from vacation is never easy
• short weeks always perversely feel longer
• I have trouble getting going in the morning
  

It has been cold and rainy all week (well, since Tuesday anyway), and this morning the radio informed me that it was 56 degrees in Boston while the window informed me that it was pouring (either again or still). What a perfect morning to snuggle under the covers, pet the cat, and go back to sleep!

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.