Misspent dotage: Prince Edward Island

The abbreviation PEI is recognised throughout Canada as the acronym for the country's smallest province. One informant rather unkindly said that we could drive across the island in an hour, but it is not that tiny.

To take a vehicle to PEI the motorist has a choice of a bridge or a ferry. To encourage visitors, both options are free to enter the island, and to make you want to stay they each have a hefty charge when you leave. We decided to arrive by ferry and depart across the bridge.

The ferry from Pictou did provide tourist information, including maps with several suggested driving routes. There are no major hills, making the island's fertile soil easy to farm so scenery was much more pastoral than Nova Scotia. Much is made of the island's association with the novel, Anne of Green Gables. Bill had started to read the story in his youth and put it aside as “a girl's book”. Eve downloaded it to her Kindle to refresh her memory and found it a bit preachy but enjoyable to revisit. But that didn't detract from the island's genuine charm.

Our first and only night on PEI was at Cable Head on the North coast. Most, or possibly all, of the North side of the island is a large, sandy beach.

Cable Head with another camper's vehicle on the cliff.

Another section of the North coast.

We stopped at the small harbour in Tracadie. Bill had a wander round and got very excited when he came across hundreds of migrating birds. He just had to get out the camera with the telephoto lens.

The harbour.

Plovers. But which species? After very long deliberation the decision was “Black-bellied” rather than the rarer “American Golden”.

The large birds with red beaks are Caspian Terns. The others are one of the sandpiper species, which all look very similar in eclipse plumage.

Scores of sandpipers.

A Great Blue Heron flies low and unhurriedly on its way South.

Further along the coast we saw three men in wetsuits assembling para-boarding gear. (That may not be the correct expression.) The wind was blowing strongly not quite directly onshore. “They'll never get anywhere against that wind” predicted Bill. But he was wrong.

When they really got going they 'jumped' off the water.

We enjoyed our short time on PEI. We didn't drive all the tourist trails, but we followed them for a fair few kilometres before paying our exit tax ($45 – ouch) and leaving via the Confederation Bridge. This is one of the world's longest bridges at 12.9km, and also the longest that crosses ice-covered water. And it's sufficiently high that acrophobic Bill was never going to look down.