After a seemingly endless ride from Charlottetown, our driver Dan dropped Ted and me off at North Cape at the far north-west end of Prince Edwards Island. The day is clear without a cloud in the sky. At the Cape, there is a wind power research facility as well as well over a dozen huge windmills turning in light wind slowly. These noiseless contraptions are helping PEI become energy independent with now over 30 percent of its energy coming from renewable sources.
Rather than mar the countryside they are a modern companion to the lighthouse and the numerous lobster boats plying their way on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Before mounting our bikes we stretch our legs along an adjoining nature trail that follows the edge of land.
The rocky red cliffs fall into the sea and a flock of seagulls and a few cormorants rest on a recently revealed sandbar. It is a tranquil and quiet time to sit and reflect as a couple does on a bench nearby. Time to ride.
We start peddling from the Cape a little before noon. Though most days this would be a very late start for us, today we have only 29 miles to travel before we get to our hotel, the Mill River Resort. Ted starts us out setting the pace along route 12.
The road is flat and very lightly travelled. Small houses with tidy lawns and large piles of lobster traps dot the sides of the road. On the right, the houses tend to be near the road while on the ocean side nearer the sea. In many ways, the flatness of the road, the simpleness of the Cape Cod styled homes, the lack of traffic and people trigger 50-year-old memories of Long Island for Ted and me as we remember the way Long Island was rather than is (more on that later.)
We stop at a small, local harbor where the lobster boats are loading and unloading traps and the bouys that mark the locations of their traps. It seems as if more boats are unloading their traps than taking new ones out to sea. Perhaps it is due to the celebration of Canada Day tomorrow and the fact that traps cannot be left in the ocean more than 2 days without being checked and re-baited.
We keep moving and to the right pass a small, white ranch house on the right that has four large trailers stacked high with pristine, seemingly new lobster traps. The volume of space taken up by these tractors and their traps is larger than the house they are parked adjacent to.
A mustached lobsterman approaches us in a slow moving, Ford blue tractor pulling one such trailer. He is wearing a well-worn baseball cap and gives us a smile and wave as we peddle in the opposite direction.
As we got started late in the day, we pull off for lunch early in Tignish to Shirley’s Cafe where I get a ham and Ted a scallop burger.
Even though it is a holiday weekend, the road we take is empty. There are no tourists or sightseers on this lovely seaside stretch. More common are those who ply their trade off the land or sea with their slow-moving trucks making their way.
The road is gently rolling with inlets and marshes on both sides of the road. Potatoes have started to go into the ground, the dominant crop we have seen so far. Large red furrows stretch long into the distance and potato leaves start to break the soil.
There are lots of little bridges we pass over and at one we startle a great blue heron that flies away. At the next bridge we spot lines of oyster cages in a quiet cove arranged in graceful curves. A few dozen cormorants set on top of these buoyed cages hoping to get an oyster snack but I think they will be out of luck.
As many plants are flowering now, so congest my sinuses. A sweet, undefinable smell comes to me. It is honey-like but not quite. It leaves me as quickly as it arrived. But not the congestion.
Most of the birds we have seen are shore birds dominated by cormorants. A quintet of Canadian geese fly overhead but they are the exception to our sightings.
As we get closer to our hotel, I see the first corn field of our trip. It seems strangely out of place for some reason.
We turn off route 12 to a side road running parallel to the Mill River. The sea is behind us and rolling fields of grass with the scent of spread manure surround us. The hills are a bit more frequent, a little steeper, a little harder as we pedal into the sun near to our resting place this evening.
