Monday, August 1
If every morning of our last trip to PEI started with the best breakfasts ever, this trip was off to a rocky start. First powdered eggs at the Holiday Inn, then some sort of mystery breakfast casserole at Serendipity. But the fresh fruit was enough to get us going for a day into the west side of the Island, an area Mom and I hadn’t been to last year. Our first stop was the Potato Museum.
Nope. Not kidding. Potatoes are a huge part of the history of PEI, and the museum was full of interesting facts about how the potato crossed from Ireland to PEI. The museum also had some historic buildings including a one-room school house, a chapel, and an old telephone room, where the operators worked.
After the museum, we headed to the West Point Lighthouse and Museum, where we climbed 4 stories through a self-guided tour. The first lightkeeper lived there with his wife and 8 children! Whoa! That’s a whole lot of family in one little house. But it was beautiful.
So was the beach next to it, where we wandered around and got thoroughly sandy and had to find a sink to rinse off in.
After the lighthouse and beach, we headed off toward North Rustico, where we stayed in a little cabin for 2 nights.
While it was a beautiful area, the cabin left a little something to be desired–the pull-out sofa bed was a bit rough, to say the least. And the creepy bugs that showed up in the most inopportune moments were enough to give anyone the jitters.
Our biggest drama of the day turned out to be where we were going to go to dinner. We thought about trying a famous lobster dinner, except, when we got to the most popular restaurant, it was $35 for a dinner, and we just couldn’t talk ourselves into that, not knowing how we felt about lobster–seeing as how none of us had ever eaten it before. After a couple more failed attempts to find a reasonable place for dinner, we ended up at Jim’s–literally a side-of-the-road shack, where we ordered at a window. Mom ordered the seafood platter complete with lobster. So there it was, our first chance at lobster. Yuck! It was cold (apparently how many on the Island serve it) and oh, so fishy-tasting. I even tried a fried scallop. Like eating a piece of fried rubber. Not for me.
After the dinner debacle, we took off for the Rustico boardwalk, a 2km walkway around the harbor with a view of the fishing village and docks. The perfect way to end the day.
