Despite setting my alarm for 7am, I somehow completely slept through it and woke up at precisely 9am on the dot. Oh well, I’ll just need to get ready a bit faster before we head out. After showering and packing all my stuff up, we got in the car and went to check out at the front desk. The night before, they had recorded my credit card information down on a piece of paper, which is not a super comfortable fact, and so this morning when we went to drop off our keys, I asked to get the card information back so I can ensure it’s destroyed. They weren’t able to separate it from the other documents they needed to keep for tax reasons, but he did use whiteout to block it out. Funny thing though, whiteout doesn’t block out pen completely. He did another layer, then let me use a pen to scratch it off. It was still visible underneath, but I figured I’d been annoying enough about it and so I didn’t push it any further.
We then drove a little bit down the road towards Charlottetown where we stopped in at a flea market in a local hockey arena. It was a little hard to find parking, but we were able to slide in right as someone left and take their spot. It was a $2 entry fee, and while I wasn’t looking to get anything, Claire was on a mission to search for any interesting film cameras she could find. We walked around for a bit and came across a total of three cameras. The first one disappeared before we could go back to look at it, the second was $100, and the third was $30 but likely not in working condition. After some discussion with the owner of the third camera, Claire ended up buying it for $25, as even if it doesn’t work, it’s still a good decoration piece.
After the flea market we headed further into Charlottetown and parked about a 5 minute walk from downtown, where street parking was free on the weekend. We walked a few minutes into downtown and passed the Province House, where P.E.I’s legislature is usually housed, though they’ve been doing construction on it since 2015, and it’s still very much underway. Afterward, we walked a little further and stopped in at a cafe along the street to satiate our hunger for a bit. We walked in and got a seat upstairs, and I decided I wanted to order a Nanaimo Bar, something I was surprised they had. Well, turns out I didn’t look close enough and it was actually an alcoholic drink, not a nice sweet treat. Thankfully the waitress let me know before I confirmed my order, and so I decided on a cookie and hot chocolate instead.
After the cafe, Claire was still hungry, so we decided to walk further towards to water and go to a market near the water that had a bunch of vendors for food and other merchandise. Along the way, we found a fish a chips place on a dock that Claire decided she wanted to eat at instead, so we stopped by there and got some food. As it turns out, we were the first customers of the season for this shop, and she had only opened about an hour ago. I didn’t get anything as I wasn’t very hungry, but Claire really enjoyed her fish and chips.
Once we finished fighting the wind on the exposed dock, we decided to go to the market anyway to check it out since it looked cool on Google Maps. It’s quite a large building that reminds me of The Forks Market in Winnipeg, with high ceilings and lots of warm string lighting. We walked around a bit and bought a couple gifts for our families back home, before leaving and walking back towards the car.
Almost done with our time on P.E.I, we headed back towards the Confederation Bridge, but stopped at Chelton Beach first, a red sand beach with beautiful views of the bridge. It was technically closed, but we could still park at the entrance and walk in and down onto the beach via a little bit of a steep hill, but nothing unmanageable. The wind was fierce, blowing constantly with occasional even stronger gusts, but we managed to get our photos and walk out to touch the water. Claire also stole a few handfuls of the sand and put it in a bag to take home, which I just hope doesn’t leak in her backpack.
We then drove to the town right at the end of the bridge on the P.E.I side, where we parked at the nearby gas station in order to run across the highway and get a photo with the welcome to Prince Edward Island sign, something we’d not been able to do on the way in. We successfully got our photo, then used the bathroom and grabbed some snacks at the gas station before heading back over the bridge to New Brunswick, after of course paying the $50 toll.
Before carrying on, we decided to take a quick 30 minute detour to pop into the corner of Nova Scotia and get a photo with the sign, before hopping right back in the car and going back to New Brunswick. I want to check out Nova Scotia at some point, but today is not that day.
We were planning on heading to the Hopewell Rocks, since although also closed for the season, so can realistically just walk around the sign and carry on to the park, with the added bonus of not having to pay to enter as there’s no one there to take your payment. If anyone from Parks Canada is reading this, I’m lying, this is fiction, we did not go to the Hopewell Rocks. If you’re not from Parks Canada, then we continued walking and found a number of pretty lookout points to look over the bay, and after a recommendation from a nice French couple, found the stairs down to the sea floor. As it was basically full low tide, it was safe to go down for a bit and look around, and we were able to walk around the rock formations in all their glory, which was a very cool experience.
After spending an hour or so there, we walked back to the car and got back on the road north west. We wanted to reach Grand Falls, New Brunswick tonight as that’s where we’d booked our accommodation for the night. We decided to take a different route than the one we’d taken east, and rather than going west then north, we were going to go north then west, along the top of the province.
This turned out to not be the best idea, since it took us off the Trans-Canada Highway and on to some more rural, quiet highways. The main concern with these roads at night are moose. Hitting a moose would be the end of the trip at best, and a much worse, possibly deadly situation at worst. After a bit of driving on those highways, we decided we didn’t want to risk it with moose, and turned around to take a shorter road to Fredricton, and then we’d carry on via the Trans-Canada highway from there, since it’s a 4 lane road with fences to (usually) keep animals out.
The speed limit on this road was 90km/h, but given the risk of moose, I was driving 70km/h and watching closely along the edges of the road. At some point, I somewhat jokingly mentioned to Claire that if she sees a moose, she should shout moose, and that I’d trust her instincts and I’d just hit the brakes in case I didn’t see it but she did. Not even 30 seconds later, what do I see? But a moose, jumping out into the road in front of us. I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a stop and slid to the left, into the oncoming lane (not that there’s any other cars on this road), while the moose panicked and turned around, running back into the forest while we sat stopped in the road.
After checking with each other that we’re okay, we continued on very slowly towards Fredericton, now driving at a whopping 40km/h the rest of the way. A drive that should have taken us 2 hours took us almost 4, since additionally, part way though we came across a horrible stretch of road with tire sized potholes that I had to dodge, driving at a glacial 10-30km/h for a good 30 minutes until the road cleared up again. We saw a second moose a few hours later, but this one was much more chill and was basically done crossing the road so I only had to slow down a bit, and there was no chance of a collision.
We got to Fredericton and picked up some food for Claire before carrying on to the Trans-Canada Highway where the speed limit is 110km/h, but I felt more comfortable going 90km/h, and we had an uneventful drive all the way to Grand Falls, where we fell into our beds at 3am (3:30am for us technically since we crossed a half hour timezone, weird I know) and quickly fell asleep.
