My Trip to PEI, August 2014 — Part 1: Getting There

I've posted earlier about visiting the cousins on Prince Edward Island. (Click on the label PEI to see earlier posts.) It's been several years since I went there, but this year the Province is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference, which the was first step toward confederation: the unification of Canada, which until then had been separate colonies. I figured there would be activities, exhibits, and the like that would be worth seeing. It turned out there wasn't much alone those lines, but there were various performances in various venues in celebration of the event.

The dates of August 4-8 were open on my calendar, so I asked my cousin Marian, my principal contact with the family, if it would be a good time for me to visit, and she said nobody else had reserved the time. She is very hospitable, and will pack relatives and friends into her house very willingly. She also gladly takes care of nephews and nieces when their parents need someone to look after them for a while.

It's something over a 600 mile drive to her place, and I decided to drive to Bangor — about ⅓ of the distance — on Sunday, and do the rest of the drive on Monday. It worked out pretty well, except I missed a turn in Charlottetown (because I thought I needed to be taking the route from C'town to the west, but I needed to go eastbound — I always think east and west on the Island are the opposite of what they are), and then I missed another turn near her place. So I only got there a couple of minutes before she had to leave for a nearby event, and it turned out I had just missed seeing the cousin whose sons I stayed with in 2010. He was taking his third son and a nephew to a soccer match. Marian had prepared a pot of mussels for me and an old friend of hers who was visiting the Island and staying a few miles away. She told me to eat half of them, and I had all I wanted, along with some rolls and butter. There were leftovers after the friend and I had all we wanted.