Prince Edward Island, September 2009

Sept 17

First, I would like to show you a photo that we took late last night from just outside the B&B. The colours are real! It was a phenomenal sunset.

Today was a local travel day in the area around St. Peters. We biked just over 11 kms to the PEI National Park (the newest national park in Canada - just over a decade as a national park). We hitched our bikes to the bike rack, and then hiked almost 7 kms around the park, which is famous for its sand dunes and its floating boardwalk. Then we biked the 11 kms back. It was almost 30 kms of exercise - just that some of it was ordinary walking - much easier on the tush.

Here is the track for the day - the dark blue line shows our arrival into St. Peters yesterday, the turquoise line shows today's bike ride, and the green line shows the hike. I made the scale more local than I did on previous days.

Today, we finally had some good weather, although there appears to have been frost overnight. The morning sun was shining, and this view of the town of St. Peters looked so pretty reflected in the water.

And this photo shows me in front of the B&B. The name of the B&B is Tir Na Nog, which is Gaelic for Land of Eternal Youth (or something similar).

The rest of the photos are taken at the park.

These three photos are taken from the floating boardwalk, and show the sand dunes in the distance (and one shows me).

The next two photos show the boardwalk and the dunes.

This is the beach. The red sand is absolutely perfect beach sand. And by the way, this is NOT the ocean - it is the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

There were many of these little red rocks on the sand - I thought that the rivulets due to the waves were interesting. The little rocks were fairly flat - and Stephen relived his childhood by skipping them on the ocean.

A sand bar and some gulls.

This grass has to be strong to withstand the force of the wind blowing the sand.

We came across several jellyfish in the sand. This one was about 4" in diameter. It is fascinating seeing their innards - thank heavens humans don't have transparent skin!

The foliage along the path was really varied. Here we have the pale purple flowers (New York Asters), the yellow flowers (Canadian Goldenrod), and yes, you guessed it - ripe raspberries! There were several raspberry patches along the path, and we sampled as many as we could!

Tomorrow is our final bike ride - 60 kms back to Charlottetown. I am going to find the airplane seat on Saturday to be incredibly comfortable - honest!