PEI - Lobster with Everything

LUPINS, LOBSTERS, AND LIGHTHOUSES.

On Prince Edward Island lupins grow wild everywhere.  Riots of pink, purple and white flowers spill over the verges into the ditches and the fields beyond.  The ubiquitous potato fields run away in green lines on straight ridges of red soil down to the sea.  ‘PEI?’ our Canadian friends said, ‘Wonderful!  Take your golf clubs.  Do you like lobster?  Have you read Anne of Green Gables?’  A quick read of a tattered 1950’s hardback copy of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ remedies the latter omission.  Reluctantly we have to leave the golf clubs behind because we’re travelling by bicycle.  Has much changed here since Lucy Montgomery’s book was published a hundred years ago?  I doubt it.  Her unfailingly optimistic heroine, Anne Shirley, might not recognize the tractors and cars, but the rustic landscape and the clapperboard timbered farmhouses cannot be very different.  This maritime province of Canada is full of friendly relaxed people.  It’s like rural Ireland with a Canadian accent.  The rolling green fields, woodlands, and deep inlets give way to picturesque harbours, their solid no-nonsense fishing boats stacked high with lobster pots.  We cycle down to Basin Head to see the old fishery and try out the ‘Singing Sands’.  The fine white sand with its smooth spherical silica particles produces an odd squeaking noise when walked on.  It’s not that musical though.  ‘Not so much Beachoven, more the One Note Samba’, someone remarks.  ‘A quartztet in tempo sandante’ is the reply.  We pedal up to the quaint octagonal lighthouse at East Point, and on to North Lake.  The ‘Tuna Capital of the World’ it announces itself.  Behind the narrow river mouth is a large inland sea.  There are rows of buoys marking the mussel culture lines.  Blue herons wade in the shallows.  It’s a tranquil scene.  The Sandstone restaurant provides another chance for us to get to grips with the variety of ways that islanders like to eat their lobster.  Will it be lobster roll, lobster salad, lobster chowder, lobster wrap, lobster club, lobsterburger, lobster pasta, lobster curry, or perhaps whole lobster?  Lunch slows us down somewhat, but then it’s onwards through meadows tall with clover and wild marguerites, along heritage roads of flattened red mud (original PEI red mud T-shirts available in the shops), along forest tracks with chipmunks and hares flying out of our way, choruses of frogs which sound like Zebedee of the Magic Roundabout has just dropped in, or a secretive beaver diving down from the water surface into its lodge.  In the remotest estuaries the occasional bald eagle or osprey glides above us.  Back in Charlottetown, the capital, we settle contentedly in the armchairs of the FlexMussels restaurant for a final seafood blitz before returning our bicycles to the laid back owner of the cycle shop, accepting another glass of wine, and then a lift to the airport to return to the real world outside PEI, the ‘Gentle Island’ as its tourism brochures call it.  And it’s true.

Word Count  494