PEI to Nova Scotia

Red sand, red cliffs at Rustico Beach, on the Gulf of St Lawrence, PEI.

Always love these ripple pix.  Abstract art!

Kayakers and fishermen dot the tranquil waters of the Gulf.  I would imagine that the Gulf of St Lawrence is like the great lakes...calm water can be replaced by rather large waves in a day.  And in the winter, again like the lakes, much of the Gulf is frozen.  Five months ago there were probably large blocks of ice on this shoreline.

One of the local lupines in macro.

Hey, they named a beach after my friend Doug!  Also a cape, a town, and a road or two.  I kicked back on Stanhope Beach for awhile.  The water is actually warmer than it is in Monterey!  Probably low 60s...versus low/mid 50s back home.  There were a couple girls actually swimming here!  Hardcore.  Of course they were probably Canadians...they can take the cold!

This is Province House in Charlottetown, capital and largest city of PEI.  All of 32 thousand people live here.  The area near Province House has cool old homes, brightly colored...should include a pic in a later post.  I have seen the war memorial in the foreground many times...on a webcam that has operated from a window on the top floor of Province House for at least a decade.  About half the year, it shows lousy weather...over 100 inches of snow fall here every winter. Not so on this day with temps in the 70s.  It always seemed a remote place to me...but now I'm here!

I was lounging on my deck at my cabin when I heard the telltale chomping of grass to my right.  Sure enough, my neighbors were having dinner!  Didn't have to leave the deck to get a good shot of my bovine friends.

My Rhode Island Chevy is taking a break in front of a typical PEI farm.  PEI is Canada's smallest province...it's about half the size of the Big Island of Hawaii.  Population 140,000.  Yet, it's Canada's most densely populated province, and the only one that doesn't have extensive areas of wilderness.  Nice towns, tidy farms, all the modcons in Charlottetown and Summerside, peaceful elsewhere...PEI strikes a happy medium between crowded and desolate.

Furrows in the red earth.

Now I'm in Nova Scotia.  I did a rare thing today...visited three provinces in one day!  Out west, where Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba are almost the size of Texas, and British Columbia is considerably larger, this is hard to do, unless you travel straight east-west and pile up some miles.  And if you drive from Kenora east to Ottawa, that's 1200 miles...all within Ontario!  But going from PEI to Nova Scotia via New Brunswick, you can hit three provinces in an hour!  I stopped at a beautiful little beach park just over the border in Nova Scotia, where I happened upon this color combination...there are paintings like this in MOMA.

I'm now ensconced at the Silver Dart Lodge in Baddeck, on Cape Breton Island.  This is the view of Bras d' Or Lake from my deck.  (pronounced brah door).  My internet research yielded some fine water view accomodations for this trip.

As the previous pic shows, the Silver Dart sits on a hillside on the mauka side of the highway from the lake.  But the lodge also owns some lakefront property, which is kept in woodland except for a gazebo and some chairs and picnic tables.  Amazing...and wonderful...that this land isn''t developed.  In the meantime, it stays in the shadows.

Macro shot near the lake.