Island LIfe on Prince Edward...

One of several photogenic PEI Lights, this one on Panmure Island.

We can only wonder what Prince Edward Island was like 20 years ago before the Confederation Bridge was opened, and the only access for vehicles was by ferry. There are many smallish islands which thrive despite their isolation (e.g. Tasmania), but nevertheless, suddenly connecting an island with a bridge must have a significant effect.

PEI's major town is Charlottetown. This town was the site of the conference in 1864 held between provinces of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Canada (Quebec + New Brunswick) which ultimately led to the formation of the confederation of Canada as a new nation. Newfoundland should have been there, but were late, and a circus in town apparently filled the hotels and required many conference delegates to stay on ships in the harbour. Even then, politics were trumped by entertainment in the public's eye!

Home of the PEI Provincial Government. Maybe the Confederation Convention was held here?

The road into Charlottetown from the bridge was, like most others we encountered in New Brunswick, of excellent quality. It makes you wonder why Australian roads cannot be so good in remote regions.

Colourful housing in downtown Charlottetown.

Charlottetown is a flat harbourside city (in fact, PEI is a pretty flat island), and we stayed in a very well located downtown hotel in Grafton Street. Just as in New Brunswick, we found that the Information Centre (marked with a '?'), despite being promoted as 'open year round' was firmly closed 'for the season' when we arrived at the front door. The locals seem to speak with an accent quite unusual to us, and with certain mannerisms. Maybe we are hearing anglisised version of Acadaian which is a particular dialect of French spoken in this part of the world, maybe not!

This skating pond in Charlottetown is starting to melt in unusually warm weather.

At Beanz, maybe the best coffee we have found so far on this trip. The friendly barista went to great pains to follow our recipes, then delivered it to our table in real cups with real spoons!

Throughout Maine and New Brunswick, the terrain we passed was pretty heavily snowed in, but coverage on PEI was pretty sparse. The land is generally pastoral, with mostly potatoes grown (in rich red soil), but we could always see the cultivation tracks through the thin snow cover.

The Point Prim Light is the oldest on PEI, seen here under very leaden skies.

Summer visitors to PEI flock to Cavendish on the northern shore to see where Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Montgomery was set. Expecting nothing to be open there, we took advice and chose to follow PEI's very pretty coastline. The island is not so big, and we hoped to drive the eastern loop road (identified by starfish signs), but in a full driving day, only got about a third of it done. We obviously dawdle too much, and the truth is, we take it easy, start late and finish early.

This chowder bar at Point Prim won't serve another clam or mussel until next summer.

In our part loop, we managed to see much beautiful ice/snow-covered shoreline and several lighthouses. We couldn't get to the twin lights at Beach Point because the of last stretch road was pure sheet ice, no attempt to clear it. Wood Islands was particularly pretty - it is a tiny harbour which receives a car ferry in summer, but was totally empty and abandoned for our visit.

Numerous lights guard the entrance to the Wood Islands ferry harbour, closed for winter.

During our stay on PEI, we did not see a single other person who could be identified as a tourist or a visitor. But plenty of people live here (~140,000), and so Charottetown had pleny of establishments open for us to dine and imbibe. Our hotel was pretty quite, maybe 10% full, the other guests being businessmen and tradies. Having feasted on lobster in Maine, we though we could do the same on PEI, but with the harbours frozen and the boats out of the water, the local industry is in recess and lobster is not available.. In the Irish Pub, The Olde Triangle, the waitress explained that lobster is off the menu because it would have to be 'imported'. This may be a strategy to harvest lobsters sustainably, because there seemed to be no difficulty or objection to importing almost all other food and seafood.

The Fowler family has gone to some trouble to decorate their front lawn near Point Prim.

Ice fishing tents on Murray Harbor, PEI. Empty, we suppose, because no pick-up was parked out there.

Like we found in Maine, you would have to spend a lot more time on PEI to explore it properly, but our ultimate objective is Nova Scotia, and we must move on!

Some places the waters of Northumberland Strait are fully iced, other not.

Into Canada and Crossing New Brunswick

The Province of New Brunswick in Canada was a transition state in all our plans, enabling us to get from the USA into the Atlantic Provinces of Prince Edward Island in the north and Nova Scotia in the east, and then back to Quebec in the west. We are sure NB is a great Province in its own right, but it wasn't a 'destination' for us on this trip. However, it gave us a great exposure to the quality of Canadian roads.

Memorial to skilled immigrant, cotton mill workers, just on the Candian side of border at St Stephens.

We first entered NB at an old and narrow border crossing in St Stephens, and were first impressed at the brisk efficiency and helpfulness of the Canadian official, quite a different story to the previous time (10 years ago) we arrived at Canada by car. Soon, we realised that there was not only a time change but also a return to more familiar metric units on the roads and in the weather. Fiddling with the settings on the Jeep's fully digital control system, we discovered that we could convert all instrumentation over to litres, km and degrees C. Even the odometer converted. And we switched our Garmin navigator over too, so now we can enjoy consistent units from all sources, a significant convenience. It makes sense to us to have all the instrumentation reading the same units as the local signage and radio.

The next pleasant surprise was the quality of the freeway running from the border to our overnight stay at Saint John. This road, quite new, has been built to the most modern standards of surface, alignment, access etc. and was an absolute pleasure to drive on, at the limit of 110km/hr. Virtually no traffic too, quite a change from the US interstates. This road runs alongside the Bay of Fundy with its incredible tides, so we suppose it is much busier "in the season".

This good experience extended into the next day when we left Saint John for Prince Edward Island. That freeway was of the same high quality and still very quiet. Well past Moncton, where we grabbed a coffee, in a cute downtown cafe mentioned in Lonely Planet, the freeway became a two lane highway for a while where we noticed how many trucks actually drive this road.

What wasn't good was the weather. It had warmed up radically, from -20C and mostly sunny in Maine to +5C and raining heavily in New Brunswick for our first crossing of the Province. The rain was dangerous - other vehicles, especially trucks, threw up tremendous blinding spray, and huge puddles on the excellent surface led to (unrealised) fears of aquaplaning. The Jeep handled the conditions admirably, but the weather conditions made driving on otherwise good roads rather stressful.

Heavy rain doesn't bother our navigator and dash-cam as we traverse New Brunswick.

We saw almost nothing of Saint John itself, so bad was the weather. It seems to be the centre of the Irving industrial empire, whose factories and branding are everywhere. We did see the famous Reversing Falls (really rapids) which are right in town. Here the huge Fundy tides rush into and out of a narrow inlet and a momentary break in the downpour meant we were lucky enough to see them swirling violently and spectacularly under a bridge.

Swirling waters of the Bay of Fundy courses in & out at the Reversing Falls in Saint John.

The highlight of our first passage across New Brunswick was the bridge at the end of it. The Confederation Bridge is 13km long! It joins northern NB to Prince Edward Island, and is named to commemorate Charlottetown's role in the formation of Canada as a nation. Prior to the bridge, about 20 years ago, the only access to PEI was by boat or aeroplane. The Confed Bridge is an engineering marvel (it cost a billion dollars) and a treat to drive along. It's one lane in each direction, 80km/hr limit, and wide and dangerous loads are forbidden. The toll is $45 return, collected on departure from PEI, which certainly discourages casual traffic. Locals and frequent users apparently don't get a discount, so it turns PEI into a giant and beautiful island prison. The bridge promotes itself as a discounted way to get to the island - this is true, the carry ferry is much more expensive!

The 1997 Confederation Bridge joined Prince Edward Island to the mainland for the first time. An awesome experience to drive over the mostly frozen Northumberland Strait of the Gulf of St Lawrence.

The $45 toll discourages heavy traffic on the Confederation Bridge, but it's much cheaper than the car ferry, which doesn't run in winter anyway!