Last year, when I was advertising my Alaska cruise, one of the things I sent out was a picture of our friends’ Prince Edward Island cottage, that had been flattened by hurricane Fiona, preventing them from cruising with us.  Time passes, and flattened cottages get re-built, new and improved.  Sheila Mason and Bob Martin invited Andrea Fairchild and my good self to join them, at their new, improved, bigger and better, as in hurricane-proof, cottage on Brackley Bay, Prince Edward Island. 

That sounded like fun, and the best swimming weather in those parts coincided with the last weeks in August, after most of the festivals in Montreal were done, so I was on board.  When we factored in our time constraints, and two full days of driving, and multiplied that by two, we realized there would be hardly any time for visiting.  Plus, if I was going to go past Halifax, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to see John Kyriaco and Peggy Scott, from my Hong Kong days.  So, we decided to fly to Halifax and rent a car. 

I secured our car back in January, from on board the Queen Mary 2.  I rented two cars, one at the
airport and one in downtown Halifax, because it was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper.  We would deal with which one to keep, later.

About three days before we were scheduled to fly, Air Canada cancelled our flight, likely because it wasn’t profitable, and kindly booked us on the next one.  Well, that didn’t work for us, as we had plans that would have come to fruition, while the plane was in the air.  Andrea was coming into Montreal anyway, to sleep at my apartment before an early flight on Friday, August 16, so the sensible thing looked like flying out the afternoon before, arriving in Halifax around suppertime. 

Now we needed the car a day earlier.  Of course, we had long cancelled the city car and it didn’t matter.  Neither the city, nor the airport had any car to give us on Thursday the 15^th.  We might have been able to bunk into an airport hotel, but I had my doubts that one would be available, and I knew John Kyriaco would never have let me live it down, if I hadn’t told them what was going on.  So I called the Kyriaco house.  Sure enough, John would not hear of us doing anything but staying with them, and Peggy agreed.  She is the best of wives and a wonderful person all around, and she has to be to have lasted with John all these years.  He is fabulous, in his own way, and generous to a fault, but his generosity runs his way or the highway.

And so it came to pass that we got off the plane in Halifax, to be met by John, Peggy and the first of the three red cars of August, their spiffy Audi. It took is to downtown Halifax and Salty’s Seafood Restaurant | Halifax Waterfront | Nova Scotia | Dine on the Halifax Waterfront overlooking Halifax Harbour (saltys.ca) .  It was a must because they are tearing the building down soon.  More’s the pity, as Salty’s is a great place.  I couldn’t wait for a real Nova Scotia lobster and it didn’t disappoint.  I was in hog heaven and we lost the bill fight to John.  This was too much, two airport transfers, room for the night, a lobster dinner and a full English breakfast with John as our private chef. 

After breakfast (which I don’t normally eat, you know), John and Peggy drove us to the airport to pick up the second red car.  Our “Manager’s Special” rental turned out to be a brand new, red Hyundai compact SUV, just the thing for Thelma and Louise, here.  Off we went to Home · Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Nova Scotia, Canada (UNESCO World Heritage Site) Andrea used to teach Art History and Curation at Concordia, so she has a lively interest in museums and had heard this one was good.  She had also visited the cliffs, long, long ago, before there was a museum.  It did not disappoint.  The cliffs are 350 million years old, and come in many layers, which lean into the planet, thanks to a massive eruption at some point in the bygone past.  Check out the web site or just believe this visual evidence:

Andrea is standing on the shore, with the cliff striations leaning in.  Her trained eye approved of the museum, too.  It was well done, interesting and educational. 

After our cliff tour, we were on our way to Advocate Harbour, where we had booked a B & B, which had won best restaurant in Nova Scotia I 2023.  We figured we’d stop for ice cream along the way and call it Four o’clock lunch.  Google took us along the Fundy Shore Road, which could hardly even be called that.  It was in terrible condition and went through the middle of, well, nothing.  We drove for at least an hour without seeing so much as a gas station, and certainly not a food outlet of any kind, not even an ice cream stand.  

Wild Caraway Restaurant & Accommodations, however did not disappoint, except for not serving anything before dinner.  We dropped our bags, quickly, and made off to a nearby campground, which had decent, not great, ice cream and horribly soggy cones.  They did know enough to give us the ice cream in bowls, with the desperate cones on the side. 

Dinner, however, was absolutely excellent.  It had yummy local amuse-bouches, soup, salad, scallops, trou normand, and an amazing chocolate berry crunchy cream nutty dessert.  We washed all that down with a nice bottle of light red wine, chatted up the chef, who’s from Australia, and went to bed.

Sunday, August 17, we stuffed ourselves full on an amazing yoghurt and granola thing with a delicious eight inch scone, loaded up the red Venue, and set out for Brackley Bay, Prince Edward Island, and our friends Sheila Mason and Bob Martin.  I met Sheila through Andrea, as the two of them had been to school together.  Sheila ended up a professor at Concordia, too, teaching Philosophy.  I didn’t meet Bob when I was teaching the PL/1 programming language, for IBM, at Iron Ore in Sept Iles, back in the seventies, but I might have.  He was running the whole company.  Our first stop was the NSLC, Nova Scotia Liquor Commission.  The government sells all the booze in Canada.  We knew to buy scotch for Bob, and added a couple of bottles each of Pinot Grigio and  Frescobaldi Castiglioni Chianti.  Our route took us over the famous Confederation Bridge, well to Canadians, anyway. Opened May 31, 1997, the 12.9-kilometre (8.0 mi) bridge is Canada’s longest bridge^] and the world’s longest bridge over ice-covered water.  We expected this to be a highlight, but it was boring as hell, all function, no pizazz, very Canadian.

On the other side of the bridge, we did find an excellent ice cream stop, as we didn’t want to arrive at Sheila and Bob’s, ravenous.  The weather was lovely, Google knew the way and we were there before we knew it.  Bob was there to meet us.  Sheila was off swimming.  It turned out the better swimming was a short drive away, much as it looked like it was at the end of the lawn.  The cottage is great.  It’s an A-Frame, a very big one, with a spacious living area and two large bedrooms on the ground floor and a masters’ suite upstairs.  Andrea and I loved our bedrooms.

We had spaghetti and salad for dinner, with apple pie for dessert.  The Frescobaldi did not disappoint.  It was just what we needed.  Bob and Sheila had a real feast planned for the morrow.  August 18 might have been a Monday, but it was absolutely a holiday for us.  Andrea and Sheila went or a long swim, while Bob and I went in to North Rustico, to pick up the live lobsters at Doiron Fisheries.  It doesn’t get more local than that.  Then we stopped at the local market that had provided last night’s apple pie and got a blueberry one. At our age you have to be crafty.  Bob had invited his neighbors Jim and Fiona to the party.  Jim had been a lobster fisherman at one point in his life and the two of them were only in their fifties.  So, we had good company and a lobster chef:

He was good at hacking them up for easy consumption,
too.  There was potato salad and drawn
butter , of course, and blueberry pie for dessert.  Here are our hosts and their sumptuous view:

None of us drinks the way we used to, and Sheila hardly drinks at all.  So, when I was picking the Pinot
Grigio, I went for bottles which could be used as décor.  See? 

They were good, too.  I’ll have to see if I can get them in Quebec.

Tuesday,
August 19 was our last day in P.E.I. so Sheila wanted to show us the local spots and Andrea wanted to shop a bit.  A
place called “Dunes”  PEI Galleries | The Dunes Studio
Gallery and Café | Contact Us (dunesgallery.ca)  had it all. Andrea didn’t buy anything to wear but Sheila and I each bought a
dress.  We enjoyed the art galleries and the gardens, too.

It was caribou steak on the BBQ for dinner, with the leftovers of both pies and the second bottle of chianti.  I told you we didn’t drink much.  It didn’t matter.  We had a fine time with good friends. 

Over dinner, we started talking about our plans for the morrow, which included a ferry ride from Woods Islands, P.E.I. to Caribou on the north-east coast of Nova Scotia.  I had naively thought we could just drive up and take the next ferry.  Well, it was considerably more complicated.  There were only three or four ferries, per 24hour period, and you had to book them in advance.  Should have done this days, or maybe weeks ago.  The 11:45am ferry, the only one which suited our purposes, was sold out.  We’d be doing the Confederation Bridge again, for sure.

So, on Wednesday, the 20^th, we got up and Andrea had breakfast with our hosts while I exercised.  Then we bade our fond farewells and headed for Halifax.  On the Nova Scotia side of the bridge, we took another costal road by Cape Tormentine, Bayfield and Melrose, just to get a feel for the scenery.  It was better than the Fundy Shore Road by a long patch, but we were happy to rejoin the highway.  We took it to the Amherst exit, because we needed to load up again at the NSLC, for our Halifax hosts.  We already owed them for the first night, so we bought more and better wine. On the road between the highway and Amherst, we came across:

It was the real McCoy, such as you rarely see today.  The waitress told us they baked their own
turkeys and basically cooked everything from scratch.  This hot turkey sandwich was delicious and
authentic down to the canned peas I used to get at Ben’s when I was at McGill.

We got into a nasty traffic jam near the Halifax airport where John Kyriaco and Peggy Scott were meeting us.  Maybe it was just John… John was my boss at Hutchison AT&T Network Services in Hong Kong.  His wife Peggy Scott worked for Hutchison Telecom, too, and we had all been good friends outside of work.  Peggy and Andrea had bonded almost instantly, as good, like-minded people will.  I was delighted. 

We went back to the house, settled in, freshened up, relaxed a bit (this means email for me) and were treated to John’s seafood pasta with vodka sauce..  Peggy is so lucky to have her own chef.  She’s no slouch in the kitchen either, mind you.  She’s the pastry chef, so hors d’oeuvres and dessert was fabulous, too. 

John and Peggy have a wonderful deck attached to their home, jutting out into their spectacular inner-city garden.   It has a fire table, too, and we made use of it well into the night. 

On Thursday the 21^st, Peggy’s brother-in-law took us for a city tour in the red Audi.  The architecture is interesting and varied, both the homes and Dalhousie University, which is huge.  Who knew? We especially enjoyed the cemetery, where 46 of those who perished on the Titanic are buried.  David, a retired school principal with a second career as a tour guide, knew a lot of interesting stories to tell us.  Things continued to get interesting back at the house, where Peggy, who is the oldest of eight children, had invited three of her sisters to tea.  They were all delightful and the easy banter among them was heartwarming to watch.  Peggy is lucky to have them all and a friend who isn’t even going to tell her red car story. 

Next thing you knew, it was time for dinner.  It was another great restaurant in the Halifax harbour.  This one had even more atmosphere and a very interesting, Asian -inspired menu.  I think the food quality  might have been better at Salty’s but Sea Smoke (seasmokehalifax.com) had fire tables by the boardwalk, with the world walking by, and was very satisfying, albeit eclectic.  After we lost the bill fight again, we skipped Sea Smoke’s desserts in favour of our own walk along the boardwalk to the ice-cream store at the other end.  There’s nothing like a walk for an ice cream cone on a beautiful night. 

Thursday, August 22 was our last day.  It had all gone by so fast.  There was another wonderful John Kyriako cooked breakfast, we loaded up the red car, and we were off to tour the countryside.  John and Peggy had selected Mahone Bay to show us.  It’s a quaint little town, gone touristy but not too badly.  We strolled its streets and browsed a couple of shops.  Then we drove to nearby Chester and THE ROPE LOFT – Welcome to The Rope Loft for lobster rolls, right on the water.

The lobster rolls were great and again, the waterside deck was fabulous.  I won the bill fight by the devious ruse of paying it inside before it was time for it to come.  We found ice cream in town after this one, too.  John bought it, of course.  Then he drove us to the airport and we flew home.

It was an absolutely wonderful holiday.  The more I travel, the more I realize that my people are more important than the places and touching bases with old and new good friends is just the best thing in the world to do.  So thank you Andrea, and Sheila, and Bob, and Peggy and John.  You all made the experience  one for the books.  

Footnotes:  I try not to be political, as I know people can be sensitive, but I have to share my favorite campaign poster of all time.  Robbie insists.:

Orange cats for Walz. Gotta love ‘em.  And another thing:

Ever notice I have a Facebook account but never post anything there.  The only time I used it
was during the Wine Country Fires of 2017, when it was useful.  I do get other people’s notices and do read what you write but very rarely comment. I keep my Facebook profile as low as I can. So when I saw this:

Apparently people are getting CLONED NOT HACKED on Fb. Changing your password does NOTHING. Heads Up. Almost every account is being cloned. One of your pictures and your name are used to
create a “new” Facebook Account. (They don’t need your password in order to do this). They want your friends to add them to their accounts. Your friends may think that it’s you and accept your request. From that point on they can write what they want under your name. I have NO plans to open a new
account!

PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT A NEW ‘FRIEND REQUEST’ FROM ME.

Better Safe than Sorry. – Thanks, Dee!

I decided to let you know this way, which, I hope, is safer.  That’s why I blog here.

Next stop, Vancouver, September 10, followed by the Silver Nova to Tokyo, and on to California. 
I’ll be seeing a lot of you. Watch this space or email me.