20/07/2024 – Back Home 4

We drove to Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Thursday (18th July) and spent Friday there. It’s the capital of the Province, and also a very nice small town. On Thursday, we strolled along main street, then settled in on the rooftop patio of the Snooty Fox bar, which was a busy and fun venue for the evening. We sampled some local beer and shared an enormous salad, which, counter-intuitively, appeared to come with endless (and thoroughly delicious) fries. Later, we strolled along the St John river and across the graphic old railway bridge (now pedestrianized) which offered lovely views in the evening light, of the town and the landscape.

Comfortable though Fredericton is, we took the advantage of its everydayness to have a “normal” day. We did laundry. Carey got a haircut. We went to Costco (to replenish our much-depleted stash of road snacks). I had a lovely video chat with my step-daughter-in-law. We walked around the mall with a Starbucks coffee. We went to the supermarket… We both said, we had a “Calgary day”. After 4 months, “the usual” was perversely exotic!

We moved onto Price Edward Island today (Saturday 20th). Crossing the Confederation Bridge is a lovely experience. It’s almost 13km long, with a low-profile design that gives you uninterrupted views. We will explore the National Park tomorrow, but today we had to get one important visit “notched up” (leaving us with ample time to return). We went to the Cows Creamery for ice cream.

For the non-Canadians among you, Cows is “the best ice cream in Canada”. They are as famous for their merchandise as they are for their dairy. The PEI Creamery is their production facility, where they freeze their flavours, age their cheese, churn their butter AND print their just-the-right-amount-of cute T-shirts, onsies. We had two double scoop cones and a nose around their corporate museum. The Creamery is set into a tourist-friendly boardwalk, which also features the Anne of Green Gables chocolate factory and shop (also made with only PEI milk) and the Moo Moo Grilled Cheesery, which offers savoury Cows treats. All these operations share their family-friendly, colourful, cartoon stylings. In what we assessed (jokingly) to be a sinister conspiracy of silence, no one talks about the smoked beef brisket the Moo Moo Grilled Cheesery also offers. One, very adult-looking sign, away from the children, breaks up the cuteness to let parents know there is also red meat available.

We drove to the harbour to check out Charlottetown on a Saturday evening.We are definitely back in the Anglo-heartland.All the shops shut at 4pm and the restaurants were full of diners at 6:30!The local Basilica is St Dunstan’s, an English, dark-ages monk and bishop, and is also a great example of Canadian-Victorian building.We walked along the harbour front, where people were rod-fishing for mackerel (and catching them) and along Victoria Row, a pedestrian area lined with cafes full of noise and laughter in the warm evening.