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Of potatoes and seaweed and little black signs
August, 1997
"The Fixed Link" (the newly-opened bridge between New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) is fun, though I'd hate to be on it in a gale.
New
Brunswick is little and neat and pleasant and rural and not obviously
very wealthy. Many of the fields have small labels on them, telling us
what variety of potatoes are growing there. There are no hoardings (billboards)
allowed in PEI, so there are hundreds of small black ones instead.
There used to be a railway, sadly now just a gravelly path, used in places as a hiking and cycling trail.
We camped the first night at West Point, in a howling rainy gale that nearly shredded our tarpaulin. Next day we drove eastwards, skirting the sea that has nibbled bites all round the island, as if it were childishly devouring a cookie. We passed through dozens of charming villages. PEI is really one huge village. Even Charlottetown feels like a large village.
The highlight of our day was a visit to the Seaweed Museum (we didn't manage to get to the Potato Museum). Seaweed is actually potentially a significant crop, with a Japanese market mostly untapped. The type of seaweed gathered from the beaches around PEI is carragheen, a glutinous plant used for thickening (and familiar to us vegans as present in a lot of our foods). Unfortunately there hasn't been much political interest in the crop, and a processing plant lies abandoned. A group of women is behind the museum and a push to get some support from the government.
Further round the coast there are meadows filled with wild flowers, and churches with white-painted wooden fences that look as if they've been made from bed-posts...
Then, after a brief night at Wood Islands Campground, we, a couple of other trailers, a car or two and three semis, caught the 6am ferry to Nova Scotia.