Caroline spotted this goat milk soap company on our way onto the island the other night. Sadly, I’m being cornered into stopping because they are open, and she needs some gift shop therapy. The place is called the Great Canadian Soap Company, and they have every scent imaginable within those walls. However, there are so many that you will only smell a mish-mash of things that blend into a potent mix that overwhelms the olfactory in seconds. The grapefruit probably smells like the pine, which, as far as I can tell, smells a lot like the patchouli. [Voice from the future: we evidently made good choices, though, because the soaps we picked kept the car smelling nice for the whole trip – Caroline]

Wild blueberries are a dream come true. While this is another honor system farmstand, the farmer/owner was visiting and rearranging things and saw us eyeballing a small box of berries when he offered to open the lid on a five-pound box we could never finish. He also warned us that they were in the process of turning as they were late-season berries; no matter that they were getting soft, what we didn’t eat by hand in the next half hour, we’d be adding to our granola, and I can tell you that they were great.

This was not the weather forecast just 24 hours earlier when it appeared that our entire stay on P.E.I. would be in soaking rain, as in a 100% chance of rain every hour until we needed to leave the island. Instead, we are presented with this view reminiscent of a road we’ve traveled on Hawaii.

The promised shortcut to the coast and the North Rustico unit of the Prince Edward Island National Park turned out to be a dead end, not literally, but the mud we encountered less than a kilometer from our turn stopped and turned us around.

The sun pokes through and just as quickly is obscured by the fast-moving clouds. Though the winds can turn blustery, gusting through the grasses, it is mostly calm. After yesterday’s slow crawl over the eastern side of the island, we are trying to be considerate of the time requirements to circumnavigate this island, which I had previously considered quite small, but I was wrong. There’s a compromise in being here, hoping to familiarize ourselves with these lands of eastern Canada and allowing ourselves to find immersion, and that is that we cannot afford to dwell very long in any one location.

A lot of our stops will see us jump from the car to take photos in one direction, turn around, and shoot in the other; that’s exactly what is going on here.

Drive a little farther; become overwhelmed by more intense beauty that demands you pull over again. You fools, you didn’t really want to get very far up the road anyway! With the weather report being what it was, these moments of gorgeous skies always felt under threat and so we should take every advantage of the respite in the rain to capture what we can before being thrust back into the gloom. That reference has me thinking about yesterday, and I want to emphasize that I didn’t find yesterday gloomy at all. Both Caroline and I feel the day was perfect, not a flaw or inconvenience. Along the way, we met some very nice people. One of my blog posts should be titled, Very Nice People of Canada, because that’s what we are experiencing. When that’s combined with sights that stand out, even under gray skies, and love is shared with an adequate amount of grazing, we have all the elements of a great time, even in the rain.

I believe there might have been an arch standing here not too long ago. When Caroline was looking for sights on our way to the North Point Lighthouse, she saw a feature that showed a hole in the rock. Well, that’s gone, as is some shoreline.

Would you believe me if I told you this was once a sandy beach and that climate change ate it, stripped away the palm trees, and chilled what used to be tropical waters? Yeah, I wouldn’t either.

Would you believe me if I told you that we stopped at the L.M. Montgomery House in New London right after visiting the gift shop and museum up the road a bit? Yeah, I wouldn’t either, but we did. Who is L.M. Montgomery? She was the author of Anne of Green Gables, and once a couple of Caroline’s coworkers found out that she was traveling to Prince Edward Island, they got very excited because that’s where their favorite book from childhood takes place. Our stop at the gift shop was for souvenirs for the ladies; our stop at the house was for curiosity, though we weren’t interested in the tour of it.

What we were interested in was eating some Prince Edward Island potatoes, and while you might think that a potato museum is not the place for that, you’d be wrong as this is also the host of the P.E.I. Potato Kitchen. Potatoes are right up there with bread and beer in a German’s dietary needs. If Caroline could have laid hands on the giant mighty potato from the prone position, that woman would have been on her knees before this holy deity of a tater. We ordered a baked potato with lobster, a side of classic poutine, and a poutine with everything, which meant ground beef and peas covered in gravy, so, potatoes with potatoes and a side of potatoes. Why they don’t feature hash browns, tater tots, potato pancakes, or potato chips is a mystery.

Having come to worship the potato, we left with a Prince Edward Island potato hoody, stylin’ with what will probably be the best souvenir of the trip.

We were almost to our next destination, but the little harbor at the Sea Cow Pond shining under the sun looked spectacular, of course, that was until we were out of the car and the clouds foiled our chance to collect a lovely memory that is now forever marred by the fascist clouds that stole our opportunity to enjoy the liberal benefits of free, government-subsidized sunlight.

What happens next? You might want to avert your eyes. Germans without natural-born children of their own, those who are now known as crazy cat ladies, are also leading the charge to eat your horses, while Haitians in Ohio are eating your cats. The horse, turning up its nose at Caroline, knows what’s coming and is frantically whinnying at Caroline, speaking horse-talk that said, “Not TODAY,” before Caroline turned murderous, breaking the leg off a horse and eating it raw. I swear it happened; I saw it with my own eyes. Someday, I hope to return to this blog post and wonder out loud what the hell I was thinking when I wrote this, only for Caroline to remind me of how this was part of our political dialogue originating with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Laura Loomer, and I’ll smack my head in disbelief that we were ever that collectively nuts.

We’ve reached the fenced-off North Cape Lighthouse, which is not visitable as it’s still functioning. As you can see for yourself, the weather has taken a turn for the worse.

Yesterday, after walking into the East Point Lighthouse, the person at the gift shop desk told us of the Tip-to-Tip certificate we could be awarded if we also visited the North Cape Lighthouse. While the road in that direction wasn’t part of our itinerary, figuring it was going to be raining all day today, we left the cottage with the idea that a long drive was ahead of us anyway, so why not collect those blue ribbons and a certificate that acknowledged our extraordinary efforts.

Somebody we’d spoken with told us about P.E.I. weather, “If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes, and it changes.” That adage holds true in our experience.

I would have loved to bring this lobster trap home as a memento of our time on Prince Edward Island, but we didn’t leave Arizona with proper equipment for affixing such things to the roof of our car. Next time, we’ll be prepared.

Squint your eyes, and you can imagine where the eye on the right once was before the sea dragged it into the depths. Pareidolia is everywhere.

Sand dollars and jellyfish are what we find on the Pacific coast, not sponges and lobster shells. So unique are these East Coast gifts that they are being put in the glove box and brought home, should any of our visitors desire to see such exotic things.

Happy McKiteFace has been christened a bi-coastal kite with its first-ever flight in the skies of the eastern edge of the North American continent. I can’t tell who’s happier, the kite or Caroline.

After visiting the Wood Islands Lighthouse in the south, the East Point Lighthouse, and now the North Cape, it was abundantly clear what our mission was: we must beat feet and get on down the road to the West Point Lighthouse in O’Leary so we may lay claim to having visited lighthouses in all four corners of P.E.I.

On our way up inside the lighthouse, after first looking into the old keeper’s room, we passed two private rooms. To our astonishment, a couple opened their door. We learned that they were on their honeymoon and that staying in a lighthouse room was not very expensive at all. Hearing our excitement, they invited us to take a look inside their room on the Northumberland side of the tower. This image is not their room; it’s the keeper’s historic room. How romantic, a honeymoon in a lighthouse!

I was nearly blinded trying to take this photo; such is the sacrifice I’m willing to endure for the love and wishes of my wife, who was threatening me for not booking her in the lighthouse. I only saved myself by insisting that the couple obviously booked it before me as I tried hard to secure the room, but the front desk insisted that it was sold out on our dates.

After visiting every bit of this lighthouse and viewing it from all known angles, we retreated for the long drive back to Brackley Beach. Knowing we’d be in for a relatively late arrival and that dinner options would be few, we called ahead and secured a reservation for the last seating at 7:30. There were other things on the menu, but it was the lobster rolls that spoke to us and funny enough, the last time lobster rolls would talk to us for some time as they were overpowered with celery which woke us from the meal-hypnosis we’d fallen into and realized, not all lobster rolls are equal.