Denise Goldberg's blog

Wandering along the edge
An exploration of Prince Edward Island

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Planning not to plan

Where to ride, where to stay, where to eat!

My day-by-day plans for this trip were not very detailed, as in not planned. But - I did plant a stake in the ground with my "plans" to circumnavigate the island in a counter-clockwise direction, started and ending in Summerside. As you know now, my non-plans were changed during the tour, primarily due to weather conditions and my lack of excitement about riding in the rain.

I did a fair amount of reading before the trip, mainly on the PEI tourism web site. I also requested paper copies of the PEI map and the PEI Visitor's Guide. Unfortunately, the mailing schedule for requests like mine and the time I had before I left on my trip didn't coincide, and the requested brochures actually arrived in the mail while I was in PEI. Not very helpful, but not a problem either. There are visitor centers scattered throughout the island, including one at Borden-Carleton (the bridge entry point), and at Wood Islands (the entry point for the ferry from Nova Scotia). It can be a quick stop to pick up a map, a visitor's guide, and any interesting brochures - plus all of the visitor centers have at least one computer available for guest use.

The Visitor's Guide is a magazine-style document, and the 2005 version is over 200 pages. I didn't really want to carry one, but I did want the information on places to stay and restaurants. I picked up a guide when I entered PEI, then removed and threw out the first 65 pages. A little lighter, and it made me happy to have the information with me as opposed to hoping that visitor centers would still be open when my bike and I arrived in a town. I found it helpful to have this information with me, and if (or should I say when) I return to PEI, I will probably repeat this behavior.

One of my tasks each day was identifying an end-point for my day's journey that included both a place to stay and a place to eat. While that seems like it would be a simple task in a place like PEI that attracts a lot of tourists, I found that finding both in one place could sometimes be a challenge. The map identifies cities, towns, and villages. There are only two cities in PEI, Charlottetown and Summerside. As expected, they have all services, and the only challenge there was deciding on a place to stay and a place to eat. No complaints there! The places that were categorized as towns often met my requirements with places to stay and eat, but the places that were categorized as villages usually had no commercial establishments at all. In fact, one day I noticed that the villages all seemed to have houses, farms, and at least one cemetery. The towns were still pretty small and didn't always have much in the way of choices. Looking back at my homes for the night, the only place I stayed that was classified as a village was Cavendish. There were a number of motels there plus a couple of choices of places to eat - but I think that was because of the presence of the Green Gables National Historic Site (you know, Anne of Green Gables...).

One thing that I found a little odd was that there were signs for cottages in the middle of no where. That is, there were no services in the form of restaurants or food stores anywhere near them. That might be acceptable if you were traveling by car, but it certainly wasn't my choice when my bike was my only form of transportation. Of course if you were carrying several meals with you staying in a place like this might work.

I just looked back through the visitor guide, and there also appear to be a lot of B&Bs that are in the middle of no where, or B&Bs that are a few miles outside of a town. This might work for you, and I could have made it work by biking to dinner, but I have a strong preference to be able to walk to find food. I also talked with some women who were riding the Confederation Trail who ended up one night in a town with a place to stay, a convenience store, and no restaurants. Luckily for them the convenience store had a microwave and a few choices of frozen dinners.

On the maps front, the highway map distributed by the province is a good map, and I used it for most of my travel days. I also used a map from the Canadian publisher MapArt. The MapArt map included more detailed maps of the cities (Charlottetown and Summerside) and also included maps of a couple of the larger towns that weren't on the official map. In addition, the MapArt map included highlights of "places of interest" that weren't noted on the provincial map. The map from the province was free (of course!), and the MapArt map was $4.95. For me, that was a little bit of money well spent.