Day 49 Charlottetown

It was an early morning start today as we had a full day tour and meeting time was 8:30am on the pier. At this port we went ashore via tender. Once ashore we joined our tour, The Best of Prince Edward Island. The day was rather overcast and cool.

After a slow drive through Charlottetown having the main points of town pointed out to us - large cathedrals of the Catholic, Anglican and Uniting Churches and the building where they first met to discuss confederation, we headed out to the Confederation Bridge.

The bridge is the longest bridge in the world that goes over iced covered waters. It is eight miles long and has an elevation of 2% at its highest point. It is free to travel from the mainland over to the island but it will cost you $46 to leave the island unless you swim or fly away.

Next stop was a place called Shop and Play. The owner of the store came aboard the bus and gave everyone a bag of potato chips. PEI is known for its potato crops. We had time to roam amongst the souvenirs and have a photo taken standing in front of the statue of Anne of Green Gables.

Up to this point we had been driving along the south coast of the island. We now headed across the island for the north coast and Park Corner, the home of Lucy Maud Montgomery's cousins and grandfather's homes. Lucy had been raised by her grandparents after her mother's death and her father decided to move from PEI.

The cousin's house is now known as the Anne of Green Gables museum. The parlour is where Lucy was married and has the magical bookshelf she writes about in her stories. The house is still decorated as it would have been during Lucy's life and contains many photographs and excerpts from her journal.

This is also where we had a boxed lunch.

After lunch we were off to a little fishing village and then to one of the beaches. The sandstone cliffs are red due to rich iron deposits. The sand on the beach is a pinkish shade due to the iron.

Our last stop was the PEI Preserve Company. Unfortunately, there were 5 other coaches already stopped here. The counter where you could sample the jams and pickles was nowhere big enough to cope with this number of people at the one time. At one stage the they were six people deep at the counter. We decided to head outside and wait for the other coaches to leave. We did manage to get a taste of some tea and jams before we had to get back on the bus.

It was then time to head back into town. We were dropped off at the cruise terminal with 40 minutes to spare. A quick walk back into town to take some photos and back to the terminal where there was time to upload a few photos from the day to Facebook.

As we departed the low cloud and misty rain started to roll in making farewell photos of the island not so great.

For any future travellers we would suggest you hire a car and tour the island on your own. It is much easier to stop and take photos of interesting sights. You also can cut out some activities and spend more time elsewhere. Our tour guide was a retired lady (we believe) who did the guiding to supplement her income in addition to running a B&B. She contradicted herself some many times we were not sure what to believe.