There is a part of this story I haven't mentioned yet, and it joins the long list of things that have gone wrong and that I would list under the category of "2024 Can Suck It."
Halfway through our trip, Dad called us when he was over at the house to take care of the cats to tell us that it was 87 degrees in the house. Our AC unit had stopped working.
While it had been in the 60s in Nova Scotia on most days we were there (aside from the brief heat wave), in Omaha it had been in the 90s every day, and some days had approached 100. I'd set the AC unit to 75 before we left -- normally, when we're home, it's set to 66 or 67 in the summer, and 70-73 in the winter -- so that the AC would not run 24/7 while we were gone. The cats didn't need it to be ice cold in the house, just comfortable. This is done on every trip we take -- the thermostat is adjusted accordingly not just to save energy, but because we're not there and the cats are fine.
Well, it apparently did not work this time.
Add to this that a few weeks before we left for Canada, we'd had the AC unit cleaned and professionally serviced, and they told us that even though it is older than I am (by several years, actually), it was in perfect working order. And honestly, it always has been. I've never lived in a home with a better air conditioning system.
At some point after we left, within a week or so, it blew out. Dad said it felt hot in the house when he'd been over the previous visit too, but he didn't think much of it as he knew we'd turned up the thermostat. However, after a few days of no air it was very apparent that it wasn't working once the temperature outside had skyrocketed.
We had Dad troubleshoot it via phone, to no avail. Our furnace fan (which propels air through the house) was on and running, but the actual AC unit was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Daisy opened a ticket with our home warranty people to get a repairman out to the house, who immediately told us that because of the heat, no repair people were taking on new jobs and it could be a while before we could get someone to the house. Dad volunteered to go over once they assigned a tech and would let them in, monitor the repairs, keep the cats sequestered, etc -- but we let him know it likely wouldn't be anytime soon. In the interim he turned off the unit, turned the house fan to "on" to circulate air, and turned on all the ceiling fans to try to keep the house, and cats, as cool as possible. It was all that could be done, really.
Fast forward to us, two days before we'd fly home and while sitting in a parking lot in the van on Prince Edward Island in pouring rain, to be told by the repair company via a very choppy phone call that the repairman's soonest availability to fix it would be the Wednesday after we returned to Omaha -- four days after we arrived home.
It is what it is, I suppose.
We had to accept that appointment as it was the soonest availability. Mind you, we were still in Canada at the time -- in another province of Canada, but still Canada nonetheless -- and we didn't even know what was wrong with the AC unit. Without hands and eyes on it back home, I didn't know if it just needed to be reset, or if it had just overheated and needed to sit for a few days before being ran again -- or if it had really and truly blown up and needed to be replaced.
But, we'll get to that.
The last two days of our trip would be spent on Prince Edward Island -- PEI, as it is known -- with the goals of exploring a bit of Charlottetown's vegan restaurants and going to see Green Gables in Cavendish. Charlottetown and Cavendish are on opposite sides of the island, with Charlottetown being on the south shore and Cavendish being on the northern shore. Mama was with us, of course, as she was traveling with us for this trip (as you know).
As PEI is a full blown island, there are only two ways to get onto it -- there is a ferry outside of Truro on the north shore of Nova Scotia, and there is Confederation Bridge -- a seven-mile-long bridge from, essentially, New Brunswick to PEI. Mama was a bit wary of getting seasick from the ferry, so we chose the bridge option. Neither one would have saved any time, honestly. The rest of the family chose the ferry.
PEI is very pretty, but it reminds me a lot of backwoods West Virginia, just on a much smaller island. Outside of Charlottetown and the other little small towns scattered around the area, it's very much rolling hillsides, farmland, and winding roads that stretch on for many miles. There are no deer or moose on PEI, nor are there any other particularly exotic forms of wildlife. Yeah, there are eagles (a lot of eagles, actually, but they're also scattered all through Nova Scotia too), rabbits, raccoons, foxes, and apparently a thriving skunk population there, but not really anything else aside from eagles and seabirds. So it's like driving through West Virginia when it's rainy and foggy, with the occasional broad view of the ocean or a small lighthouse/cove and then BAM, you're in a town or larger city like Charlottetown.
Make no mistake, Charlottetown is gorgeous. It is a beautiful coastal city of about 40,000 people, and its harbour (because there's a U in it) is giant and breathtaking. When we pulled into town, a giant cruise ship -- like, a tourist cruise ship -- was pulling out of the harbor to continue its journey. I got video of it. It wasn't the largest ship I've ever seen; that honor goes to the absolutely massive cruise ship that was docked in Portland, Maine when I was there in 2015...but it was big.
We'd gotten onto PEI in the middle of the day on a Wednesday and were in Charlottetown by 3, 4pm-ish. There was a restaurant that Daisy wanted to try called the Stir It Up Vegan Kitchen (or something like that) that was supposed to be right on the harbour. Well, apparently it was -- but it was inside a big mall-like food court building that housed many restaurants and little boutique shops/kiosks. At 4pm on a Wednesday, the place was almost completely deserted inside, so we had no trouble getting food. I don't exactly remember what the girls had, but there was a shop famous for its poutine next door, so I (of course) got a poutine. That was #3 of the trip, and would end up -- sadly -- being my last.
It was very good.
PEI is known for, and is apparently quite famous for, its potatoes -- similar to how Idaho potatoes are the gold standard here in the states. Well, PEI doesn't fuck around with its potatoes:
Like sweet holy jesus they are serious about their potatoes. But there's a reason for that, and it's because those potatoes are great.
I am not sure I've had better fries on this planet than the ones in that poutine above. Daisy got fries from another place up there and they were also just as good. I got fries from another restaurant in Charlottetown the next night and they were really good as well -- not the best but leaps and bounds better than what I could get in Omaha. I don't know what it is, if it's the right soil, latitude, altitude, climate, whatever -- that makes these potatoes so good, but it's like Canadian cheese and Canadian flour (I'll even throw in there Canadian tea, too) -- they're just better, and leaps and bounds better at that.
Also, don't think I didn't notice the backward N in "poutine" above in the baked potato picture. I don't know if that was a typesetting error or was somehow intentional.
Anyway, see that I <3 PEI POTATOES sign in the corner? Yeah, you can buy t-shirts and stickers and keychains with that on it. It's a thing up there.
There is one other thing about PEI that I really didn't know anything about until I got there, though I'd heard a little here and there -- the dirt there, the soil there -- it is red. And I mean really red, like bloody maroon red. I guess it's something about the clay composition in it (similar soil exists in South Dakota, for example) but they fully embrace it, and you can buy t-shirts dyed reddish brown by the PEI mud as it, apparently, has a composition that makes it excellent for mud-based tie-dyeing -- the color does not go away or come out, it's permanent and bonds with the fabric.
I was told there would be a place to dye your own shirts when visiting, so I packed (again, foresight is everything) three plain white t-shirts into my luggage. Well, the "place" is the island itself, anywhere you could find a mud puddle or a muddy beach, basically -- or you could just buy the pre-dyed reddish-brown shirts in a shop, most of the time with logos/text on them that stated they were dyed with PEI mud. I thought this was pretty neat, actually. The shirts sat in my luggage and we never dyed them anywhere, so it was sort of a waste to bring them, but I did think it would've been cool to find some red muddy water somewhere to do it in. I also did not purchase any of the pre-mudded shirts, mainly because the two shops I saw them in did not have them in fat guy sizes. Oh well.
Anyway.
Our motel -- and it was, make no mistake, a motel -- was in Cavendish, about five or six miles from the Green Gables complex (I'm estimating) and about two miles or so from where Lucy Maud Montgomery herself is buried.
If you're not familiar with Anne of Green Gables, I wouldn't be incredibly surprised. I'd known of it by name only before Daisy and I got together, and had never seen any of the television or movie adaptations of the original series of books -- nor had I read any of the books either, of course. However, in Canada it is likely the most famous of Canadian literature, and outside of Canada the 1985 TV miniseries and its much later three-season Netflix adaptation Anne with an E have also become wildly popular and have helped to make the character of Anne more universally known -- I encourage anyone interested to watch both series, as they're great. The entire series is set on Prince Edward Island, and focuses a lot on the Cavendish and Charlottetown areas (in the books/series, "Avonlea" is based very much on Cavendish in the early 1900s).
But, Green Gables is a real place. It is a real house, purchased by the Canadian government about 60-70 years ago and refurbished/maintained to look like the house as described in the books (not as depicted in either series, but definitely the books). And ever since I watched both of the miniseries with Daisy, I have wanted to see it with my own eyes, in person, on a trip to Canada. Daisy and her sisters, with the parents, had seen it many years ago. Most of Daisy's Canadian family has been there to see it once or twice. I never had gone -- PEI is a long haul of a trip and it can't be done in one day, unless you wanted to start at 4am and not get back to the family homestead until waaaaay after midnight.
In 2015, while we were there in Nova Scotia for a good long time, we never went.
In 2022, Daisy's grandfather had died and that's why we went on the trip when we did -- there wasn't really any extra time to galavant off to PEI.
In 2023, we could have gone and considered doing so, but we were there on our own and for a much shorter period of time than we would've had to really enjoy it -- and cost was a factor.
2024 was the year -- we were there for two weeks, we had Mama with us, Daisy's sister wanted to take their five kids to see it, and Daisy's cousin and her two kids were coming up from mainland Nova Scotia to join us all for the adventure as they lived considerably closer to PEI than to the family homestead. We'd made plans and booked the motel in Cavendish well in advance of the trip, and as it was a week or so before the summer tourist season would really start, I think there were only three different rooms in the motel actually in use when we were there. All of it was planned out for us to spend two nights in Cavendish and then hit the road back down to Halifax to get our flights back to Omaha.
I was told that Green Gables wasn't much to see, that it was basically the house and a little gift shop, surrounded by a huge tourist-trappy area. None of that really mattered to me. Being able to see the house, being able to touch the wood and steel and be where all of the magic happened -- well, where it was "set," so to speak -- was a very important experience for me.
What I did not know -- and apparently none of the family really knew either -- is that five years ago, in 2019, a giant complex was built on the farm next to the house. This complex housed a very detailed museum, huge gift shop, cafe, and AV area all focused around Anne of Green Gables as well as the life of her author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. $12 got you into the museum, which you went down through to see all of the exhibits, and then it led you out the back door and up a short gravel path to the barn and to the actual Green Gables house itself. There were other paths too, hiking paths and a "haunted forest," but...of course, as it's Atlantic Canada, the day we were there it was pouring rain.
But...
There's the house, with Mama and Daisy heading towards the entrance in the front.
The house itself is not that impressive, really; it's just a green-and-white house that looks old on the outside. But the inside, which is roped off and immaculately-kept, is a time-capsule of the early 1900s, and is very much meant to be such.
I took a pic of Anne's room too; yes, of course, I was in the house:
The museum complex itself is beautifully designed, but of course, it is geared very strongly towards tourists. Green Gables is the big tourist draw of the island itself and tourism is the biggest part of PEI's overall economy as a province. So, everywhere you go anywhere around the northern half of PEI, it's Green Gables this or Anne that. It's so much of a novelty there that it feels fake and hollow, and I'm sure the people who have lived there all their lives, for generations, are sick of hearing about Anne. The town of Cavendish, while cute, is just littered with tourist gift shops. They're not bad gift shops -- they're actually pretty nice ones -- but because thousands of tourists stream through there every year, prices are heavily inflated.
Because I wasn't leaving PEI without some sort of souvenirs, even though my luggage was near-bursting anyhow, I did end up getting two different t-shirts (one with "Cavendish" on it in beautiful script, and one with a map of the Maritimes) and a long-sleeved PEI shirt while there -- in addition to some candies and taffy and potato-based soap based on the Anne characters. To be fair, the shirts are really nice, the taffy was...questionable, and the soap left me unimpressed once we returned home.
Anyway, that was the Green Gables Adventure™. It was fun, but all three of us (me, Mama, and Daisy) agreed that we never need to do it or see it again -- I've now checked it off my bucket list of places to visit and see and I'm happy/satisfied I did it, but it is what it is. I'll likely never return to Cavendish or the Green Gables area in this lifetime.
However, we hadn't left the island yet -- we had one last blast before we left....
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