A little vacation in PEI, with the great beaches and better weather.  Charlottetown is a lovely jewel of a city with lots of angle parking.  The parking allows businesses, families and even the public library to “adopt a corner” and plant beautiful flower gardens on most downtown corners. Streets are delightful with red brick buildings, and row housings sometimes of wood but mostly of red brick. Halifax could learn a lot about preservation, restoration and even tourism from Charlottetown.  The garbage receptacles in the city are quite nice, made of wood, and open with little awnings.  Better than the grey three siloed steel drums we have in Halifax.

Larry and I were staying at a “boutique” hotel downtown in Charlottetown and there was a great tree a “smoke tree” with pink fluffy cloud-like leaves.  As we drove through the PEI to Stanley Bridge, Cavendish and Kensington, on every small hill it seemed there was a fantastic white wooden church with an elegant steeple in the midst of the rolling farmland.  “Raise a little shell” is the slogan for lobster subs at Subway…

Here we are at Argyle Beach, red water, red cliffs, not far from Charlottetown.  The city has a two metre tall metal crane by the waterfront.  And there are many Sushi restaurants with an overwhelming selection of Sushi. Probably because some of Japanese visitors to the Anne of Green Gables House decide to stay… The menu in the window of this restaurant is immense,

And of course to place this all historically you want to look at these two paintings:

The Fathers of Confederation (1864) vs the excellent Kent Monkman version The Daddies (2016),  and you can learn and see more in an article in The Walrus here

We made two important cultural finds:

First: in Beanz cafe Larry heard Electroswing Republic — hear it for yourself. They’re from Denmark.

And I discovered where Clairol and L’Oreal dump all their  blonde shades of hair dye — PEI.  Every woman sports straggly long hair and a bottled blonde look. It’s a thing here.