It is a beautiful morning along the coast or Prince Edward Island. That's my chair, where I sat watching the sunrise on Stanhope Beach. I drag it around, sometimes walking half a mile or so with it. It is comfortable!
As I write this, I am at my second campground in PEI National Park, Cavendish. The community around this area is much more developed and more highly populated than Stanhope. The campground is much bigger, too. It sprawls. I am not sure I like it as much, overall, but, my site the first night was fantastic, only about 100 yards from the shoreline, the sound of waves part of a very satisfying experience. I move to a different site today, and I’ll be there two nights.
One reason I say I am (was?) not sure I’ll like it as much is the guy at the registration station told me there are no paved bike trails in the park, that they are all packed gravel. But, in reading the trails map this morning, it indicates there is a paved trail. I’ll have to explore and see that the actual situation is. Whatever the case, there are about eighteen miles of trails here in the park. If I do not ride much, that’s okay. I’ll do plenty of hiking, and have a slightly different fulfilling experience.
I am listening to Path Metheny’s album, Secret Story, and enjoying it thoroughly. It’s inspirational in several ways. He utilizes a variety of styles on it, some up tempo with a jazz flavor, some slow and quietly contemplative. He integrates some vocals in it, but they are either in a non-English language or perhaps they are not in any language at all, but rather are vocalizations of human sounds alone, primal syllables rhythmically created. He also utilizes what seems to me like children in some of these sounds. In addition to guitar, there is a great variety of instruments, piano, horns and stringed instruments (violins, etc.) on some songs. Some songs are distinctly energizing, others are slower, moving towards reflective. It’s definitely a multi-mood creation, covering a range of human emotions. I love it, including the titles of some of the songs: Above the Treetops, Finding and Believing, Sunlight, See the World, and The Truth Will Always Be …
The sunset last night was spectacular. Once again, there was a big red-orange ball of quiet energy sinking into the water at a distance. How can it be that it moves so slow and so fast at the same time?!?! The last thirty minutes, it seems to take a long time, then it’s right at the horizon. It forms a tangent with the surface of the Earth. Still moving slowly, one can watch its slowness. I feel it. And then, it’s gone, out of sight. Like it disappeared magically. It’s a paradoxical phenomenon.
I talked briefly with my neighbor this morning. He and his partner have a Winnebago Solis, which is a campervan similar in some ways to mine, but dissimilar in others. We both have the Dodge Promaster 3500 as the base vehicle. The Solis has two 100-amp hour AGM batteries (lead) while I have four 100-amp hour batteries (lithium.) It has a generator and propane. I do not. Any, I learned two things from him. One is that we are in something called Construction Holiday. It is a two-week period in Quebec when most of the construction industry in the province of Quebec shuts down and employees take vacation. A result is it was hard for him to obtain reservations on short notice. This made me realize I was fortunate to obtain my reservations. The second thing he told me was how great the ice cream at the Cavendish boardwalk was. It’s at a place simply called Cow’s Ice Cream. I’ll have to check it out!
Now I ‘ll back up and mention a few things about Stanhope Campground.
Being here at Cavendish confirms that Stanhope was the campground I stayed at in the early 1980s on my bike trip. “What bike trip,” you say? I rode my Bob Jackson ten-speed here in 1983 from Danbury. I have tried to recall the timeline and some incidents of the trip, posted on another entry.
The weather for my time at Stanhope was fantastic. Today is Day 11 on this segment of Summer 2024, and the weather overall have been better than the first segment (June 2-July 9). I have not had any significant rain or humidity on this trip, while Segment 1 had lots of both.
Stanhope has a paved bike path the full length of the park, about seven and a half miles one-way, so riding it back and forth is a fifteen-mile ride. One can add four more miles to that by riding the packed gravel road to Robinson Island. These trails translated into fantastic riding, despite the wind that comes with being on the shoreline. I did eighty miles total in the two days riding.
The beach extends the length of the park as well. Actually, it extends past the park boundaries … it is one of the best beaches I have been at. Of course, I have not been to many, but I like it better than Gulf Islands National Park, which is just as long, because the beach here is definitely more swimmer friendly. The water deepens much more gradually, great for kids who want to romp around splashing and body surfing.
Something in common with Gulf Islands National Park, one can watch the sunrise and sunset over the water! In my experience, this is a unique geographically phenomenon. The times I have been at Fort Pickens Campground (at Gulf Islands) one can do this in December and January. (I was there this year in March, and the sunrise comes up over land at this point in time.) Of course, being on the coast looking north, one sees the sunrise coming up to one’s right, setting on one’s left, whereas in Florida this was reversed.
At Stanhope, I learned there is a game called Gaga Ball. It is played inside a rather small area, maybe about 8-10 yards wide, enclosed by an octagonal wood fence about two feet high. They have a Gaga Ball setup in the playground area of the campground. There is no limit to how many can play the game, though space is an issue. All of the players climb over the wall into the smallish playing field. The object of the game is to strike a ball, such as a soccer ball or kickball, even a basketball could be used, in such a way that it hits another person. Then that person is out.
The game starts out by one person dropping the ball in the center of the area. There is a scramble to obtain possession. You can’t grab the ball. You have to tap it to yourself in such a way that you control it, have it in your possession. Then you try to hit someone with it by striking it in their direction, like Dodgeball, but the trick is, you need to bounce it off the wall first. Strike the ball with your hand or fist, sending it into the wall and bouncing it off towards other players. If it hits someone, they are out. If not, then whoever is closest can retrieve the ball and make the next play.
Later, 3:15PM, having late lunch after riding 50 miles. It’s a beautiful day, jeepers, sunshine and blue skies, a touch of clouds inland. Sand dune’s green grass is dancing in a gentle breeze, and it is shining. It is not nearly as windy as yesterday. The beach is crowded today, whereas yesterday, with the wind and mostly cloudy skies it was nearly empty. Today, the parking lots are filled, and cars are parked along the side of the road. It is very different here on this matter, compared to US national parks in my mind. In the US, there are “No Parking” signs so often along roads. It’s a different feel here, almost as if people can park anywhere, as long as they do not block traffic. Yet it seems quite orderly. Relatively speaking, it is a long walk from the side of the road parking to the beach in most cases.
There was a woman and her young daughter, maybe age three, sitting in a car near my van when I returned from my ride. She had a Massachusetts license plate, so I asked where in Mass. “Newton,” she said. But she is originally from Nova Scotia. She talked about how nice it is here, as compared to crowds on Cape Cod or the North Shore. The reality is, PEI is not a highly populated place. And the two provinces close by, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, they are not particularly crowded either.
Another difference here, it seems the park systems on PEI, both provincial and national, utilize youthful employees differently. The lifeguards at Jacque Cartier Provincial Park were high schoolers. They did a nine-month training course to qualify for certification. They were fun to talk with, too! The “employees” working the registration kiosks at PEI National Park seem to be just out of high school, maybe college just into college aged. There is no indication of “park ranger” status, as is the case usually in the US National Parks. It’s more like youth in park-branded t-shirts and jeans, rather than uniforms. Just an observation.
One woman working at Stanhope has worked at Cavendish three years and this is her first year here. She likes it better here. “It has a better view,” she said, looking out towards the water. Now that I am at Cavendish, I see what she means. The kiosk here is not near the water. Like the two women lifeguards at Jacque Cartier, she appears to be high school age, but for all I know she could be 25. It seems they staff parks differently here than in the US, where park rangers seem to be older and somewhat more … official presenting. I like the way things are here. It seems so informal.
I would say the pace of life here is slower than that of VT, NH, and ME, just based on what I have experienced the past couple of months. And both areas a slower paced than Danbury. Of course, one of the barometers I use to determine this is actually my own personal pace of life, which can tend to be both fast and slow at the same time. Fast in that there is a part of me that wants to do things, keep busy, accomplish goals so to speak. When I worked in any of my jobs, I had natural impulses to identify projects and goals, create pathways to attaining them, and dive in full speed. I like that framework.
Nowadays, I still identify projects and goals to some degree, but they have a different meaning. I don’t have any sense of timeline, no sense of any due dates. It means that on days when I was going to work on something, if I do not get to it, I just let it slide and the things I enjoy. Like if I was going to study my Spanish, and I don’t get to it, it’s no big deal. Things pop up and lead in other directions.
Comments