Title: Day Nine – Exploring PEI
Date: August 27, 2007 12:52 PM
Category: Bike
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I need a road to ride. Everyone else seem to want to visit Green Gables so I’m going exploring instead.

From mapquest and the fact I only really fancy a couple of hours on the bike, the best option looks to heading west to Summerside and then south the Charlottetown, mainly as I fancy picking up something new to read too.

Heading out, the stiffness is really back in my arms. When I get back, I really should look into Helibars for the daytona. Losing another 25lbs wouldn’t hurt either…

Heading West on the 6 is somewhat pleasant. There’s few cars today and it seems a faster, twistier road all of a sudden, but not drastically so and I realize my perception the other day was colored by the excellent “North of antigonish” run. Heading towards Kensingon, I realize not. It’s back to being straight agricultural roads again. All slow drivers, often tractors and no passing places.

Pressing on to Summerside, I figure it’s just about time to eat. As teh second biggest town on the island, I figured it might be somewhat close in size to Charlottetown, which itself is no metropolis. I was wrong. The place is a small, single street city center surrounded by a few of the typical big-box stores that surround most towns these days. In short, in a brief drive though, I was less than impressed and gave up even trying to locate somewhere for food. After circulating town, I headed South to Charlottetown on route one.

This was a somewhat more interesting ride. There’s some good fresh roads here with some decent turns too, especially after passing Borden Carleton, but ultimately, if this is the best the province has to offer, as it looks to be on the map, it’s worth riding somewhere else.

I arrive in Charlottetown for a late lunch and discover it’s not an unpleasant city. It is however somewhat devoid of choice. The restaurants I found were nothing terribly interesting, at least from the menus, and mostly clones of each other. I ended up in a little Tex-Mex place that was acceptable at best. After some brief detour to buy a book from perhaps the worlds smallest large-chain bookstore, I headed back North on highway 6.

Part way up, I realized perhaps that my jaded view of the province was based on the major highways. While I forgive myself for not realizing sooner (they are, after all, only single lane roads pretty much all the way) I decided to hit a detour up one of the 2 series roads that ostensibly lead back to Cavendish, the 241 I think. I should have known better. It’s agricultural. The only use for most of these side roads is to move either improbably large tractors down or herds of dung-laying animals. I encountered both on my short detour and arrived back at my destination even less impressed. PEI seems to be the antithesis of country. A place where the roads are all dead-straight, where the highways are more fun than the back roads and the excessive number of motorists all get scared when the road kinks and brake hard.

Luckily, I’m leaving here soon, but I still need to leave the province.

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