Bye to PEI
While we knew that we had to leave PEI we did drag our feet. Instead of heading directly to the bridge we went to downtown Charlottetown. On our way into Charlottetown, Greg spotted a Princess Auto right on the edge of our route, so we stopped in to pick up a replacement for the misbehaving hydraulic system switch. Our original thought was to go to see Province House National Historic Site and relook at all the stuff about our origins as a country.
The House is closed for renovations but the Confederation Centre for the Arts has a room set aside with a bit of a blurb on the happenings. I did see that the play that was coming was Anne and Gilbert. As I read all the Anne books I would have loved to have seen that one. We think that they have done a great job in the downtown area and there were many places we thought we could explore but the bridge beckoned. So off we went.
Welcome to NB. Our first stop was a potato distillery. They use the potatoes that are smaller and they can’t sell to the stores to make vodka and gin. A bit disturbing, but not surprising was the revelation that all of the potatoes they sell are ALL GMO. We got a tour to see how it is all done and learned new words about processing vodka: foreshots, heads, hearts, and tails.
Foreshots one doesn’t drink as it is high in methanol and toxic but we sampled the rest. The tails are not kept either. It is the heart you want. We did have a chance to sip on the finished product. My favourite was the 100% (oops, that should be 100 proof – 50%, too many samples). The gin was good too as they add 12 botanicals: juniper, coriander, grains of paradise, angelica root, ginger, orris, lemon, sweet orange, cassia, cucumber, fennel & nutmeg whereas most gin uses only juniper. Nice and smooth. Neither of us had any idea that gin is actually based on vodka. Their particular gin was the smoothest we have ever tasted, so a bottle of it jumped into our bag to come home with us.
The sipping helped cure out sadness about leaving PEI and we headed for our final destination of the day….Hopewell Cape and the flower pot rocks. I had been here years ago with Mum but Greg had never been there. We headed directly to the “Flower pots” as we knew that we would be there at high tide. We had to wait till the tide peaked and just started to recede before we were allowed to go down to the rocks. It was fascinating to see it start to go out ; receding at about a foot a minute.
One of the guides told us that 160 billion metric tonnes went in and out TWICE every 25 hours. Can’t comprehend this amount so he helped by saying that in order to get this amount of water you would need to collect all that went over Niagara Falls for 21 months. We decided that we needed to stay the night and be there for low tide the next morning. Off to find a motel.
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