Adventures Planned and Unplanned: 23 June 2014, Monday

By guest blogger Lara Davis

This morning dawned like many others in PEI, with the sun shining and the birds chirping in the trees. We woke and took ourselves over to Tim’s, the local hang out, and then started out on our planned excursions…. and an unplanned adventure.

So we started out on the coastal drive along the northeast part of the island toward Basin Head, a place the local branch insisted was the best beach and somewhere that must be visited. We knew that Singing Sands was there and thought we'd just make our way around that part of the island seeing the sights and stopping here and there as caught by fancy. We drove a little while, when we came upon Souris, a small little town with a lighthouse out on the wharf.  I'd never seen a lighthouse before and we detoured to see it and found out we could tour the lighthouse for free. The views we magnificent, and as I tried to capture the feelings of the ocean and the perfectly picturesque scene on camera, I realized it couldn't quite be done. It's one of those things that the pictures will remind me of how absolutely beautiful it was, but never convey the beauty to the outside observer. I think part of that has to do with the old phrase, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I still feel that a thousand words wouldn't really convey the emotions completely.

After the lighthouse, we continued on to Basin Head. There we got out our large hats and walked along the Singing Sand. It was incredible! I've never seen or heard anything like it. As you walk through the sand, it sings! We were amazed and delighted by the unusual sounds. Until we heard the sands sing, we thought that it was just a beautifully and wistfully named place; we didn’t realize the significance of the name. We sat on the beach in a perfectly lovely spot and read fromAnne of Green Gables and enjoyed the beautiful scene. We even managed to catch the singing sand on video, for all of the skeptics who won’t believe us when we tell them that the sands literally sang.
Note: I wasn't able to load the video of the singing sand:(

From Basin Head we moved further along the coast toward Morell, where we planned to rent bikes and go for a ride. As we drove through each little town we saw the most beautiful little old chapels, all whitewashed and looking just like you would imagine with a cemetery right in the churchyard. We stopped and took a picture of our favorite one. When we arrived in Morell and found the bike rental place, they told us to take the Confederation Trail to St. Peters for ice cream and then come back. It was a great ride. The confederation trail goes right along the old railroad tracks path. They've just removed the tracks and kept up the trail; it goes from one end of the island to other. We only did about 12 miles round trip. It took us along the water, over bridges, and through the woods, past fields and wild flowers. We got ice cream in St. Peters as suggested, and it was the perfect break before we headed back to Morell. 

By this time we were very hungry and decided to head toward Naufrage, where we had heard there was a restaurant and a bridge. The bridge sorely disappointed us, until we asked about it in the Shipwreck Café and found out that it was built during the war for tanks to cross over the harbor. The new information endeared the bridge to us slightly. At the Shipwreck Café we had fish and chips, seafood chowder, and strawberry rhubarb cheesecake (all quite delicious). We talked with some of the locals, and one woman who visits every year and is actually from my hometown, Riverside.  She was very friendly and rather encouraged that we all had healthy appetites. She asked if we had done the Greenwich trail to the dunes. We realized that we hadn’t and decided to try and fit it in before dark.

We arrived at the trailhead at about 7:20 and figured we had a little more than an hour to do the trail before dark. We met Myra at the trailhead, a nice little woman who set a wicked pace. She got ahead of us but then didn’t take the right turn, so Jenny ran along the trail to get her back on the right path.  Before we headed out on the path, we covered ourselves in bug spray, because we had already encountered the mosquitos of PEI and knew we needed it before we even made it to the trail.  About 10 feet down the trail, we realized that the bug spray wouldn’t protect us for long; we had sorely underestimated the vicious nature of Greenwich mosquitoes.

    The trail went through a little wooded area before it turned to a wooden dock-type trail over a little marshy area. We made it to the dunes, admired for a few minutes, and then turned around for the walk back. As we entered back along the wooded area of the trail, we realized that the troops had rallied and would no longer pay heed to the bug repellent. We picked up our pace and nearly jogged down the path, while swatting each other to kill the mosquitoes. A couple times we thought that the path ahead looked okay—that is until we looked back and saw the swarms chasing us. If you remember Linus from the old Peanuts comics, then you might be able to imagine what we looked like hurrying down the trail, a swarm of mosquitoes in our wake. A few times they started to overtake us, and we literally ran away from the onslaught of blood sucking creatures. On the drive home we were still swatting the stray mosquitoes.

At the end of the day we were thoroughly satisfied with our adventures.