NS & PEI – Day 8 – Stanhope

Tuesday, August 27, 2004, 75.6 miles: Word of the day: Coffee! With an exclamation point! Coffee was on our minds from waking to morning ablutions to breakfast of granola and YOPs^* to packing up the gear and getting on the road. And we purposely had not brought coffee prep material because I assured Dana there was a Tim Hortons on every corner. Not today and not here.

First a little about this area of PEI. Rurally beautiful beyond belief and low traffic roads due mostly to the low population density and the concomitant lack of commercialization — including basic things like coffee shops. In retrospect, we should’ve backtracked a little bit to the Woods Island Market for our Java fix, but on we went with Dana scouring the maps for a place to get a hit. We detoured off my “planned” route through White Sands, Guernsey Cove and Cape Bear and headed for the little town of Murray Harbour.

“Planned” is in quotes because this day wasn’t well-planned on my part. My idea was to hang around the Murry Harbour area and find a campground (of which there were many), but Dana wasn’t down with that plan as fulfilling her need for a certain minimum amount of milage that was much higher than mine AND a guaranteed waterside spot for camping. I wasn’t particularly worried about finding some place to crash for the night, but as this area is so sparsely populated, we could’ve ended up with 90 or 100 miles before we got to a Dana-approved campground. (BTW: We have friends and relatives who shiver at the thought of not knowing where they’ll be staying on a vacay night. It’s kinda in our go-with-the-flow DNA and why we do travel well together.) So, while downing our Joe at the Esso station in Murray Harbour, we came up with a plan to head northwest to Stanhope Beach National Park on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was a good plan — 60 +/- miles, but that neglected two things: that we had already ridden more than 10 miles and that we were basically going the wrong direction for a tour of PEI and had headwinds the last 50 or so miles. But that’s getting ahead of the rest of the day.

We did head out to the north side of actual Murray Harbour. It wasn’t quite the visual orgy I expected, so we added about 15 miles of occasional glimpses of the water — it seems that when land was parceled out on this land, very large PRIVATE estates reaching from the road a half kilometer down to the sea was the norm. And then we were soon headed back into the headwind that we’d have the rest of the day to Stanhope. At a short stop in Montague for some lunch, we checked with the campground to make sure we’d have a spot and were assured they weren’t full. We still wanted to get there before mosquito time to get set up and resumed our trip for the last 35 miles.

Well, turns out that the campground is across the Gulf Shore Way from the beach, but that was OK because we were tired and just wanted to get set up and get something to eat along with some liquid refreshments. The campground staff was great and suggest a spot that was close to the bathhouse but not on a direct path. And the mosquitos weren’t a problem because it was so windy, unless they were blown into you, they didn’t stand a chance of directed flight in the 15-20mph winds. We head to the suggested restaurant of Little Richards on Covehead Bay about 3 km from the campground, but the line was so long that we checked out the two other food options and decided on Roe’s. As the whole area was a national park, there wasn’t any place to purchase alcohol except LR’s, but Roe’s had NA beer and we settled for that and some excellent fish tacos and taco-avacado salad. We headed back to the campground and spent an hour planning tomorrow’s day and got some well needed sleep.