Trip 45 — Prince Edward Island Walk

Day 14: North Rustico to Grand Tracadie
Tuesday, 12 August 2025

Today: 45102 steps/32.20 km/20.01 mi/5h 53m
Total: 672148 steps/476.02 km/295.79 mi/88h 43m

It was around our 21st kilometer on Saturday, about the time that our bodies were restored by lemonade served by two kids under a tent, when a car coming toward us stopped.

"Excuse me, do you know where Blue Mussel is?" the driver asked.

I realized that I had heard of it, because it had been recommended to me and because it was the latest dinner option in North Rustico. Unfortunately, that meant these people were way off track.

"It's about thirty kilometers back that way," I said.

Unfazed, they turned around, waved, and headed back from where they had come.

The Blue Mussel Cafe is extremely popular and doesn't take reservations, so I signed up on their waiting list via their Web site while Liz was in her penultimate session yesterday. The estimated wait was somewhere between 113 and 143 minutes.

The harbor at which the restaurant is situated is almost two kilometers from the main stretch of North Rustico. Access is via a pedestrian walkway that goes behind some of the fisheries and then offers lovely views of the harbor. It was during this stretch that we got the notice that our table was ready.

"Is it all right if we see you on our back patio? the hostess asked.

That turned out to be the best table in the establishment, a high top with views of the sunset. It's where people came to take pictures. As the distant pines caught the sun in their branches, it turned the bay orange.

The menu offered imaginative deviations from the usual fish and chips and other seafood fare. We shared a sesame tuna salad with couscous and yellow beets and then the "bubbly bake": a hot casserole with cheese, halibut, lobster, and scallops. A fantastic way to have an oyster was as it floated on top of a Caesar — similar to a bloody Mary but with clam-tomato juice.

I left this morning at 8:53, intending to go 22 kilometers and meet Liz at one of the seafood shacks at Covehead Harbour. I put on Ocean 100, the radio station that had sent a representative to Katherine's picnic.

"The temperature in Charlottetown is currently twenty-two degrees, going up to thirty-two, but it will feel like thirty-eight with the humidizationalizer," the announcer said, or something similar. I'm not sure I understand those "feels like" temperatures. Sure, 32 with high humidity is more unpleasant than 32 in dry air, but I think it just feels sticky, not necessarily hotter.

Then she put on John Mellencamp's "Hurts So Good," which I don't think was in reference to the weather. When it finished, I switched over to classical. Julie Nesrallah must have a great gig. She'll say things like, "To take you to the top of the hour, here's Beethoven's 'Emperor' Piano Concerto," it'll be 10:22, and then she has 38 minutes to figure out the Wordle or whatever it is she does.

I kid, of course. She intersperses playlists with interesting tidbits about the composers, such as how Hans Christian Andersen revered Franz Liszt and how Mozart dodged criticism for responding late to a letter by saying, "If I were dead, how could I answer so beautifully?"

Within a half-hour the heat was in full force: blazing sun, no shade, no breeze. I rounded the bend at Rustico and stayed along Route 6. The route made a few more turns, crossing numerous bodies of water — I can't tell what's a creek and what's a river — and the heat persisted.

A sign for the Dunes Studio and Cafe, five kilometers ahead, beckoned me for a break on the way to lunch. I could spend 20 minutes, have some iced tea, and be on my way.

I invited Liz to join me. She had had a good morning, having found a bookstore, thereby acquiring something better to read than the copy of James Patterson's "Kiss the Girls," the pick of the paltry options at one of those honor-system kiosks in Kensington. Its prose was laughable (typical sentence: "This can be a bad neighborhood even for a cop, which I am"), and we spent the past few evenings wondering how most of it got by an editor.

"Want a ride?" Liz called out from the car as she passed by, a minute before I would arrive at the cafe.

The place was on two levels, and it was full of paintings for sale. There was a lovely garden in back, and people were strolling through it.

I went downstairs to check in and was horrified to find a line of about 12 people, none of whom were being helped. I was dripping with enough sweat to bathe a hippopotamus. The place was not air-conditioned, and the puny fans were on a humble setting. Everyone else in line seemed content to wait, having spent mere seconds in the heat on the way from their vehicles.

And here's where I established AWKWARD Rule 282G: Anyone who arrives at a popular eatery having walked more than ten kilometers to get there gets to skip the queue. I'm sure I won't get anyone to enforce it, but it seems reasonable to me. I couldn't wait to sit down face to face with a giant glass of cold water.

I wondered at what point they would stop refilling my glass and just leave a pitcher. They did bring me an enormously tall and beautiful glass of house lemonade with blueberries. I'd envisioned the place as a little tearoom serving drinks and maybe pastries, but as it had a full menu, we decided to have our lunch here.

"Today's soup is an apple butternut squash with a sour-cream drizzle," the server said. I kept waiting for her to tell me it was cold, but it never happened. "And our pizza of the day has a shawarma topping."

I'm not one of those people who reserve steaks for the wintertime, but I couldn't fathom how a decision had been made to offer so many hot specials. If she had mentioned something about gazpacho or cold poached salmon, I would have said, "Bring it on."

Liz and I shared an enormous beet salad with walnuts and some crab cakes, while we watched people in the garden. Then she filled up my water bottles, I applied sunscreen, and we continued on our ways.

It was hot enough to melt the bandages off my blisters, as they say. Actually I don't know if anyone has ever said that, but it was the truth. The cows back in Rustico had been listlessly lying in the grass under a tree. It was too hot for mosquitoes, fortunately. It wasn't too hot for the grasshoppers, who were especially active on the bridge into Oyster Bed.

It was even too hot for Helga, who stopped announcing the kilometers after lunch. But maybe that was an act of encouragement: I felt sluggish and didn't want to know how slowly I was going.

From Dunes the road headed north into a stretch of national park, bearing to the right and following the coast. It was similar to yesterday's, with a bikeway spanning its length. I was glad to be off the highway, which had carried an inordinate number of trucks — goodness knows where they were all going.

I followed the road for an hour, between grass-covered sand dunes and wetlands, before I crossed over the bridge and reached the food shacks where we had originally intended to have lunch. All I wanted was something cold, and I was able to get a lemon slushie from the market at Richard's without waiting in another interminable line. I brought it upstairs and talked to people at one of the long picnic tables, which were covered in graffiti.

"Look, there's a poll!" one of my neighbors said. "Are you team Jeremiah or team Conrad?"

"What does that refer to?" I asked.

"It's a show called 'The Summer I Turned Pretty,'" she said. "Who should Belly end up with?"

The score was currently 18 to 4 in favor of Jeremiah. "Whom should I vote for?" I asked.

"Vote for Conrad!" she said. I took out my pen, and the three of us almost doubled Conrad's score.

I was ten kilometers from tonight's lodging. It was still hot, but at least now there was a breeze. I broke into a kind of slow gallop for the next hour, enjoying the comfort of the bikeway and not too bothered by the sun.

I took a slight shortcut along a dirt road and rejoined the main road just before it exited the park, at which point the bikeway disappeared and I was walking in traffic again. If they could put a bikeway through the whole park, why couldn't they put one on Route 6? Route 2?

Tonight's lodging, booked on AirBnB, is a small cabin just inside the entrance to the Whispering Pines RV park. Liz had arrived a couple of hours before I did, and I'd told her not to expect too much. But it turned out to be better-appointed than I'd predicted. It even had air conditioning, a refrigerator, and enough lighting for you to distinguish your left shoe from your right. The bathrooms and shower were just across the driveway. It seemed at first inspection not to have a bed, but we found it under the couch, available with a little extraction and assembly.

More importantly, the property had a pool, and we took a long swim during one of Liz's breaks. While she had her last two sessions, I dined at Fin Folk Food, two kilometers away. (They spell it FiN, which I thought might refer to First Nations. But upon discovering that the capital "N" doesn't mean anything, I demoted the last letter.)

Entering the restaurant's premises, I committed one of the greatest mistakes I've ever made in all of my travels. There was a bathroom just before the ramp up, and in an effort to save steps I used it before checking in with the hostess. I arrived at the stand just in time to hear them tell the person in front of me that there might be a seat at the bar. After checking, they escorted him upstairs.

And I checked in for a 50-minute wait with 27 parties in front of me.

When I was finally seated, I ordered a double jalapeño Caesar and perused the menu. I've long thought that a lobster is perfect on its own and doesn't need to be mixed in with celery or corn or that vilest of condiments, mayonnaise. Liz agrees that a lobster roll is best Connecticut-style, with butter instead of mayonnaise. Most of the places we've visited on PEI have offered only the mayonnaise version.

My other problem with lobster rolls is that they can often be consumed in about four bites, so I never feel I'm getting $30 worth of experience. But Fin's rolls were simple, with butter from ADL (Amalgamated Dairies Limited, the island's main distributor), and they were offered in three sizes: four, six, or 16 ounces of lobster meat.

I had to see what a 16-ounce lobster roll looked like. I knew I wouldn't finish it, but Liz would have some and I'd bring some on the walk tomorrow. The monster sandwich was the equivalent of a double-length roll. It probably had about ten claws' worth of meat.

I entered a kind of delirium that comes from waiting almost an hour, drinking a Caesar, and letting butter drool down my chin from the densest lobster roll I'd ever had.

"Seth vs lobster," Liz messaged me. Finishing it was the stuff of eating competitions.

I ate half and brought the rest back to the cabin. Harbour Road had no streetlights, but the way was barely visible, illuminated from above; the moon was almost full and a subtle yellowish orange, almost the silhouette of a face. As I walked two kilometers to a chorus of crickets, I kept my eyes on the sky. Because Neil deGrasse Tyson says to keep looking up, and I sometimes forget there are stars.

Go on to day 15