Trip 45 — Prince Edward Island Walk

Day 16: St. Peters Bay to Hermanville
Thursday, 14 August 2025

Today: 39667 steps/27.28 km/16.95 mi/5h 20m
Total: 779995 steps/548.86 km/341.05 mi/102h 46m

Once again, my first contact with the weather fooled me.

"It's cloudy and so windy!" I said when I opened the door. It was just before ten, which was our check-out time and also when Liz was to start working.

"Perfect day for walking!" It was cool and I even considered wearing pants instead of shorts.

We loaded up the car and finished our veggie burgers from last night — somehow the longer my walk, the less hungry I am at the end of it. I refilled a bottle with the last of the lemonade and three other bottles with water. Today I took the bug spray — the mosquitoes haven't been much of a problem since those days around Tignish, but I noticed a few new bites yesterday.

There's nowhere to eat between St. Peters Bay and North Lake, almost 50 kilometers away, unless you detour to Souris or to the Snack Shack in Naufrage. So I stocked up for lunch at the general store, part of the Esso gas station.

There was something comforting about the general store, with just the right variety of expected offerings and surprises: sandwiches, tools, tomatoes, playing cards, locally baked cookies, and lottery tickets. I picked up a roast-beef sandwich and a bag of Bishop's Rest peanut-butter-and-chocolate-chip cookies.

I thought about getting one more drink, but here they were even more exorbitant than yesterday. It was ludicrous that I couldn't find a liter of water for under $3. The best deal yesterday had seemed to be two 710-milliliter bottles of Gatorade for $5.50, but Canada is even worse than the United States when it comes to lying about prices. The two bottles had come to $6.53, marked "other non taxable" on the receipt, and I'd wondered whether the two-bottle deal hadn't been applied.

"Sorry, I thought it was two for five-fifty," I said.

"Then there's tax and bottle deposit."

"Ah. I guess that's how it rings up, then," I said, smiling an I-appreciate-what-you-do- but-we-all-know-that's-ridiculous smile.

But I wasn't smiling inside. There's no sane world in which something advertised as $5.50 should cost $6.53 — 19 percent more. At least I wasn't expected to tip. It's time to end this bottle-deposit nonsense, anyway. Don't we all recycle when we can already?

The first half of today was on the trail, with the usual wetlands, forests, and fields...and the heat, which came back immediately. Of note were an abrupt dip in the trail to a road crossing — no doubt there was a bridge here in the railroad era — and a place called Five Houses, named either for the five early Acadian homes in the area or for the five Larkin brothers who came from Ireland in the late 1700s.

I found a picnic bench and sat down for my sandwich and a cookie. Meanwhile, Liz had driven to Souris, the town to the southeast, where a fisherman had just returned with an enormous tuna and bestowed a couple of slabs upon her. The perfect sashimi, freshly cleaned and hacked up, some of which she saved for me for later: a giant cut, deep red, the kind that would go for $40 at Whole Foods, shared joyously.

I left the trail in Selkirk and headed east on Mill Road for about an hour. There wasn't a soul, except for the blue dragonflies just off the ground and a persistent fly, or perhaps it was a bumblebee — it was almost the size of a dove — that buzzed around me until it was carried away by the wind.

A short connector north led me to Northside Road, where I turned east for the final boring seven kilometers — up, down, hot, traffic — or at least that's how I expected the segment to end. Google Maps put the Johnson Shore Inn right on the main road, but it was 1.6 kilometers down a dirt driveway. Now, today's walk wasn't particularly long, but when you're sweating and faced with a surprise extra mile, you might get a bit surly.

All that surliness went away when I saw the resident golden retriever and English yellow lab lying in the hallway, and when Liz and I had a moment next to the brilliant red cliffs. The inn's owners were lovely for conversation — one had just had leg surgery and then had to help put out a wildfire in the nearby forest on Sunday — and they prepared a hearty lasagna dinner: yet another place where I've thought, I really have to head out again in the morning?

Go on to day 17