Trip 45 — Prince Edward Island Walk

Day 17: Hermanville to North Lake
Friday, 15 August 2025

Today: 27048 steps/19.81 km/12.31 mi/3h 43m
Total: 807043 steps/568.67 km/353.36 mi/106h 29m

The parlor at the Johnson Shore Inn was a relaxing place to share information and stories and to pet Jonesy and the Missus, the yellow lab and the golden retriever. Mellanie, one of the owners, offered wine in the afternoon.

"You're the one with the red shoes," she had said. In my quest to find Liz yesterday, I'd barreled upstairs without heeding the rows of footwear inside the front door, each guest's pair in its place, like the numbered parking stalls at a motel. Kim, who had checked me in, had politely admonished me for my transgression, and I'd gone back down to shed them, unleashing puffs of ocher dust when I pulled the laces. Kim had then pulled out a brush, like a wizard drawing a wand, and wiped off the red dirt that I'd accumulated on the Confederation Trail.

Mel, a guest from Australia, was running about half the island. She had also suffered the mosquito plague last week and contemplated cutting the journey short. We leafed through a book of photos of the island that a pair of previous guests had assembled a few weeks earlier.

"The rain wasn't enough," Mellanie said this morning. There had finally been a storm overnight, cooling off the air, and Liz and I had enjoyed the comfort of the sounds of the rain and the ocean waves through the open window. "All it did was pack down the dirt. Meanwhile, Alberta is getting nothing but rain."

And the wildfires had continued in British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces. "The fires in Nova Scotia were arson," she said.

I brought some items over to Liz's car, using the side entrance near our room. When I tried to go back in that way, Jonesy barked at me.

"All right, I'll use the main entrance," I said, and he let me through.

"Jonesy never gets sick," Mellanie had said. "His thick coat is because he gets mackerel twice a day. Although today he had salmon."

"He barks at me, too," Dave, the other owner, had said.

I had a few minutes on the porch and a short walk over to the cliffs before saying goodbye and going up the long dirt driveway back to Northside Road.

For the first time in over two weeks, I didn't put bandages on my feet. It was a short distance today, and they seemed to have had enough rest lately to recover. The phone signal was sparse out here, in the extreme northeast of the island, and it struck me that I might not have any communication with Liz until she drove by a couple hours later.

It was much cooler, but all the clouds had departed with the storm, and it was bright and sunny again. The wind was light but got stronger as I approached North Lake, enough to make the grasshoppers do gymnastic somersaults as they landed.

Around an hour in, I felt a refreshing trickle down my right leg. But there was no precipitation, there were no dogs in sight, and as far as I could tell, I hadn't had any bouts of incontinence brought on by Mellanie's hearty breakfast of eggs, sausage, ham, and potato cake.

It was coming from my backpack. As usual, I'd had two refilled water bottles in the sides of the bag and two in the main compartment. The cap had come loose on one of the latter, and the water was leaking out. Fortunately Liz had most of my belongings, and all that was in there with the water was the bug spray.

The side pocket had my papers in it, though, including my passport. On its maiden voyage to Aruba, it had attracted a couple of molecules of liquid — perhaps a fly had sneezed on it — and for the past five years, any time I go through an electronic immigration gate, I'm rejected with a big "X" and what I assume is the Polish equivalent of "What did you do, throw it down Victoria Falls?"

So now I keep it in the finest protective case money can buy (a plastic sandwich bag) and, as far as I can tell, I haven't had any further damage. The machine in Montreal even let me into Canada last month without putting on a French attitude and sneering down a pair of angled spectacles.

Even so, I quickly opened the zipper and was relieved to find the passport unharmed. Just in case, I put it in a pocket of my shorts, and I dumped out the excess water.

Liz came by halfway through the walk, and we had a little conversation and a few berries. Northside Road continued through the little communities of Rock Barra, Priest Pond, and Campbells Cove before reaching Lakeville, where a road headed northeast to our stop for the night at the North Lake Beach Motel.

The adjacent restaurant is supposed to be open from eight to eight, but it was closed for lunch today, so Liz went in search of a grocery store. The general store at Bothwell Beach hadn't been on my radar as a possibility, simply because I won't reach it until three hours through tomorrow's walk. But it turned out to be only eight minutes away by car.

It was almost too windy to eat our lunch outside. The beach was only a minute's walk away, down a few steps between the sand dunes. But the water here looked too frigid and choppy for a dip. We walked along the harbor, reading more ships' names — with monikers such as Fowl Play and Hard Cor, this must have been a risqué part of town.

Some of the boats were fishing charters: Little North Lake considers itself the tuna capital of the world, landing 1000-pound specimens and sending them off to Japan — quite the reverse of what I had long believed. But because it gets sold off, it doesn't show up at the restaurant; you have to get lucky and see a 770-pounder brought in as Liz did yesterday at Naufrage.

We were seated for dinner at 6:10 and closed the place down, having arrived among the end of the evening rush (and 20 minutes early for our 6:30 reservation, by far the latest booking on the list). Even without tuna, the North Lake Boathouse Eatery had plenty to keep us happy: chowder with giant clams, salad with copious amounts of lobster claw, salmon in a cream sauce, and pan-fried scallops.

We quickly returned to the beach for the sunset, where the owners of the motel had invited us to a gathering for guests to toast the giant fireball in the sky with shots of Fireball. The wildfires have led to a ban on bonfires, so the usual open flame was replaced by a spark-free propane fire. It was chilly on the beach after sunset, with the strong winds keeping away the bugs that had been problematic recently.

Here I'd been dealing with oppressive heat for three days and now it was suddenly so cold that, even standing behind the fire, I pulled my arms in under my shirt to stay warm. A few people were swimming — the water was warmer than the air.

We even put the flame on in the motel room. But I doubt I'll reach the northeast corner of the island tomorrow before I'm breaking a sweat.

Go on to day 18