Trip 45 — Prince Edward Island Walk

Day 18: North Lake to Souris via East Point
Sunday, 17 August 2025

Yesterday: 38962 steps/31.01 km/19.27 mi/5h 13m
Total: 846005 steps/599.68 km/372.62 mi/111h 42m

I went to bed on Friday without much enthusiasm for walking on Saturday.

The recent stops had been rushed. I would have loved another night at the Johnson Shore Inn to explore the cliffs and hiking trails with Liz. Or the Gateway to Greenwich Suites, the most expensive place on the trip, where I'd washed Confederation Trail dirt down the drain, watched a few episodes of Breaking Bad with Liz, and fallen into bed after eating half a veggie burger. St. Peters Bay was gorgeous, and I never even got to go out for a meal there.

Breakfast tickled my nose from the restaurant in North Lake. An hour later, Liz would have a stunning lobster eggs Benedict. But I was eager to go 31 kilometers by the mid-afternoon and enjoy a long break in Souris.

I took the bridge over the harbor and past North Lake's fishing industry and soon resumed along Route 16 toward East Point. An unfenced but friendly-looking dog came toward me and then went back to its porch.

"Lovely day for walking," its shirtless owner said, coming around the house.

"Couldn't be better." It was breezy and not too hot, and for once it would stay that way. This stretch of road had very little traffic; there were numerous cut-throughs between North Lake and Souris, so few went all the way to East Point except as a destination.

Soon I reached the extreme northeast of the island. Two weeks and 400 kilometers ago, I had woken up at West Point after what was probably the toughest day in the whole Abecedarian Walks. East Point had the phenomenon of "16 West" signs on both sides of the road, as well as gargantuan dragonflies. Heading west along the south shore, I encountered more mosquitoes — they must have been blown over here by the onshore wind at North Lake — but they didn't bother me much.

The fact that I was now headed back toward the walk's finishing point, the promise of a full day off with Liz before she was to fly home, and the gorgeous weather pushed me to do some of my fastest walking ever. The eight kilometers to East Point barely felt like an hour. After 15 kilometers and 2½ hours, I reached Elliott's Grocery & Pro Hardware, where Liz met me for a quick sandwich stop. It was an appealing general store, with rows of tools, a liquor outlet, and flyers of local businesses and events taped to the doors.

My 18th kilometer was the first to break ten minutes, and I finished 24 in under four hours. The only challenge was finding the entrance to the Library Inn in Souris — the building was barely signed as lodging and there was no indication where to go in until I had circumnavigated the building.

Souris was the first real town since Kensington a week ago. It had two grocery stores, a liquor store, a movie theatre, two drugstores, a thrift shop, a hospital, an overheated but useful laundry room called JJ's Bucket o'Sudz, and several eateries. It's where the relatively peaceful Route 16 finishes and the soon-to-be-busy Route 2 begins innocently as a town road. It's also where the Confederation Trail ends, somewhat unceremoniously, opposite the harbor.

We could have played bingo at the legion hall, and there was a blueberry social planned for today, followed by a screening of "Grease." After last night's dinner, Liz fell asleep immediately. That's when Air Canada canceled her flight out of Charlottetown this evening, the flight attendants' strike having begun yesterday.

The message arrived with a link to a rebooking tool, but it could search only through Wednesday. There were flights available on Thursday, but the tool wouldn't let me commit to them.

Some time later a second message arrived, saying that after combing through seat options for the next three days on 120 airlines — which included Kenya Airways, China Southern, the Greek airline Sky Express, and the defunct Canadian airline First Air, which hasn't existed since 2019 — they had no way of getting Liz off of PEI. It was paired with a third message helpfully inviting her to check in for her connecting flight from Toronto.

It was nearing midnight. The wind was strong, and the shutters were rattling. I couldn't tell whether I was hearing ocean waves or rain. From the harbor down the street, I could hear the boarding announcement for the 1 a.m. ferry to Îles de la Madeleine, up north.

That made me think. There were other ways off the island besides flying. If she could get to Wood Islands in the south of PEI, she could take a ferry to Caribou, Nova Scotia. From there she could perhaps find a way to Yarmouth, where she could take another ferry to Bar Harbor, Maine. If she could then get to Brunswick, she could take Amtrak to New York via that weird transfer from North Station to South Station in Boston.

And that might be a lovely way to go, if she had all week. But the point was to get her home and working again.

Still, it got me pondering other possibilities in neighboring provinces, and somehow I found her a cheap flight on American Airlines from Halifax on Thursday. It was even in business class! And on points (about the same number as the economy routing from Charlottetown), so it could be easily canceled if Air Canada came through. She'd have to take a bus to Halifax the day before, or perhaps the car-rental company would let her drop her car off there, but at least it was something.

With just enough progress made, I somehow fell asleep to the percussion ensemble at the windows.

There were worse places to be stuck than Prince Edward Island. We spent our day off at Basin Head, a splendid and well-provisioned beach where a safe but swift current carried us under a bridge popular with jumpers. We had soft-serve ice cream and basked in sunshine that wasn't too hot, next to a red cliff. In the evening, we sat along the Souris boardwalk and ate lobsters and steamed clams by the sea.

"Well, this is lovely," I said. "I'm glad you're still here."

"It's not like I had a choice," Liz said, though she was also happy to be staying.

"I made it happen. I called up ten thousand flight attendants and told them I didn't want you to leave."

So we get a few more days here, in passing by day and together by night. Tomorrow we move on, taking our respective times to Georgetown. At least there should be ample eateries from here on out.

Go on to day 19