Trip 45 — Prince Edward Island Walk

Day 25: Charlottetown to airport
Monday, 25 August 2025

Today: 8776 steps/6.92 km/4.30 mi/1h 10m
Grand total: 1113941 steps/810.60 km/503.68 mi/146h 56m

Bryson met me yesterday at the Gallery cafe, where I learned more about the history of the walk I had almost completed.

Inspired by his experiences on the Camino Francés and the Rota Vicentina in Europe, he recruited three friends to hike around Prince Edward Island in 2019, using the Confederation Trail as a base but heading into places it didn't reach. There wasn't accommodation everywhere, and they spent some nights at the homes of people they had met who offered them places to stay.

Eventually the route became established, and with the help of articles by writers in widely read publications such as Travel and Leisure magazine and the New York Times, the Island Walk attracted visitors. (It was a friend's telling me about the Island Walk in about 2022, having seen the Times article, that put PEI in my head for the Abecedarian Walks. Until then I was trying to figure out how to get to Pitcairn Island.)

(I still am.)

It took a while for the lodgings to catch up to the influx of visitors; the walkers-to-accommodations ratio will always be floating around the optimal number. Some hosts wanted to be affiliated with the walk and offered transportation to the route. The waypoint numbers were established to help organize pickup and dropoff points.

Those route and waypoint signs cost $20,000 Canadian, and they're among the walk's significant expenses, which is why the walk is signed only in the clockwise direction. "People steal the signs," Bryson told me. "Especially the ones with the numbers."

"That sucks," I said. "But it's also sort of..."

"Endearing."

"Exactly what I was thinking. It gives you street cred."

The other main ongoing expense is the robust Web site, which contains maps, updated directories of food and accommodation, suggested itineraries, a registration form, and plenty of travelers' experiences. Bryson also maintains a paper guidebook, a well-worn copy of which Mary had at the Olde Anchor.

An 85-year-old woman from Ottawa named Betty did the walk last year. Her biggest challenge was that except when the Island Walk was concurrent with the Confederation Trail, there were no places to sit. She went back to Ottawa and convinced her church congregation to donate money for benches. For a while there were plenty of sponsored benches and nowhere to put them, but residents have since offered the edges of their property for placement.

The walk keeps evolving. And this year, PEI residents are doing it.

I'd been chasing ceilidh evenings around the island: gatherings for Irish or Scottish music and dance, a testament to the native lands of many of the settlers. They always seemed to be the day before or after my arrival in a village, or they were in a church or community hall far from town and thus not feasible for my purposes.

In Charlottetown, however, I was able to enjoy a Irish traditional session at the Old Triangle, held every Sunday afternoon. It was a casual affair, with people opening their instrument cases and joining in even in the middle of songs. At one point there were 11 fiddlers, a flutist, and a drummer. The songs had fast patterns in the familiar Irish-jig meter, with a main theme usually played four times before giving way to a related secondary theme with similar repetition, and sometimes a third or fourth theme. The players didn't always agree on which theme was coming next, or when a piece was going to end, but did it matter?

I have a habit in my travels of trying to relive an entire trip on the last day, especially when it comes to food. And Charlottetown was a good city to eat my way around. I had a last bowl of steamers, 20 Malpeque oysters (thanks to the $1.50-each deal at the Olde Dublin Pub, daily until six), a lobster-claw Caesar, a bowl of chowder, and a final stop at the Cows outlet on Queen Street — scooped into a cup, thank you very much. But I stopped short of another two-pound lobster: Nothing could beat the company and the view at the Lobster Shack in Souris.

Meanwhile, my feet and legs started to heal. I progressed from clutching parking meters on Saturday night to descending stairs in an approximately forward-facing orientation. My calves had taken the brunt of the pain on Saturday, and they reminded me of that whenever I stood up, but then they agreed to another journey...

...Culminating in this morning's walk to the airport. I curled around Great George Street and up Euston Street, which had attractively colored houses with sharp angles. I branched left onto Longworth Avenue, following a sign for Route 2 east toward Souris — which was either 200 kilometers and a week ago or a million and a year.

At the drinking room of Red Island Cider, I turned left onto the Confederation Trail. The Charlottetown branch runs for about eight kilometers from the city center to Royalty Junction, just north of the airport, where it connects with the main Tignish-to-Elmira trail. This part of the trail was abundant with people on their way to work, as well as rosa ragusa, a plant with red hips — good for tea and jam — growing almost as big as apples. On my right, horses grazed, even this close to the city center.

A good walk, even a short one, is enhanced by a good meal, so I stopped for breakfast at Pür & Simple: a smoothie with four kinds of berries and a Korean-sauce skillet with eggs, bacon, peppers, kimchi, potatoes, and Hollandaise sauce. The trail continued toward a turnoff to the airport, but it was along a section I covered on my first day. Instead, I wound through the Mulberry Park neighborhood, which was lush with elm, maple, pine, and other trees.

I crossed the Trans-Canada Highway one more time and walked the final few minutes to the airport. Air Canada has gotten back on track, and the flights back to New York were uneventful. When I got home, Bryson messaged me to say that I was officially the 99th finisher of the Island Walk.

One short of a hundred. And I'm one island short of completing the Abecedarian Walks. The last one won't take me four weeks like PEI, but it will still be...long.

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