A few days in PEI, heading towards Ontario tomorrow

 

Our driveway camp spot at Pat & Nancy's. Not as many trees since hurricane Fiona hit in 2022.

We returned to our great driveway camping spot on Friday, and will stay here over the long weekend. Campgrounds here in PEI and in New Brunswick are still pretty much booked up over the next couple of weeks, so no reservations for the trip home yet.

Saturday was kind of a rest day. Nancy and Cathie did up the Charlottetown mall. Pat tried soccer for the first time since his recent foot operation (he's a goalie, so not too much running, and it went ok). Pat's brother Kurt dropped by for a visit so I had a chat with him.

Saturday afternoon/evening Pat & Nancy's boys came by for a visit, all 3 of them together. Good family time.

Pat instructing 2 of the "boys"

 

We planned to visit the relocated weekly Charlottetown market on Sunday. It has been held on a downtown street for quite a while now, but has been moved to the town docks area. Maybe to be closer to cruise ships? 

Two fairly large ships came in to dock on Sunday. They are quite a sight. The larger blue-hulled one is the Celebrity Silhouette, and the smaller one the Norwegian Gem. Both are large, with the Silhouette capable of carrying almost 3,000 passengers plus about 1,500 staff and crew. The somewhat smaller Gem can "only" handle about 2,394 guests, with about 1,070 staff and crew. Dropping 5,000 cruisers on a Charlottetown Sunday sure impacts the city, mostly in a good way for local businesses. 

It's neat how you can do an online search for these specific ships by name and get all kinds of info, including their itinerary. Both ships came here from Boston this time and will return there, with different routes and stopovers.

The Celebrity ship was already docked when the Gem approached to tie up. Docking is a very slow and exacting process:

The Gem rotated 180 degrees before docking end-to-end with the Silhouette

That tug looks pretty small. It was only to handle the lines tying up the ship.

Various businesses offered different kinds of tours once on land; even some harbour tours on smaller boats. This tour would offer a major change from the water for the passengers:

Clip-clopping around Charlottetown

 

There are various buildings around the docks, like hotels and convention centres. These small units are rentable if you want accommodation right at the docks:

Here's some shots of the 2 ships from the Stratford side of the harbour:

Those steeples you can see between the ships normally look quite large from here 

Between them the ships pretty much hide Charlottetown from here

 

This rickety-feeling dock doesn't quite reach to the ships (still a long ways away):

It's a private dock on the Stratford side of the harbour

 

Today (Monday) we toured Charlottetown a bit, some shoreline and some hiking trails:

 

 

The tide was pretty low then

Time for lunch, so we headed to a small mall at the North River Causeway, on Hwy 1 at the edge of Charlottetown. Lunch was at the BOOMburger, kind of a cheezy name but great burgers, with other choices we didn't try today. There are also a few other shops in the mall:

Cows ice cream store, with a "behind the scenes" tour of making their products 

Luckily we don't know these strange people... :))

 
Several other shops were open so the gals went shopping.

Pat and I staked out a table in the BOOMburger, waiting...

 

Here's a link to the BOOMburger:  <link>

and one for the Cows tour: <link> 

 

A couple of small maps for the day:

Charlottetown Harbour upper left, Stratford lower right

Cows tour, and BOOMburger