July 25, 2024 - Canadian Cruise Vacation Day 6 - Carlottetown Prince Edward Island

With an excursion that started at 8:30, we had to have an early morning breakfast.  My dad still didn’t feel well enough for breakfast so it was just Brian and I.  We were offered a water view at a shared table so we sat with a nice table of people from Arizona, Minnesota and Rhode Island.  Since my dad wasn’t responding to text messages early in the morning we didn’t make plans for breakfast which left my step-mother out of the loop and she ended up neither dining not going on the excursion with us.  Since she wouldn’t be comfortable going out on her own for breakfast, I hurried through the ship in the few minutes between breakfast and our excursion boarding to bring back a few sandwiches for her to nibble on.

The bus driver and tour guide (2 separate people) were both better on this excursion.  The driver was smoother and the narration from the guide wasn’t as grating and seemed on-topic more than Sydney’s.  This trip was also on better/bigger roads so the ride was less bumpy too.  Essentially this excursion just takes you from Charlottetown to the Confederation bridge, the relatively new 8 mile long (!) bridge that allows people to drive on and off of Prince Edward Island, a fast that required a ferry before it opened.

There is a nature preserve at the end of the bridge (on the New Brunswick side) which we had just over an hour at before returning.  Our schedule was going well so we made a side trip through an area of historic homes on the way back.  Overall this was a perfectly fine basic excursion.

With the excursion done, Brian and I had time to wander Charlottetown on our own.  This seems like the Goldilocks of the Canadian ports we’ve visited. Halifax was a little too modern and seemed very concerned about its appearance.  Sydney was very small and a lot of it was under construction.  Charlottetown has a nice size (about 40K people in the city proper) and there are several blocks of retail and tourism oriented businesses close to the port but they look like ‘real’ businesses that locals probably use also.  

I noticed one especially highly rated restaurant that I wanted us to try.  Cork and Cast turned out to be a very good choice indeed.  We started with mini meat pies.  Meat pies can be very humble affairs with carrots and ground beef etc but these were well spiced and served with 3 different sauces to accompany them.  I particularly liked the pickle chutney or whatever they made.  It was all served on an attractive board.  We ended up chatting with one of the 2 owners briefly.  They have outdoor seating (which was fuller than the indoor seating we chose) and a very cool atmosphere with moderate background music and a very pleasant summer energy.  For my entree I had a beet and goat cheese salad and Brian had a burger with bacon jam, goat cheese and cheddar cheese.  We even had cinnamon cake for desert and it was so rich and buttery it reminded me of a cinnamon flavored butter cake.  I just couldn’t have been happier with the food or service.

The rest of the evening on-board was spent eating and visiting two different lounges that had live performers for music.  I turns out that the lounges don’t seem to be setup to really emphasize the music and it was hard to really appreciate the details of the music even though we sat in the front row on a few of them.  My father did join us for dinner.  None of us went out after the lounge visits so it was a relatively early night.