25 July 2019, Thursday
After a light Asian style breakfast of fruit, mildly garlicky muffin and a sort of rice pudding with herbs and slices of pork we drive towards the national park at Cavendish stopping along the way at a bank and at Kent, Canada’s version of Home Depot, to buy some planks to help level Vincent when the campsite is a bit sloped.
As we approach the north shore of PEI we are both getting a bit hungry so we stop at COWS, known for its delicious ice cream. Lunch is an ice cream sundae in dish-shaped waffle cones – yum! We proceed to the campground after lunch. We are in loop B, campsite 1, a fairly short hobble to the beach, but in a wooded area and shaded most of the day. In the warm sunshine we finally have time to dry our damp backpacking tent and our tarp.
After supper we make our way along the path to the beach. I manage to hop down the wooden stairs to the sand without incident. The beach is practically empty as we gaze out towards the Gulf of St. Lawrence. O checks out some red sandstone rocks while I sit on the sand, careful to avoid getting sand in my cast. I watch ducks, cormorants and a great blue heron fly by. There are other birds out there but O has the binoculars with him. When he returns to the mesh mat upon which I am perched I borrow the binoculars. The larger unidentified birds fly by intermittently. The body is white, ends ot the wings are pointed and black, beak pointed and tail pointed as well. I take out my phone and bring up Merlin, a bird ID app. My search indicates that these are Northern Gannets. We’ve never seen them before. As I am reading that the birds dive into the water like torpedoes, we observe on doing just that, with a distant splash – Wow!
As the sun lowers in the west more people show up on the gradually darkening beach, cameras at the ready. It’s time for the evening sunset show. There is a low bank of purple clouds to the west. As the sun sinks behind the clouds it creates fiery pink and orange colors beneath and a gold rim around the cloud. We watch as the sun finally dips below the cloud bank and disappears into the gulf. Our evening’s entertainment at an end, we return to camp.