July 16 – Biking St. Peter’s Bay

Today was definitely the better day to bike, Clear sunny skies and not too hot. The wind was pretty strong but it was from the side most of the time so it just kept us nice and cool.

We went and did what is said to be the most scenic part of the Confederation trail, running between the villages of St. Peter’s and Morell. It travels right along the south shore of St. Peter’s Bay. The national park that we hiked in the other day is on the other side.

Looking at the entire map of the Confederation trail this is the only section that isn’t through farm country.

By car.

View Larger Map

By bike. Our hike from the other day is at the top.

The pictures don’t need much explanation. Some are on the way out and some on the way back. I thought it was quite pretty. Jennie was not that impressed.

The wild roses were everywhere although they weren’t the fragrant kind.

Once we got to Morell we could see from the map that the trail headed back to farm country. Since we had only done about 11 km, we decided to keep going. We like our rides to be in the 40 km range. Long enough for a bit of a workout but not too long to really tire us out.

This section had a slight rise and just blue sky at the end. A “To infinity and beyond” moment for the rider ahead of us. We didn’t quite wait long enough to take the picture below but he is in the picture above.

In the section up to Morell we saw about 15 other bikes, After Morell we saw 2 other people.

These gates are the bane of our biking existence. There are a set at each side of every road crossing. They are no problem for a normal bike but because we are so long we have to stop and walk through.

My favourite, and very worn out, joke at some of the dinky dirt road crossing is that I should always check for traffic. Today on one of them this guy was blasting along about 100 feet down the road. It was a bit of a shock.

We came to these wide open fields that almost looked like the blueberry fields in Maine but I think they were just fallow fields.

After about 19 km we decided that it was time to turn around.

When we went through Morell we noticed that the wharf was just down a short road so when we got back we took a little detour from the trail.

Some of the local businesses.

Mussel fishermen loading boxes.

It looked like each boat had their own storage shed.

We went out to the end of the wharf to have lunch.

Across the bay was the national park.

We could see, far off in the distance, that the wind had really whipped up the waves out on the open ocean.

Heading out we had gone by a very short section with a strong smell of lilac. Going back we checked it out. It was a small clump of these flower.

We are not sure what they are but they smelled great and the bees sure loved them.

 

An interesting house.

Heading back into St. Peters.

The big waves had intrigued us. Since we were so close to the national park we went back to a beach that you can access by car. The entrance complex had this observation tower.

It doesn’t look like much but because it was so open you felt quite high up at the top.

The boardwalk out to the beach was surrounded by fields of wild roses.

Because it was so wavy there was no swimming allowed. This was the best you could do.

There was a lifeguard watching but some people went in anyway. We just sat on the sand and enjoyed the waves for a while.

Heading back home we decided that we had not sampled any PEI potatoes yet so we stopped at this place in St. Peters.

We shared a 2 piece order of fish and chips with fresh home made PEI potatoes and haddock. The fries were great and the haddock was very tender. Best we have had in a while. They even split it into two plates for us so “There would be no fighting”.