October 26th – Prince Edward Island

Well I have now officially gone to all 10 provinces. Just gotta hit up those territories now…

So I woke up late today, around 10, and then got the rest of my stuff ready for the trip. At noon, I was picked up by one of the researchers on the grant and we headed off to Sackville to pick up Alison, the other grant employee who was going. Alison is also the only other person near my age who works with me, so we will be hanging out a lot this week. After picking her up we got on the highway towards New Brunswick, and three short hours later we were in PEI. People are always saying you can’t really see anything on the bridge, but the view was actually really nice. It was a clear day so we could see the island getting closer and closer to us, and the ocean around us. Pretty cool.

We got into the hotel, The Rodd Charlettown, around 5. It’s really nice, very old. The doors have keys. Real keys! None of those swipe cards here. From my extensive research reading the sign in front of the building, it was established in the early 1900s as a railway hotel. Fancy. After settling in for a bit me and Alison set off in search of a place for dinner. We didn’t expect it would be as difficult as it was; everything in Charlettown is closed on Sundays. I hadn’t really realized how dependant on tourism the place is, but since we are on the off season, the place was deserted. We’ll see how different it is tomorrow. We ended up getting to the conference hotel (it’s all on the same street) before finding a restaurant so we got registered and got out free conference shwag. It was great timing because they closed registration right after we got there. We asked one of the hotel staff where we could go eat and he suggested Lobster on the Wharf, which turned out to be a pretty nice restaurant. I don’t like lobster though, so I jsut had Fish and Chips.

After eating we went back to the conference to attend the reception. They gave us drink tickets. You gotta at least show up and use the drink tickets. We went to the reception for a bit and also checked out the poster presentation they had upstairs. After that we just headed back to our hotel.

Once at the hotel, I talked with Jess over iChat, which was pretty cool. I had figured that instead of calling we could jsut use iChat or Skype to save money and also video is always better than audio. I will probably go to bed soon because I need to wake up at 6:30ish so we can get breakfast before the opening plenary tomorow. ’twill be fun.

Filed under: Everyday, chpca conference, Everyday, PEI, sunday, travel