Cavendish, Queens County, PEI

We arrived in Cavendish at the KOA about the same time as most of the caravan.  This campground is made for families! It has playgrounds, pool, outdoor movies, hay rides and a lot more activities and games for the kids.

We had an early morning departure on the tour bus with a very knowledgeable guide took us to the beach so we could experience it before the hoards arrived.  They sometimes have over 3000 people on this one beach with many more along the coastline and they swim in this cold Gulf of Saint Lawerence water!

Not far from the KOA campground is the house featured in the book “Anne of Green Gables” by Lucy Maud Montgomery.  Lucy was born in 1874 and was a published writer at the age of 15. The home actually belonged to her grandparents’ cousins but she spent a lot of her summers here. We toured the house then walked around the grounds and down Lover’s Lane and through the Haunted Forest.

Everything is very close on the island so it was a short drive to the harbor where we learned about lobster fishing and the growing of mussels and oysters.  It take 10-12 years for a lobster to reach one-pound that is the minimum keeper size. This is a strictly regulated industry.  The traps are laid out daily only in May and June on the north side of PEI and Aug and Sept on the south side. That’s it! No more lobster fishing for the rest of the year.  A fisherman may have up to 300 traps and no more but he can catch as many lobster as he is able in those two months on either the north or the south, not both.   Oysters are farmed in the shallow bays along with the mussels.  We didn’t learn much about oysters but 71% of the mussels sold in the US are PEI mussels.  A frayed rope is seeded with mussel spat and then hung from a buoy in the bay next to the oysters.  There they grow until they are big enough to put into a mesh bag and then that is hung in the water until they are mature.  

Summerside is about 30 minutes from Cavendish and is the home of Holland College and the College of Bag Piping.  Irish and Scottish immigrants settled PEI so there is a lot of influences from the Old Country here - city names, speech, potatoes, and Celtic music and dance, including bagpipes. At the Piping College we enjoyed a performance from three of their students - one on bag pipe, one on drums, and one dancing. Really talented youth.