We had a wonderful day at the Acadian village yesterday. We got there just as it opened at 10am and spend the next four hours experiencing the Acadian life of the 19th century. We had a little rain but not enough to put a damper (pun intended) on the day.

There are about fifty building in the village and most of them had an interpreter to tell us about the person who owned the building. All of the interpreters were bi-lingual and I guess they got their clue for your first words as to whether they would talk in French or English. Here is a picture of one of them.

The only clue that we weren’t actually back in the 19th century were the tire tracks in the muddy road from the service vehicles of the night before. I know it is in the triple digits in much of the U.S. right now but most of the buildings here had fires in the fireplaces to take the chill of the early morning air.  It did get up to the middle 70s later in the day. The lady shown here was actually making a very robust looking stew (not a fake one!). It smelled so good I told her I would be back for lunch.

Here is another picture of a resident of the village. He stood with his head out the door  eyeing us the entire time we were there. He seemed friendly enough but kind of stand offish.

After leaving the village we headed south for Prince Edward Island, or PEI as the Canadians call it.  It ends up that the distance traveled was quite a bit further than I had anticipated so we didn’t get into our hotel until after 6PM.  The hotel we are staying at here was built in 1913 as part of the chain of hotels that hosted the trans-Canadian railroad in that period.  More on that in tonight’s post.

I apologize for not posting yesterday. After we got into our hotel and got settled we went to a popular pub just down the street for seafood chowder. It seems every place on PEI claims that their chowder is the best. It was pretty good where we ate but seemed to lack some of the necessary spices. This has been the usual here; Canadians just don’t seem to be very friendly with spices.  But their local brew was very good. In fact I had two pints and thus the reason I didn’t post here last night 🙂

Today we will be investigating the sites. There is a 3 km board walk along the harbor here in Charlottetown that will be one of the first places we visit. I will let you know more about that this evening. That is if I don’t overindulge at a local pub again.

And the journey goes on….