Canada: North Cape Coastal Trail Part 1

Today was the day to hit the 350km North Cape Trail around Prince County which covered the western third of Prince Edward Island and I had a route planned out.  I could take my time over the North Cape Trail a little more as I had 2 nights in Prince County, one at the northern end in a heritage inn and one at the southern end in a lighthouse!  This meant I could do the most westerly part of the trail on the first day and would do the other half as I journeyed back east towards Queen County, the central county of Prince Edward Island for my last 2 days.

I had stayed overnight in the Tignish Heritage Inn.  This historic building had been constructed in the 1860s as a convent school and residence.  Nuns from Montreal came to Tignish to teach in the building which opened as a school in 1868.  The nuns lived and taught in the school and some students boarded there.  The school was a private enterprise for 54 years and then became part of the public school system.  The classrooms were closed in 1966 and then the building was just a residence for the nuns.  The last of the sisters left in 1991 and 2 years later the convent was purchased by the community of Tignish and converted into an inn and meeting centre.  The fact that I stayed at the inn for the night is evidence the community achieved this objective.

I was advised to look inside the church at Tignish which was right next to the inn, so I ventured inside to look at it and was met with the sight of a bright blue ceiling covered in stars!  After this short diversion, it was time for me to venture out for the day.

For today’s itinerary, first I would go to the Wind Energy Interpretive Centre and then to the Potato Museum. 

I drove a few minutes down the road from Tignish to the North Cape Wind Energy Interpretive Centre.  There are 16 wind turbines on North Cape and it gets very windy here.  Unfortunately I got no information from the Interpretive Centre.  It was in complete darkness, the doors were locked and there was a sign on the door to say it was closed until further notice. 

I could still access the beach though, and I had managed to time it to arrive here at low tide so I could walk on the ocean floor.  The natural rock reef where the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Northumberland Strait meet is visible at low tide, so I had a walk on the rocks that formed the ocean floor.  It was fairly early in the morning and it was windy, so I was cold!  I had my hood up on my fleece and my gloves on.  I set up my gorilla grip in order to be in some of the photos of the ocean reef and the gusts of wind kept blowing it over!  I did manage to get two or three photos with me in them to choose from before I gave up and headed back to the car.

The drive around the coast was pretty and the sand on this coast is red due to the iron deposits in the earth.  This means that the water closest to the shore has a very orange colouring on this part of the island and that’s unusual if you’re used to seeing yellow sand. 

There isn’t too much to see along the coast after the North Cape for a distance, so I made my way to the inland town of O’Leary which would probably be totally bypassed by tourists if it wasn’t home to the Canadian Potato Museum.

Potatoes are so important to Prince Edward Island that it has a whole museum dedicated to them.  30% of Canada’s potatoes are grown on Prince Edward Island, which is a staggering amount for the smallest province.  Prince Edward Island isn’t just the smallest Canadian province, it’s the smallest by a long way with an area of 5,660 square kilometres, the second smallest, Nova Scotia has an area of almost 10 times as big at 55,284 square kilometres.

You can’t pass the Canadian Potato Museum and not have a look inside, so I paid the entrance fee and looked around this unique museum, home to the Potato Hall of Fame which disappointingly featured people rather than varieties of potato which was what I had been expecting.  The Potato Hall of Fame specifically featured men who had contributed to potato cultivation on the island.  But I supposed they deserved recognition when such a tiny area of land produced almost a third of Canada’s potatoes. 

The museum was full of all that stuff you never knew you needed to know about potatoes, including all the diseases potato crops are susceptible to with handy plastic potatoes as representations of what a potato plant damaged by the disease would look like.  The Colorado beetle is the potato farmer’s worst enemy.  Britain is actually the only country to successfully eradicate the Colorado beetle, so that’s one less problem British potato farmers have to worry about. 

There was a lot of other information, such as two potatoes a day provide you with enough Vitamin C to prevent scurvy.  Captain Cook was well known for feeding his crews with Vitamin C rich foods, including potatoes, thus ensuring his sailors never died of scurvy. 

Potatoes originally come from Peru and when the Spaniards got there and raided the country for its gold, the Incas couldn’t understand why gold was so valuable to the Spanish and wondered if they ate it!  The Incas freeze dried their potatoes so they would last almost indefinitely; it was the ancient version of Smash!  When the Spanish stole their freeze dried potatoes, that’s when the Incas were really in trouble. 

More trivia, potatoes were banned in Burgundy because they were thought to cause leprosy, they were originally used as animal feed in Europe and the British didn’t eat them because the Irish cultivated and ate them, which therefore made the British consider potatoes as peasant food.  Marie Antoinette wore potato flowers in her hair.  Yes, everything you never needed to know about potatoes.

Of course, at the Potato Museum you have to also eat some potato products, including some unexpected ones.  For instance, I sampled fudge made with mashed potato which actually tasted exactly like any other fudge I’d ever eaten, I would have never guessed it had potato in it.  I had some chips in the café, but they were nowhere near as nice as the ones I’d had from the burger van in Charlottetown the day before. 

According to the information in the Potato Museum café, chips were originally French and the thin French fry was invented when someone complained about the chips being too thick and so the chef sliced the potatoes wafer thin, thus creating the French fry.

Today I was also going to visit 2 provincial parks in the far west of Prince County on the North Cape Coastal Trail. 

First I went to Jacques Cartier Provincial Park, a very small park where I parked up for 20 minutes and had a brief walk on the lovely bright orange sand beach.

After that I drove to Cedar Dunes Provincial Park which was the location of West Point Lighthouse, the first lighthouse in Canada and the tallest on Prince Edward Island.  The West Point Lighthouse was also my accommodation for the night.  I was in the Tower Room! 

After dropping off my things in my room, I put some Newman Estates wine in a portable mug and went down to the beach.  I was finally able to take advantage of some sunshine.  The sun also gave out a bit of warmth which was nice because it had been freezing all day!  In fact, Prince Edward Island had been pretty cold for most of the time I’d been here. 

I read this was the best place on the island to enjoy the sunset and my lighthouse tower bedroom window overlooked the beach and the sea.  I also read some interesting legends as I wandered along the beach and took in the information boards along the way. 

Firstly there was a legend that there was buried treasure on the beach.  There are some quite strict rules legislating treasure hunting activities if you want to avoid the wrath of the coastal gods and avoid consequences that wouldn’t be out of place as a scene in a horror film. The rules are you must dig for treasure at midnight by the light of the moon and refrain from announcing your discovery or the sand will swallow you up.  I could see a fatal flaw in these regulations.  If you have to refrain from announcing your discovery, what if someone has already dug at midnight by the light of the moon, discovered the treasure and not announced their discovery?  That would mean the treasure has gone.  But no one knows because the prospector kept it a secret to avoid the fate of being gobbled up in quicksand never to be seen again. 

The other legend is about an 80 foot sea serpent that roams the coast.  It has fur on its body rather than scales.  There were 9 sightings of this creature in 1992.  I wondered if some particularly bad strain of new hallucinogenic drug had reached Prince Edward Island that year…   

I sat back on the beach and watched the waves and sipped my wine.  I didn’t see any furry sea serpents and I wasn’t tempted to dig for treasure.  I was just enjoying a relaxing moment.  I can’t relax for long, I’m far too restless a soul for that when I’m travelling, besides which the sun was starting to sink and the temperature was falling rapidly. 

I’d been up to the top of the lighthouse earlier and now as I sat in my tower bedroom looking out of the window, I wondered if I could go to the top of the lighthouse again to watch the sunset.  The lighthouse was open as a museum for non-residents, but it was closed for the night now.  However, there was no barrier across the stairs preventing me from going up.  I decided to check if I was allowed up there, I didn’t want to set off any alarms!  The manager of the lighthouse, Scott, said that I could go up there and would I like to go outside at the top of the lighthouse?  I asked if that was possible and Scott said it was as long as he came with me. 

As we ascended the stairs Scott told me that West Point was the first lighthouse built in Canada, but when its future became uncertain, the community bought the lighthouse and turned it into a museum.  They converted a couple of rooms in the lighthouse into hotel rooms for guests and also converted some adjacent cottages into hotel rooms.  It gave the community an income that ensured they could continue to preserve the lighthouse and it offered tourists like me the experience of staying in a lighthouse.  I wouldn’t have stayed in the lighthouse if I hadn’t been able to reserve the tower room, but actually it would have been worth staying there even if the tower room hadn’t been available.  Although obviously the tower room was better! 

The door to the outside of the top of the lighthouse was an Alice in Wonderland door.  I hadn’t even spotted it when I’d been up there earlier.  It was the type of door that was too small to walk through; you had to crawl through it.  I’ve encountered quite a lot of doors like that on my travels and with all the adventurous exploits I’ve had on my trips, an Alice in Wonderland door posed no problem. 

It was beautiful outside.  The sunset was amazing.  The sky was the most gorgeous colour and there was a windfarm on this part of the coast too, so the wind turbines were silhouetted against the orange sky.  It was now very cold and getting colder, so we went back inside the lighthouse.  As Scott was on duty he had to go downstairs, but as I was safely indoors now, I could stay up here as long as I wanted.  I watched the light shining in the top of the lighthouse as a warning to passing ships.  The information about the lighthouse detailed the way the light was powered and a new system in 1823 changed its effectiveness from 17% to 83%.  Ships with their modern navigation systems didn’t really need the shining light to warn them about dangerous rocks anymore, which was why the lighthouse had been in danger of closing and falling into disrepair before it was purchased by the community.  But it was an icon of the past and I was pleased the community had chosen to preserve it.  It would be a real shame if lighthouses disappeared from the world’s coastlines.  Britain, with its long coastline and extensive seafaring history, has hundreds of lighthouses.  Being British, lighthouses are part of my heritage too.  If they weren’t I probably wouldn’t have been so enthused about overnighting in one. 

I descended the steps from the top of the lighthouse to my tower bedroom.  From a cold blustery morning on the ocean floor through potato trivia at lunchtime to an afternoon on a beach containing buried treasure and patrolled by sea monsters and culminating with watching the best sunset on Prince Edward Island from the top of the oldest lighthouse in Canada.  It had been a good day.

I travelled around Atlantic Canada in June 2018.

Details of the 350km North Cape Coastal Drive including map and attractions can be found on the Prince Edward Island tourism website.

I stayed at the Tignish Heritage Inn in Tignish. You can book and see full room details online

I stayed in the Tower Room at West Point Lighthouse in Cedar Dunes Provincial Park. You can also visit the lighthouse museum which is open to non residents from 9.00am to 8.30pm daily June to September and costs $10.

Cedar Dunes Provincial Park is free of charge to visit. It is located on the southwestern section of the North Cape Coastal Drive 24km south of O’Leary, 53 km south of Tignish and 74km west of Summerside.

Jacques Cartier Provincial Park is free of charge to visit. It is located 14km south of Tignish.

Head up to North Cape to walk on the ocean reef at low tide. The Wind Energy Interpretive Centre is open from May until October. North Cape is approximately 20 minutes drive from Tignish.

The Canadian Potato Museum is located in O’Leary. It is open from May to October and entrance fee is $10.

Read North Cape Coastal Trail Part 2

Read about my other adventures on Prince Edward Island.

Points East Coastal Drive

Canada: Cavendish and the Rotating House of North Rustico

Charlottetown – Pocket Capital of Prince Edward Island

And check out more of my posts about Canada

Canada’s Medieval Castle

Canada: Saint John River Valley

Canada: Magnetic Hill and Fundy National Park

Canada: Quebec – Waterfalls, Via Ferrata and A Religious Theme Park