Charlottetown, Thu, 15-Jun-2023
/Our second and last full day in Charlottetown had a lot of downtime to recharge for the last week of our trip. We walked to and around Victoria Park and took a quick spin through the Cows Creamery.
Our laundry plan was to do it while we were in Moncton, and the owner of the B&B had offered to do it. However, seems she got busy and didn't get around to it, so we did a bit of hand washing to extend to today. Since there isn't laundry at the hostel, we went down the street to the local convenience store/café/laundromat. They offered drop-off service, and even though it would cost more than doing it ourselves, we went ahead so we would have a bit more time during the day. We'll need to do a bit more hand washing to last until the end of the trip, so we shouldn't need to do full laundry until we get home.
Victoria Park
After we dropped off our laundry, we walked to Victoria Park, not quite a mile away. When we got there, we followed the boardwalk along the Charlottetown Harbour. There are deep red rocks that line the shore. Prince Edward Island has red sand beaches, but the ones we went to were either the normal sand color or a light red; seeing the rocks, we could imagine what the beaches look like.
Partway along the boardwalk, we saw the Prince Edward Battery. As we got to the end, we got a good view of the Brighton Beach Front Range Lighthouse, but we didn't continue to get closer. Instead, we walked through the park and noticed an arboretum was nearby. As we walked through, we wandered all around, trying to find all of the numbered specimens. We think we found them. One that amused us was Herb Robert, which is a noxious weed in Seattle.
We went back to the room, then walked a couple of blocks to Founders' Food Hall and Market for lunch, settling on a sushi burrito. After that, we walked back to the car to go to Cows Creamery.
Cows Creamery
We had visited a Cows kiosk in Halifax and thought it would be interesting to go to Cows Creamery, which is in Charlottetown. All the Cows ice cream sold in the stores is made at this creamery, and we saw the machinery (it wasn't in operation when we were there). What's amazing is there didn't seem to be that many machines, so it's impressive they can support all of those stores.
In addition to selling ice cream, Cows also sells cheese. We saw the cellar where they age the cheese wheels, some of them blooming with mold.
Cows was selling so many t-shirts, they decided to start printing them in-house. You could also see the machinery used to print them. You can place an order and they print them on demand.
Rest of the day
We picked up some groceries and then headed back to the hostel. Since we still had time before picking up our laundry, we went to a café to hang out for a bit. We then picked up the laundry, put it away, and had a quiet rest of the afternoon and evening.