We arrived in Cavendish early evening on a Tuesday.

Wednesday morning I suggested to my girls that we take a peek at the beach before heading to Green Gables, etc. I wanted to dip my toes in the North Atlantic. We headed over and that was all she wrote.

Because the entrance to the beach was right across from our hotel, and because we are early risers, we ended up at the beach before the admitting booths were even open!  (I love that the beach access is called Graham’s Lane, because Graham is my maternal grandmother’s family name and that’s my Canadian family.)

We first started out on a higher outlook area.  (Remember my camera is messed up… I didn’t get the focus problem worked out until around 10 A.M.)

As we walked down this board walk it suddenly hit me that I was having a “Someday” moment.  As in, I’ve often mused, “SOMEday I want to see Prince Edward Island.

It wasn’t cold or warm.  It was just lovely.

We then got back in the van and headed to the beach access lot.

You can’t see it in this lame photo – but we saw a beaver at work that morning!  We never saw him at it again.

We were so early to the beach, the sand still held the imprints of the earlier morning visitors.  I can’t express how much I love this picture.

The beach.  A big, clean, empty beach.  The ocean.  The sun.  And me. 

The red sand was perfect.  Not coarse and seed-like, as in Cozumel, or creepy flour-like, as it is in Jamaica.  It was fabulous sand.

This is the only NOT red rock we saw all week.

But these babies.  They are everywhere. 

At this point, I really thought this was going to be a one-and-done activity.  After all, it’s not exactly 80F.  This is the North Atlantic, right?

We had NO idea how fabulous this beach was going to be. We frolicked for a long while and I had to DRAG my girls away to go visit GG.

We got to Green Gables and it turns out that it was Canada’s Sesquicentennial year, so they were giving away park passes!  Yay!  So getting to the beach before the booth was open this morning didn’t make me feel guilty any more.

We hurried over to meet Anne and Diana, as I had heard they can be very hard to meet.  The place was really crowded.  Not Disney World crowded, but way busier than I enjoy visiting a museum. 

This photo below marks when I finally figured out how to get my camera off the one weird setting I was aware of.  (Sadly, I still took all my other photos with the weird .NEF extension.)

We had to walk in a person-to-person line through the house.  While this is not where the author lived, this was the house she purportedly used as her setting for the Anne books.

While we did enjoy visiting, all the while they wondered out loud when we could head back to the beach. We went to our motel and got our swim gear. It had never dawned on me at home we might actually use swim suits at the beach! I expected it would be far too cold.
In fact, by the time we headed over with our packed lunch, it was teeming with activity.

There was a section with lifeguarding.

There were oodles of jellyfish carcasses both on the land and in the water.  You just had to be alert.

From the beach into the water, there was always about a 6 foot span of these rocks and then sandy bottom again.

Dunes are everywhere, just like in the TV show.

It was chilly, but there was not way I wasn’t going to give it a try.

We ate our lunch at picnic tables near the parking lot, then ventured out onto the trail.

Millions of little fishies.

It went on forever, but we turned around after about 15-20 minutes to wander back. 

We eventually went back to the motel to swim and eat our dinner.  I wish I could remember what we dined on.  It was a little like camping. 

After dinner we went to another beach east of Cavendish – another national park – Prince

Edward Island National Park.  This place was gorgeous, too.

We headed back a little west toward North Rustico.

The receding tide was leaving exquisite sandbars. 

Some photos are from my phone.  Some are from my fancy camera.  Neither gave me images good enough to blow up for a wall print.  Ouch.

We headed back to our apartment and watched another movie, eating butterscotch ice cream out of mugs.