Prince Edward County

Edited post

Although I tend not to edit posts, once I’ve put them up, this one’s an exception. I’ve modified the links to my photos site.

Probably not that important, but I’m anal-retentive, that way.

We went away for the weekend, to Prince Edward County (which I’m abbreviating to PEC in this post). (Be warned, if you’re tempted to click that link, that it will start playing music.) Andrea was originally planning to go to the Montreal Jazz Festival on the weekend, but everyone who was supposed to go with her backed out, so she had the weekend free, and we decided to take advantage of it and go away somewhere. The question was: where? So we just hunted around for places we could go in Ontario, and came across PEC.

Our first step was to book a hotel, or a bed & breakfast, or an inn, or a motel, or something. Unfortunately, it was the long weekend, and we didn’t start looking for places to stay until Thursday evening, so we were afraid that there wouldn’t be anything free. But Andrea managed to get us a room at a winery. They actually had a very nice deal, which included dinners, but they were booked up, and we couldn’t get it; the only room they had free was their super-mega-wonderful-holycowwhataroom room. It was pretty expensive, but we decided to go ahead and treat ourselves.

And I must say, the room was breath-taking. It was huge, with two bathrooms, two fireplaces, three TVs, etc. etc. The inn itself was pretty disappointing—that is, the way it was run. (That’s why I’m not posting a link to their web site.) But the room… wow.

As for the rest of the trip, there isn’t much to say. I have a few pictures, up on my pictures site, although not too many. (There are two albums, one called PEC, and one called PEC Room, which is devoted to pictures of our room. Yes, I was that impressed with it.) It really was enjoyable, and the scenery was great. (We drove about 260–270km during the three days and two nights we were there. I wished, numerous times, that we’d had our hybrid car, for the trip.)

I’m trying to think of highlights, but there aren’t really that many.

Our trip up, on Saturday afternoon, was pretty horrendous. I’d been hoping that traffic wouldn’t be so bad, on Saturday, that everyone who was leaving the city for the long weekend would have left Friday night, but apparently they didn’t. Traffic was jammed from Toronto all the way to Belleville.

We had dinner at a couple of places that I really liked:

• The Acoustic Bar & Grill, in Picton, was a nice place. They have live entertainment, which consists of somebody with a guitar, playing blues, jazz, or folk music. We went in expecting the music to be mediocre, but we were both impressed with the guy who was playing when we went there.
• The Devonshire was a really nice restaurant. Since we’d been staying at a winery, and had taken a wine tour, and had bought a bottle of wine, and just generally had wine on the brain, we decided that we should go to a nice restaurant, that would serve wine, and match it up with some good food. Unfortunately, I don’t know from wine, so I was leaning on my waiter to recommend something to go with my steak, and he didn’t feel overly qualified to do so. Luckily, the steak they made was amazing, so any wine would have tasted good with it. (The waiter chose a wine that was “light, with a peppery after taste”, which seemed to work well.)

We also had lunch at a place which disappointed me, called Buddha Dog. They serve home-made hot dogs, where all of the ingredients—the meats, the bread for the buns, etc.—are grown locally in PEC. And I was pleasantly surprised, when we went in, when I saw the price was only $1.50. But then we found out why: The things were tiny.

One of the sights I was really looking forward to seeing was the Lake on the Mountain. Any sites about PEC tend to feature pictures of Lake on the Mountain all over the place, and it looked pretty beautiful, so I was looking forward to seeing it. As it turns out, it wasn’t quite as amazing up close—it’s just a lake. To get the full effect, I guess you’d have to hire some kind of aircraft, and see it from above. (I tried to take a series of pictures, that I could join together as a single “panorama” picture, but it didn’t work. I was hoping the tool I was using—IrfanView—would somehow intelligently see the overlap between each picture, and seamlessly join them together, but it didn’t. I guess I could try again, with Photoshop, since Andrea has that installed on the computer at home.)

And then the drive back to Toronto on Monday, which I was expecting to be even worse than Saturday’s drive, turned out not to be that bad. I mean, we didn’t fly; there was quite a bit of traffic. But neither were we driving too slow; we averaged around 100km/hour.

I wish I could remember more, to post about. I’m fairly sure that after I click Submit, and post this blog entry, I’ll remember something else I wanted to write about.