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Amy, Liam and I headed back east for a couple of weeks at the end of June. The main purpose of the trip was to head to PEI so that we could help carry out my mom's last wishes and scatter her ashes in the ocean just off of Stanhope, PEI.

We decided the best way to get there would be for Amy and Liam to fly home (so we wouldn't have to endure 12 hours in the car with an unhappy 2 year old) and I would drive so that we would have a way to get around when there. That worked out really well actually, or at least from my perspective it did...Amy may say differently - I think the plane ride was tough for Liam and sadly it was fully booked so that mean he had to sit on Amy's lap the whole time. Quite a difficult feat since she is 8 months pregnant. Anyways, we all made it back to NB safe and sound.

I had borrowed JK's TomTom for the trip, just to try it out and it did quite well. It didn't know about the new highways in Northern NB, but since they are relatively new, I guess that's to be expected. I briefly pondered if it would be a good idea to have the unit save in memory a track of when the vehicle is travelling in excess of 100 KPH when the system thinks it's not on a road. If you correlate that from a few different units (when they are connected back to the computer and hence the internet) then that should be a fairly reliable means of finding out about new highways wouldn't it? Anyways, I digress...

We spent the night in Frederiction on Friday before heading to PEI on Saturday. That gave us a chance to hit the market in Freddy before heading out, which was nice because I got to pick up some buffalo burgers which I'd be BBQing while in PEI. I had been to the place we were going, Windermere Cottages, many many times (we used to go every summer when I was a kid) but I decided to let TomTom navigate us there to see how it did. In the end, TomTom took us in a way I never knew about, and completely avoided the park gates that you normally have to pass through. Sadly this route has become known to many of the local kids who use it to avoid having to pay to get into the park so the owners of Windermere have blocked off the road from that end to avoid cars racing through their grounds. The road block simply consists of a chain across the road and a chair in the middle of the road, so I was able to get in without having to drive all the way around which was nice. It's a good thing too cause Amy had to pee pretty bad and I don't think she could have waited the extra 5 to 10 minutes it would have taken us to drive around. :)

As it turned out, we were the first to arrive and Deb (one of the owners) showed us which cottage would be ours for the week. We had a look around and then Liam made a bee line for the swings - which is where he would spend a significant portion of his awake time during the week. He also got a short ride around the property on Jack's (the other owner) golf cart. He really enjoyed that. We had been scheduled to stay in Elm cottage, but since it was still under renovation they upgraded us to Poplar cottage, which was a three bedroom with a large living room and a decent kitchen. The three bedrooms were all different, one had two double beds, one had two single beds, and the last one had a queen sized bed. Can you guess which one Amy and I picked for us? I'll give you a hint, Liam took the room with the two singles, and my sister slept in the room with the queen bed for a couple of days. :)

One of the benefits of being upgraded to this larger cottage was that it was right next door to the cottage that my dad had booked for himself (and some other members of my family). The name of that cottage is Juniper but when you look at it now, it actually has two names. Jack and Deb had made up a new name plate for it with "Beth's Cottage" written on it - see photo at top left of this post. I thought this was a really nice thing for them to do in memory of my mom. Juniper was always the cottage that mom and dad stayed in when they spent a month in PEI each year. The sad thing was that I didn't notice the sign (and neither did Amy) until after my sister Katie pointed it out to us. D'oh!

Sunday was the day that we had planned to do the scattering of mom's ashes so late in the morning we all headed down to the nearby wharf and jumped onto a fishing boat and headed out to sea. It was a beautiful sunny day. The boat stopped with a view of Windermere off the starboard side and we all participated in the scattering of the ashes into the ocean. Not long after that, Liam was voicing what we were all feeling when he wouldn't stop crying. We eventually got him calmed down just before docking at the wharf again. Afterwards we went out for a nice lunch at a nearby restaurant, The Millstream, as a family before heading back to the cottages.

My brother Sean and his family (wife Jen, daughter Cicely and son Aidan) had to head back home on Tuesday because school wasn't over in NS yet, and vacation time is hard to come by for a guy like my brother who spends a lot of his vacation time doing triathlons. The rest of us continued to enjoy the remaining part of the week by making a few trips to the beach, going on a deep sea fishing trip, going to see the Anne of Green Gables musical, and just generally hanging out. Sadly the weather turned crap towards the end of the week and we had to deal with a couple of days of rain. Not that fun when you have a 2 year old who is full of energy and just wants to go outside and play.

All in all it was a pretty great week. I'm glad we had the opportunity to get together as a family and I'm really hoping that this becomes a yearly thing that we all do. Timing may be tough, but I think we can work it out.

If you're interested in seeing the pictures (and videos) then check out this set over at Flickr.