Location Taken: Prince Edward Island, Canada
Time Taken: July 2012
Do you know how tough it is to get a good picture of flat farmland? Especially from a car as you drive past?
This is the only photo I even attempted of capturing what the majority of Prince Edward Island looks like.
It’s an odd province to drive through. There are very few major roads, and even the numbered ones tend to just be your standard two-lane blacktop. In fact, the only places with more than just one lane going each way that I recall were all in the capital city. And Charlottetown barely counts as a city to the eyes of one who’s been through New York City. The place only has one other designated city, and that’s only got 14,500 people or so. All of the rest of the towns in this place have less than 10k, and there’s only eight of them.
The island is around the size of Delaware, in case you were wondering. And it has less than a sixth of the population of that august body of land. However, it’s also far more domesticated than Delaware, which has most of its population concentrated in the northern cities. PEI, on the other hand, is full of farms. Every single corner of the place is farms farms and more farms, thanks to the excellent iron-rich soil of the place.
Which, perhaps, is why the roads are so small. It’s an island with only one bridge to it (and a ferry or two), and well, there’s nowhere to go except Charlottetown and farms. Well, and the National Park on the north coast, which wins my award for “most human-influenced park I’ve been in”. So the roads just kinda wander around acting as access roads for farms, more concerned with covering as much territory as possible than with actually going anywhere.
So if you do visit Prince Edward Island, which I do recommend, if only to eat their excellent potatoes and ice cream, bring a good GPS or map. You will be making a lot of turns just in trying to get from one place to another, and the only landmarks will be farms, farms, and more farms.
