Moving to Cavendish

On Sunday we were to move to Cavendish Campground, in the Prince Edward Island National Park. It was a short distance (less than an hour), so we enjoyed joining our church in Irving, Texas for worship via YouTube, and then drove to the national park.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Cavendish Beach Music Festival was going on during Thursday-Saturday, so there were festival-goers leaving the campground on Sunday. When we arrived near noon, we were told that our site was not yet "ready" and that it should be ready by the check-in time of 2pm. They told us that this would be their busiest turnover day for the season, with 197 campers checking out and 140 (I think) checking in. We could go ahead and provisionally check in, and then go to our campsite around 2pm. We were welcome to use the park, go to the beach, etc., until check-in time.

So, we disconnected the Jeep and left Gracie and Miss Kitty in the parking area while we drove around the park. We drove into the campground and found that there was no one in the site we were to occupy, so...  we figured we could just go ahead and bring Gracie in, but, since they had indicated the check-in time, we decided to visit the beach instead. We saw the beach from the campground, but drove down to the public access beach.

Information sign at Cavendish Beach

Map showing various trails

Characteristics of some of the trails -- looks like we'll be able to do some bike riding directly from our campsite!

There are also some activities by the park that we may be able to join!

Heading out toward the beach...

... same sign, with view on the other side of it... boardwalk out to the beach.

Information about the Piping Plover

At the end of the boardwalk...

... information about current conditions. 29C is about 84F, 13C is about 55F. Nice air temperature, but the water sounds a bit chilly!

Looking east down the beach...

... west down the beach (the campground beach is down that way)...

... looking straight out to the north.

You can see that there were quite a number of people taking advantage of the warm sunny Sunday afternoon at the beach!

We enjoyed people watching for a while, and then, since it was about 2pm (official check-in time), we headed back to Gracie...

... a picture of one of the walking/bike paths -- this is the Cavendish Dunelands trail.

We got back to Gracie in the parking lot and then drove to our campsite and got hooked up.

This picture was actually taken on Monday -- not quite as sunny -- Gracie in site A95.

Blog readers who were following Dwayne and me in the past may remember that we went to Cavendish Campground in 2016 (https://trekincartwrights.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-relatively-quiet-sunday.html). Back in March when I was determining which sites I wanted to try to reserve when the reservation system opened, I was surprised to find that many of the sites indicated that they had no shade. When we had been here in 2016, the shade was pretty heavy in the campsites:

Miss Doozie and the Jee-rage in site A25 in September, 2016.

Definitely a shady site!

We rode our bikes over to site A25 that Miss Doozie had been parked in...

This is what site A25 looks like today (with my bike and me standing in for Miss Doozie).

What a difference! What happened? 

Turns out that hurricane Fiona hit PEI September 24, 2022 (just last year) as a "post tropical cyclone". The national park website had a warning that had clued me in before I made reservations:

On September 23, 2022, Fiona’s ferocious forces left an unprecedented wake of destruction across the province. In PEI National Park, storm impacts included the falling of thousands of trees, road and beach access washouts, and the significant erosion of the park’s shoreline, including sand dunes.

For information about the upcoming changes to infrastructure and visitor experience for 2023 following post-tropical storm Fiona, please visit: https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/pe/pei-ipe/Principal-Main-Fiona

This site: https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/pe/pei-ipe/visit/fiona/photos has an interesting set of photos with before/after images with a slider so you can compare one to the other.

Information from Canada about "post tropical cyclones": https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/hurricane-forecasts-facts/learn/post-tropical-cyclones.html

We've seen impacts from Fiona all around Prince Edward Island, but the changes here are more stark to me. It is still beautiful, but just different from before. 

One positive is that we now have a view of the ocean (actually, the Gulf of St Lawrence) from Gracie in our campsite!

It is kinda mind-boggling to think that they somehow got all those trees cleared out of the campground since September -- in fact, in March, they were allowing me to book the sites, so they were committed at that point to have the campground up and running. I don't know precisely when the campground opened (I think it was in May) - but a lot of work had to go on to be ready to do that!