Last week my employer stuffed me in a box full of styrofoam peanuts, cut out some airholes and shipped me to Halifax. Depite the colder weather there are certainly worse places to be (last summer I was swatting mosquitoes in Winnipeg), so I decided to stay the weekend and discover a little more of Canada.
I had never driven to Prince Edward Island before and had no idea what to expect. I forgot my iPod so once out of Nova Scotia I was entertained with the sweet sounds of New Brunswick's unique brand of country music...
en français. I crossed the Confederation Bridge into PEI and I found that someone in Charlottetown obviously has a sense of humour, because they named their own radio station SPUD FM. Cute.
Oh ya, the bridge. It's a 13 kilometre marvel of engineering completed 10 years ago, linking the two provinces with a ribbon of concrete. What they fail to mention on MapQuest is the $40.75 toll they ding you with on the return trip. That's a helluva lot of quarters.
There are three methods of payment available: Cash, credit or debit. If you have none of the above, there is another alternative: It involves Rocco the toll booth guy ordering the driver to get out of the car, grab his ankles and to "Do it for PEI". Based on the toll charges, it turns out that this is actually the least painful way to get off the island.
I'm hoping that someday Rocco accepts my invitation to come live out in the GTA so that I can return the favour. Once he starts paying McGuinty's Health Premium he'll know first-hand what it's like to "Do it for Ontario".
