The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust presentation to Executive Council appears to have gone well.

I was up late last night putting together John Sylvester’s photography and my own words in an Apple Keynote presentation (you can download the slides as a big PDF file).

Thanks to silverorange, I had the lend of a screen projector to show the presentation; when I woke up this morning, though, I realized that I didn’t actually have a screen. I tried getting through to Executive Council Office to see if they could help, but the phone kept ringing busy; finally, just as I was ready to give up, the phone rang. It was Executive Council Office, just calling to make sure we were on track (this is the sort of serendipity that happens all the time on Prince Edward Island). An hour later I picked up a screen from the Shaw Building.

I showed up at the New London Community Complex at 11:30 a.m. Much to my surprise, my fellow Directors of the Land Trust had all heeded my request to show up early, and they were milling about in the parking lot.

As it turns out I was the only one wearing a tie; the rest of our Directors were turned out in everything from shorts and T-shirt on up (our President, Hon. Marion Reid, was an exception of course; she was, as always, well turned out). It seems as though I am cursed to be the guy who never wears a tie when everyone else is. And vice versa.

We took a few minutes to discuss strategy, caught up on the usual sort of thing that Islanders catch up on (who started school today, who got a scholarship to Mount A, who died), and then went inside to wait for our 12 Noon appointment.

Cabinet was running about 15 minutes late (we were their last meeting for the morning), so we cooled our heels in the waiting room and discussed our presentation some more.

At about 12:15 we were ushered upstairs to the mezzanine where Cabinet was meeting. We quickly set up the screen, the screen projector and my laptop, and I was just firing up Keynote when Premier Binns introduced Marion.

As Marion delivered an impassioned speech about the importance of preserving our scenic coastal landscape, I showed a series of John’s photos in the background; they truly are stunning shots (they’re in here too) and they clearly show the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.

After about 10 minutes Marion handed things over to me, and I ran through the rest of the presentation: a brief review of the Land Trust’s history and reason for being, a summary of how we work and what we’ve done, ending up at an explanation of the situation at Cape Tryon.

Cabinet followed up with a series of questions, and by 1:00 p.m. we were done. The bulb didn’t blow in the projector, my laptop hard drive didn’t crash, and nobody kicked out the power cord by mistake.

Our immediate challenge at the Land Trust is that 90 acres of land around Cape Tryon may come up for sale in the near future; this is arguably the iconic image of the Island’s coastal agricultural landscape (John Sylvester says “it’s our Peggy’s Cove”). We’re working to ensure that, no matter what happens, this land is preserved free from development in perpetuity. Watch the Land Trust website for updates.