Back in the 60s when we first moved to Prince Edward Island (okay, it only seemed like the 60s — it was only 14 years ago…) you basically had two places to go for coffee that was better than plain old swill: the market and the hospital.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital was home to the only Second Cup outlet on the Island, and thus one of the few places to have a machine capable of making good coffee. This led to the somewhat odd habit for Catherine and I of “going out to the hospital for coffee” when we first arrived here. Add in a couple of hours at the Charlottetown Driving Park betting on the horses, and you had a Saturday.

The [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] was, and is, home to Brett Bunston’s small coffee stand, a regular stop for many market-goers.

This morning this included me:

Now I understand what all the fuss is about, and why market people will arrange themselves in a claustrophobic line for 15 minutes to get a their fix: it was very, very good coffee.

The Styrofoam cup, of course, leads to some demerit points (they do offer “fill your own mug” service that would mitigate this). But otherwise I’d have no complaints: their foam was, at least in my limited 3-weeks as a cappuccino drinker, world-class. The coffee was robust without tasting like burnt rubber. Service was friendly.

This adds a new layer of complexity to the Saturday morning market routine: Saturdays have always been firmly rooted in [[Karin LaRonde]]’s excellent iced tea, and I wasn’t prepared to give that up (there’s a good chance, I think, that if I stopped drinking Karin’s tea, the whole house of cards might tumble down and she would stop making it). The solution was to go to the market earlier and stay longer, bracketing the experience with a cappuccino on one end and an iced tea — peach this week! — on the other.

The longer time spent at the market meant that we actually had time to buy produce, something, oddly, that we’ve never done before. So in addition to a coffee/tea buzz, we came home with 5 pounds of blue potatoes (from Taylor’s Taters, operated by two of the absolutely nicest people you’ll every meet: buy your vegetables there, please), 2 pounds of carrots (on orders from [[Don the Dentist]], in order to encourage Oliver’s wiggly tooth to exit), a cowboy cookie and three samosas.

And rather than splitting a smoked salmon bagel from [[Kim Dormaar]]’s stand, we each ordered our own this morning, allowing Oliver to indulge in his love for capers and me in my love for dill.

Caledonia House has earned my Saturday morning cappuccino business, and I’m prepared to give Linda’s a couple of days a week. Which means that the search is still on. Stay tuned.

We have a friend, let’s call him “Larry,” who, as far as I know, has never once eaten in a restaurant. Oh perhaps he once ate at a roadside stall in the Kashmir. And certain family functions may have forced him in through the back door. But in the many years that I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him eat out.

There is one exception to this habit: there was a time during the 1970s when “Larry” was living in a certain historic downtown Charlottetown house and had no access to a kitchen. As a result, he was forced to take all his meals at the The Town & Country restaurant. I’m not sure, however, whether this is a technical violation of his non-restaurant-eating stance, as eating at the T&C has always seemed more like eating at home than eating out.

Oliver and I were eating dinner tonight — Catherine was out at the movies — when a story on Compass announced that tonight was the last night for the Town & Country: Louis and Faida Rashed, who’ve operated the restaurant for 42 years, are retiring.

The night before Oliver was born, Catherine and I had our last meal, before launching off into parenthood, at the Town & Country. That’s the kind of meal you remember well, and I’ve always taken great comfort from knowing that the last little bits of Oliver snapped into place in the womb fueled by T&C food.

I’ve eaten there with friends, family, and colleagues. I’ve crammed into one of the the round banquettes with all of silverorange. I’ve enjoyed many a summer afternoon on the patio. I’ve been around for their 30th, 35th and 40th anniversary celebrations. And I’ve almost always ordered exactly the same thing: a shish taouk with rice. And it was the chicken soup otherwise.

And along the way I’ve benefited from the kindness and generosity of Louis and Faida: I’ve been sent home with half a dozen warm biscuits, been slipped a dessert or two on the sly, and have followed along as their granddaughter, born a month after Oliver, has grown up.

The Town & Country isn’t going away — there are new owners, from Indonesia, who will re-open in a month. But I know it will never be the same: Louis and Faida made the T&C a very special place, and their absence will leave a hole in my life, and a hole downtown.

Upon hearing the news that tonight was the last night, Oliver and I got bundled up quickly, picked up some flowers on the way, and popped over for a good-bye and a last chicken soup and a chocolate milkshake.

I told Oliver about the night before he was born, and explained to him what “retirement” meant. Louis and Faida were very nice to him — he came away with a box of chocolates and a hug — and I got a chance to thank them for everything.

I asked Faida what she’s going to do tomorrow morning: she told me that she has no idea.

Helpful readers [[Jevon]] and [[RobL]] pointed me to [[Linda’s Coffee Shop]] in search of a decent cappuccino after my experiments earlier in the week turned up only pompous swill. Thank goodness they did.

At 7:00 a.m. this morning I walked down into the heart of [[Ye Olde Charlottetown]] and into Linda’s, the only business open south of Grafton Street that early in the morning. I was the only customer in the place, and I parked myself right at the counter in front of the impressive coffee machine.

I ordered a cappuccino, an English muffin and a side of home fries.

And then I watched as my cappuccino was lovingly crafted by the owner — a complex dance of twists and turns and burbles ensued, and out the other end came my coffee:

No precious glass decanter. No annoying wooden stir-stick. No attempt to create a multi-hued, multi-layered experience. Just coffee and foam served in a proper coffee cup with a tea spoon on the side.

I was beginning to lose hope. Obviously, by looking to the elite super-mochacinno-latte-bené palaces, I was staring in the wrong direction: if you want workaday cappuccino, go to a workaday coffee shop.

I was so happy to have found a place that approximates what I had in Italy that I walked over after my meal to thank the man who’d made it for me, and we had a nice chat.

Linda’s cappuccino is still priced a little high for my tastes at $2.50, but after what I’ve been through this week I’m not going to complain. And they make a pretty good English muffin too.

In his post Out of Context Observation: The Travel Ethic, [[Thomas]] notes, in the context of “democratization of business travel due to low costs,” that “we’re starting to see the extreme liability air travel has compared to other travel forms in terms of global warming.”

Having been back and forth to Europe three times this year, something that it tells me here, saw me responsible for more than 3.78 Tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, this is something I’m painfully aware of.

It’s hard to be an advocate for more world travel and an advocate for climate crisis action at the same time, especially where you’re a Europhile like me who looks across the Atlantic for cultural, culinary and aesthetic sustenance.

One of the foundations upon which our mostly successful adoption of life here on Prince Edward Island is based on is the requirement that we be able to get off the Island on a regular basis. This doesn’t imply that the Island isn’t a great place to live, simply that our need for constant stimulation with the new and different can’t be properly fed here.

And so the current working model is “PEI as a wonderful home base, with frequent trips out into the world for what we can’t get here.”

While that’s a great plan in theory, it runs at cross-purposes to dealing with the carbon dioxide problem: all the supposed good I do by parking the car 99% of the time and walking, riding my bike, and taking the bus around town is rendered moot by my itchy feet.

Neither of two obvious ways of mitigating this conflict — trying to remake PEI in the image of elsewhere, or moving elsewhere and trying to remake it in the image of PEI — seem particularly achievable. Or rational.

I’m not sure where this leaves us.

In the meantime, this Sunday’s edition of The Observer contains a compelling article titled The Great Green Rip-off? in its travel section:

It’s travel’s biggest bargain - pay someone to plant a couple of trees and you can keep flying with a clear conscience. But where exactly does the money go, and will it really save the planet?

What their research uncovers suggests that the “travel, but plant trees to make it okay” model isn’t working as we think it is. Indeed from what else I’ve read on this notion, it seems that the very idea of trying to “offset” carbon emissions by “making it up” somewhere else isn’t sustainable, and that the ultimate solution lies in absolute reductions.

The Observer, and its sister paper The Guardian, have been doing some excellent reporting this year on the environmental impacts of travel, starting with What is the real price of cheap air travel? in January. In the world of $398 tickets to London from Halifax, and almost “free” travel around Europe, this is something we should all be reading more about.

Today’s cappuccino stop was Bo’s To Go, the coffee shop in the Atlantic Technology Centre. Bo’s was once the heart of a strangely pleasant and open public space on the first floor of the building; alas it’s been gradually squeezed into a corner as the public space has been converted into private space. So what once was an unexpected oasis is now a cramped corner, made even more claustrophobic by the blaring of “K-ROCK” throughout.

Bo’s is the other Island coffee shop “proudly brewing” coffee from Starbucks: yesterday’s stop, Mavor’s, was the first.

And the results were pretty much the same as at Mavor’s: watery coffee with about 25% too much “burnt all to hell” taste on the beans. The foam at Bo’s was dreadful and tasteless, and the whole experience was rendered almost completely null and void because Bo’s only serves coffee in paper cups, so there was also a faint aftertaste of paper and glue.

I’ll give this experiment another day — and perhaps tack on a bonus attempt at the market on Saturday — but my hopes are not high, and the old iced tea lifestyle is looking pretty attractive from this vantage point. If you have any other suggestions, please pass them along.

On the wall of the elevator at [[Hyndman and Company]], my insurance broker, is this sign:

The sign, as you might imagine, does not inspire confidence in the fitness of the elevator: it seems more complicated to deal with a stopped elevator than it does to deal with a downed airplane.

The only time I’ve ever been in an elevator that actually did stop was when I lived on the 29th floor of an apartment building in downtown Montreal. One day the elevator just stopped moving between floor 27 and 28. My displeasure at being trapped was mitigated by the sudden opportunity to use the elevator telephone; unfortunately I opened the door to said phone only to find that the handset cord was dangling free, disconnected from the elevator itself. Fortunately the elevator started moved a few minutes later, seemingly of its own volition.

Here in [[Charlottetown]] most if not all of the elevator phones ring into one place: the “Message Centre” on Grafton Street at the corner of Hensley. They’re the same people who answer for our home alarm system, and they’ll also take your call if you want to make a reservation at a national park campground in Canada. One wall their “command centre” is covered with old black telephones that ring when someone picks up a phone in a Charlottetown elevator.

Remember that night, back in the 1950s, when your Mom and Dad were out celebrating that new promotion. They were splurging — going to Enrico’s downtown rather than the usual place around the corner. Enrico’s had real cloth napkins, and a wine steward, and a fountain right in the middle of the dining room. After dinner they decided to make one last splurge — the bank was already broken anyway! — and have “special coffees” Maybe an “Irish Brogue” or an “Italian Sunset.” The coffees came in glass decanters swaddled in cloth, on a special serving tray, with an exotic chocolate angel perched gingerly on the plate below.

Remember that night? Well that seems to be the plateau on which [[Charlottetown]] coffee shops place the cappuccino. Without sounding like a Euro-snob (okay, I realize it’s too late for that): in Italy the cappuccino is a workaday drink, not special event. It costs about 1,20 EUR and it lacks any pretense or pomp.

Here in Charlottetown cappuccinos cost as much as a Big Mac, and they’re served in pompous, delicate glass vessels that would be more at home at a cotillion than a jobsite. Like this one, at Mavor’s:

Not only are such vessels too precious to hold coffee, but they’re not actually suited to the task at hand — they elevate the foam high about the actual coffee, thus preventing the two from the delicate dance required for each to achieve its optimal state.

Otherwise, the Mavor’s cappuccino was about as bite-free and bland as you can imagine. It’s not hard to imagine why Starbucks — whose coffee Mavor’s “proudly brews” — has spread around the world like wildfire: if my cappuccino was typical of their swill, their product is designed to neither offend nor particularly delight anyone.

I promise that I’ll shut up about all this shortly. Indeed I’m considered recanting my newfound coffee adherence, and going back to the simple life of an iced tea drinker.

I picked [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] up yesterday at the airport around supper time and, what with our cupboard being bare at home after a two-week absence, we decided to go out for dinner. Although Oliver pushed hard for [[The Noodle House]], I pushed back with a suggestion that we try the new Boston Pizza out by the mall.

After the whole Mike’s debacle four years ago — Mike’s was the last chain pizza restaurant to open out by the mall — I didn’t have high hopes for Boston Pizza. But you have to try everything at least once.

And to our surprise and delight, they make a very good pizza: thin crust, not drenched in sauce or cheese, and available in a stunning variety of combinations (we shared a “Thai Chicken” for example). Their staff are obviously very well-trained — we had several “well, that was very nice” episodes — and they are family-friendly both in attitude and with a kids’ menu that includes more than just dinosaur-shaped deep-fried chicken (Oliver had the quesadillas and salad).

The place was packed, so the word must be getting around. A shame it has to be part of the University Ave. urban sprawl, but it’s the best pizza in town right now — Catherine said it was the best pizza she’s ever had in Charlottetown. We’ll be back.

I had high hopes for [[Timothy’s]] when I walked in this morning on the second day of my “okay, now that you like coffee you have to try and find the best place in Charlottetown for a morning cappuccino” quest: they have arguably the nicest staff of all the coffee shops in town (and certainly the hippest) and it’s the most pleasant coffee shop to simply hang out in. But, alas, the cappuccino came served in a standard coffee mug, which is just plain wrong. And as a result the coffee languished separate and apart from the foam, and it was impossible to effectively stir in the sugar. The coffee itself, perhaps for related reasons, tasted weak and diluted. Sadly, I came away unimpressed.

On the other hand, I did get to chat with both Brenda Brady and Harry Holman.

I needed a new jacket to wear on my trip to Italy, so the week before I left I spent a couple of hours in Marks Work Wearhouse in [[Charlottetown]]; I ended up buying a WindRiver Microfleece Windproof Softshell Jacket.

The jacket is basically the same general idea as the Polarfleece jackets from REI that I’ve been wearing for the past several years, but it’s got a wind-proof lining which means that I can wear it almost year-round.

It’s well-equipped with pockets, sized just right, and it’s comfortable. What more could I want?

Well, perhaps for it to not start falling apart after three days.

The inside pocket zippers were the first to go — they simply came off the rails because their “zipper ends” weren’t properly stitched into place. Then the main zipper started to come off the rails too, and the fabric inside the outer pockets started to fray.

I might understand this if I was driving the jacket hard — climbing mountains, running the Iditarod, etc. — but I was simply moving about my regular everyday life.

Now I know that I shouldn’t expect the world for $49.99. But three days of use out of a jacket isn’t acceptable wear at any price.

The jacket’s going back to Mark’s this afternoon. I’ve got an email into MEC looking for suggestions about a replacement.