Cora’s Breakfast and Lunch on Queen Street is apparently in the middle of a transfer to a new franchisee, and so is closed temporarily. Not a good time of year for this sort of think, I would think.

Meanwhile, the Downtown Diner is about to re-launch as “Barristas,” leaving us with Yet Another Coffee Shop:

Up the street a little, the Maple Grille is also “closed for renovations,” but there’s no indication, at least from the outside, that it will re-open until a new name:

And I finally got a chance to visit the new grocery store, the Clover Farm on Queen Street, that opened while we were away:

First impression: it’s clean, well-staffed, and has a good selection. Unfortunately it doesn’t turn downtown Charlottetown into downtown Italy, but that was probably just wishful thinking on our part. Think “roast chicken” not “fresh goat cheese.”

Local gadabout Andrew Sprague has teamed with my friends Anne MacKay and Wayne Barrett to create Taste, described as a “virtual tour of Prince Edward Island through its restaurants.” The book is having its formal release this Wednesday, June 21 at 8:00 p.m. at the St. James Gate in Charlottetown.

Meanwhile, my friend, business partner, and gadabout in his own right, Dave Moses, is out in Vancouver tending to his television series, and you can read of his adventures while he’s there. The series itself — Robson Arms — has its own production weblog, an interesting look into the world of Canadian television.

Over the last month we’ve cruised the still waters of the Douro, taken trains in two countries, subways in three countries, and buses in four, ridden the streets of Copenhagen by bicycle, glided down the side of the hills of Porto by funicular and cruised the verdant byways of New England in a luxurious Volvo station wagon. That we would rumble into Charlottetown at 1:30 a.m. last night in a rented Chevrolet Impala thus made for something of an ignominious return.

It’s easy to understand why General Motors is in such dire straights as soon as you sit behind the wheel of an Impala: it’s a car designed to completely isolate you from the driving experience, and the “road” thus feels like an abstract concept located somewhere underneath several layers of padding. It is not at all a pleasant car to drive.

But it got us home to our own beds, and for that we were thankful.

The whole “car rental costs less than Halifax hotel” idea was eliminated when I neglected, in my early morning haze, to fill the tank up on the way to return the car to the airport, and found myself stung with a $69 fuel bill. But $69 was a small price to pay for avoiding the check-in, security lines, and flying stresses involved in a hop from Halifax to Charlottetown this morning.

Charlottetown appears much the same as when we left in early May. There are a few more bricks in the new federal building, the new grocery store downtown has a month under its belt, and the trees are in full bloom. G. decided to renovate our house while we were gone, which included repainting our front porch pewter green. There have been two deaths among friends and acquaintances while we’ve been gone, and three cancer operations. Apparently North Korea is preparing to attack Kansas City and someone was plotting to behead the Prime Minister. And we missed the hockey play-offs. Oh, and I forgot how to order at the [[Formosa Tea House]]. But it’s summer on Prince Edward Island, and that’s nice to return to.

Here’s a brief summary of our time away in numbers:

• Days away: 42
• Days spent working at [[Yankee]]: 7
• Photos uploaded to Flickr: 1,096
• Countries visited: 6 (USA, Ireland, Portugal, England, Denmark and Sweden)
• Currencies in my wallet: 5 (US dollars, Canadian dollars, Euros, Danish Kroners, Swedish Kroners)
• Modes of transport used: 11 (automobile, airplane, taxi, tram, subway, bus, funicular, river-boat, bicycle, monorail, dugout canoe)
• Value of Playmobil and Lego acquired: $150.00
• Ways of saying thank you: 3 (Thanks, Tak, Obrigado)
• Medical emergencies: 1 (puffy eye)
• Airlines flown: 4 (Air Canada, US Airways, Ryanair, easyJet)
• Lost luggage: none
• Aeroplan miles earned: 7,526 (US Airways Boston to Dublin return — they’re a Star Alliance carrier)
• Mobile SIM cards acquired: 3 (Denmark and two in Portugal)
• Telephone calls received: 4 (two from [[Johnny]], one from a client, one from a distant relative)

There was about 3 cubic feet of mail waiting for us on the dining room table, and my “inbox to zero” plan is faltering with 52 messages waiting for my attention (where you’re used to zero, 52 seems like a mountain). And Catherine seems convinced that the inside of the house is covered in dust.

Bring on the summer…

Back in March when I booked us on an Aeroplan flight for the return leg of our complex Copenhagen - Dublin - Boston - Charlottetown trip, I didn’t give much thought to the inconvenient Halifax overnight imposed by Aeroplan’s anemic availability. Overnight in Halifax was just another delightful part of the journey.

From this end up the trip, however — so close to our own beds, yet so far — spending the night in Halifax seems like spending the night in jail.

So a quick rearrangement and we’re flying to Halifax and then renting a car for a drive over to the Island tonight. We’ll sleep in our own beds, avoid an early departure tomorrow morning, and it’s actually cheaper because the cost of a one-way rental to PEI ($143) is less than the cost of an airport hotel room ($163).

We’ll spend the day rambling around the scorching heat of Boston (temperature at 11:00 a.m. as I write: 30 degrees C), head to the airport around supper time, and be back on the Island by midnight if all goes according to plan.

Of course, Air Canada might interfere with this excellent plan. And we do have to get through customs with our 6 weeks of ephemera. With luck, we’ll see you at Timothy’s in the morning.

We’ve been in Boston for two suppers now, and have had two very different restaurant meals.

On Saturday, on the way back from the Children’s Museum, we stopped at Legal Sea Foods at Park Square. I’d always had good experiences at Legal, and although it’s a chain, it has at least the veneer of being local, and I knew the service would be excellent.

I was wrong.

We were shown to our table, our order was taken. And then we never saw our waiter again. We waited too long for our appetizers, too long for our main course, and nobody ever bothered to ask if we wanted dessert or coffee. The check never came, and I was forced to hunt down a manager to get it; even then, she left immediately and I had to hunt down someone else to actually pay. While the food was excellent, the abysmal service ruined what would have otherwise been a very good night out. Mindful of [[Johnny]]’s dictate that one should always report problems like this, I sent a full report to Legal by email; I can only hope that we caught them on a bad night.

Last night was as different as you could hope for on the service spectrum.

It was [[Catherine]]’s birthday yesterday, and mindful of her love for “small plate eating” — dim sum, tapas, etc. — I made reservations for us at Tapeo on Newbury Street after reading generally favourable reviews online.

The service at Tapeo was excellent, from the host at the entrance through to our server who was patient, helpful, aware of children, and just generally a pleasant person to interact with. She made the meal memorable.

While it’s difficult to recreate the vibrant “belly up to the bar for whatever’s available today” experience of a bar in Spain, Tapeo’s food was great too: somewhere in there we had baked goat cheese, battered shrimp with green sauce, salmon balls, garlic potatoes, duck with berry sauce and grilled asparagus on toast with an olive/anchovy tapenade. I’m not entirely sure what a tapenade is, but man was it ever good. The bill, at $71 with drinks, was perhaps five times what one would pay in Bilbao, but for a birthday night out in Boston, it was well worth it.

I’ve posted the slides for my presentation at the CRMA Annual Conference. They’re image-heavy, and I didn’t do anything to optimize the size, so the download is 19.1 MB, for which I apologize. I’ll work to convert to a more web-friendly format as soon as possible. Thanks to all who attended. Miracle of miracles we ended with a final question right on time at 5:00 p.m. It was lots of fun.

A blurry photo of my audience at the City and Regional Magazine Association Annual Conference. I took the photo from the podium to demonstrate “live blogging” in action.

We arrived in Boston on Friday night and checked into the Marriott Boston Copley Place. We’re here — or at least I am — for the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association.

These are the people who make, well, magazines for cities and regions. Looking down my list of attendees I see Jayson from Honolulu Magazine, Hudd from Memphis Magazine, Cindy from Plano Profile and Mary from Bangor Metro. Because they’re all making magazines in their own little area, they’re an oddly cooperative bunch.

My session, at 3:45 p.m. today on the “Production” track is billed “Web 2.0 — an introduction to web technologies that publishers can take advantage of now or in the near future.” Which amounts to what must be the most generic and mundane title for one of my talks yet. I’m up against sessions titled “The Interview,” “The Future of Media, Part II,” “Special Sections/Ancillary Products/Best Ideas,” “The Power of a City/Regional Magazine,” and “Developing Circulation for Companion Titles.”

I’ll post the slides here when I’m done.

Back in April I posted about a little project to scrape the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission website and make an RSS feed out of their Lands Protection Act database search.

This project was one of those that I mentioned in my presentation on public data at reboot.

To my surprise and delight, I received a message this afternoon from Don Sutherland, (Director of Technical & Regulatory Services at IRAC) that they’ve developed their own RSS feeds for this data.

This is doubly wonderful: it’s excellent that IRAC realizes the potential of RSS to aid in their public service role, and it’s excellent that they’re willing to listen to — and implement — ideas from their constituency. Thank you.

Although I’m still doubtful that it’s possible for humans to flit about the surface of the earth so quickly, we woke up yesterday in Dublin, Ireland and as I type this I’m sitting here at [[Yankee]] in Dublin, New Hampshire — 3013 miles away and 24 hours later.

Our travel day, while exhausting, was thankfully uneventful — no puffy eyes or other disasters. U.S. Airways took off from Dublin on time, landed in Philadelphia on time, and then did the same for the Philly to Boston leg of our trip.

We picked up another Volvo from Hertz for the trip up to Keene (leaving out the brutal environmental damage caused by automobiles, the XC70 is a beautiful driving machine).

This Volvo has Sirius Satellite Radio in it, so we ended up listening to CBC Radio 3 for the entire trip. Please allow me to take back anything bad I’ve ever said about CBC Radio 3 (well, not everything — those Flash-o-matic websites were, and are, truly dreadful): they play an excellent mix of “modern Canadian music.” It’s only a shame you need a satellite receiver (or the Internet) to pick up the signal — [[Catherine]] and I agreed that we would happily jettison Shelagh Rogers for a bit of main network time.

We arrived at the E.F. Lane Hotel in Keene around 9:30 p.m. at the approximate end of our mental and physical limits; we all three went straight to bed, and we didn’t wake up until this morning at 7:00 a.m.

We’re here in New Hampshire until Friday, then down to Boston for the weekend and back to the Island, with a Halifax overnight (thanks, Aeroplan!) on Tuesday morning.