This morning I crossed the divide from “places in Charlottetown that make allowances for cappuccino, but don’t really do it all that well” into “places in Charlottetown that snear at the very mention of anything that’s not regular coffee.”

They don’t actually serve cappuccino at all at Chambers Restaurant and Bar in The Charlottetown Hotel. Their english muffin, however, is perfectly acceptable.

You would think that the Delta Prince Edward, being the largest hotel on Prince Edward Island and thus temporary home to international financiers, rulers, and royalty, would seek to make the best cappuccino in town.

While the presentation was nice — look at that elegant swirl! — and the service was world-class, the cappuccino itself was moribund.

The worst of it was that it was served luke-warm. There was also the deflated foam and the coffee that was bland and tasteless.

If you’d asked me which would have a better cappuccino, tiny Linda’s next door or the Delta, I’d have picked the Delta every time. I was wrong. Sorry.

One of the nicest things about Charlottetown on a Sunday morning is that you can, literally, walk down the middle of the main street and not encounter any traffic:

I was up and out of the house by 6:45 a.m. this morning — I still haven’t recovered from being on Central European Time for two weeks — and the few people I encountered on the streets were either coming home very, very late, or going to work very, very early.

Frankly, Cora, I expected more of you. With your over-the-top fruit plates and endless variety of lavishly done waffles and pancakes, I fully expected that you would similarly pull out all the stops when it came to coffee.

But you didn’t.

I sure hope what you served me this morning came out of a pre-mixed cappuccino packet, because if you made it with a real coffee machine, you’re really in trouble:

I’ve a feeling that I could get a better cappuccino in an Irving Big Stop. Charging more than $2.50 for this luke-warm, tasteless coffee-substitute is criminal. You should be ashamed of yourself.

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.