Rob Lantz blogs his bus trip. These days if you’re not blogging about taking the Charlottetown Bus with your children, you’re not blogging at all.

Today was the day for Oliver and I to take our public transit adventures to the next level: we were going to transfer.

According to the official map and to my derivative of it, at 9:55 a.m. the East Royalty - Kensington Rd. bus should have ambled by the corner of Prince and Richmond (map) before turning right onto Sydney to loop back to the Confederation Centre of the Arts where we could catch the 10:00 a.m. Winsloe - University Avenue bus out to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. We were out on the corner at 9:40 a.m. just to be sure. The bus never came.

Whether this was because the bus drove by early, because the schedule or route has changed, or because I misunderstood the route map (although it’s hard to interpret it any other way), I’m not sure. But we had to react quickly, running over to the Atlantic Technology Centre to catch the Winsloe bus on its way out of town.

We only made it as far as the corner of Kent and University (map) before the bus came along. Fortunately the kindly bus driver stopped for us (although we did get a kindly “you know this isn’t an official stop” dressing down).

We got to the Atlantic Superstore at about 10:15 a.m. and walked over to the market. As with our first trip by bus to the market, we were the only ones making the trip, which makes me think that either all the pro-transit hippies live out in Breadalbane and have to drive, or that their commitment to transit extends only providing it for others. In any case, the parking lot was as chock full o’cars as it usually is. Score one for Big Oil.

The market was unusually pleasant today perhaps because I consumed both the berry-mint iced tea blend on offer from Karin LaRonde and an freak moccacinno from Caledonia House (freak only because coffee buzzes me all the way to next week).

When time came to leave I realized that there was still an hour to go before the next bus south, so Oliver and I consulted and decided to walk home along the Confederation Trail instead of taking the bus.

This proved to be a very pleasant walk, taking us through the Experimental Farm, past the 1911 Jail, through Joe Ghiz Park and out to Grafton Street near Holland College.

Passing along the trail between Longworth Ave. and Euston Street, we overheard two neighbours talking to each other about the weather and other neighbourly things. Just as they were about to go their separate ways, one neighbour told the other to hang on a second, and he ducked up to the porch and pulled out a giant — giant! — beet.

“That’s some big beet,” said the beet-less neighbour in awe, “where’d you get it.”

“From a guy at work,” replied the beet-holding neighbour.

“Gonna be some tough,” came the response.

“Yah, some tough.”

The weather was fantastic — sunny and just a hint short of brisk — and we made good time: we were back home before 12 noon. Next week we’ll try the transfer again.

I’ve been hacking around with WML this afternoon, trying to patch together a mobile phone browser version of the Charlottetown Bus Schedule. Doing mobile phone development on a Mac has been painful because there’s not a good WAP/WML emulator for the Mac (if there is, please point me to it!).

What I’ve got so far is an application that prompts for bus route and street number and name; it then returns the closest stops to that civic address, with links to the schedule for each stop.

You can take this early version for a ride: if you don’t have a WML-capable mobile phone, use this web-based emulator. The address you need to enter in either case is:

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Prince Edward Island Tea Merchants, the restaurant at the front of the old GNK Marketplace (formerly known as Great Northern Knitters, and before that as Woolworths), serves 48 varieties of unsweetened iced tea. At Ann Thurlow’s recommendation I tried the Spiced Rooibos today (for more on rooibos, and iced tea in general, see this earlier post); very tasty. Of course you can ask them to add sugar if you are one of those crazy sugared iced tea drinking southerners.

My car radio ended up on Radio-Canada yesterday by mistake. And the most beautiful song poured out of the speakers. A little bit of Googling revealed that the song was Café Robinson from Moncton singer Marie-Jo Thério. I am willing to guess that this is the single most beautiful thing to ever come out of Moncton.

You can hear a clip over at Archambault and learn more about Marie-Jo Thério (confusing Google translation thereof).

The CBC is reporting that Mary Lou Finlay is retiring as of November 30. Currently the host of the radio program As It Happens on CBC Radio One, Finlay is perhaps least well remembered for co-hosting The Journal with Barbara Frum starting in 1982.

The CBC Archives page on The Journal says that Finlay left the show after two years because producer Mark Starowicz “believed a 38-minute show was too short to justify two hosts.” I always thought she was the better of the two hosts, and I’ve always enjoyed her on As It Happens.

Here’s some audio to remember the good old days by.

From the blog of Piper:

In 1985 I was listening to music that would have earned me “cool points” like I now collect Shopper’s Drug Mart “Optimum Points.”

Dad sent along a link to this interesting Ancestry.com page that provides a map, from the 1920 U.S. Census, of all the Rukavina families in America. Also interesting to note their definition for the last name:

Croatian and Serbian: nickname from an augmentative form of ruka ‘hand,’ a nickname for someone with large hands.

This just in: Johnny reports sighting a new tea house, “Aing’s Tea House,” on Grafton St. opposite the Polyclinic. Is it possible that Charlottetown is going to become the most cosmopolitan city in the Maritimes?

I’ve had the website of the CBC here in Charlottetown bookmarked for a long, long time — perhaps seven years? And the site has gone through a lot of URLs since I hacked together the very primitive first version back in the mid-1990s:

• isn.net/cbc
• charlottetown.cbc.ca
• pei.cbc.ca
• cbc.ca/pei

Of those, all but the first one (which, confusingly, redirects to the Charlottetown Yacht Club) still work. Or at least they get you to the right place in the end. I finally decided today to update my bookmarks to use the cbc.ca/pei address for the page; I fully expect that a committee in Toronto will decide that this should become something crazy like cbc.ca/local/pei as soon as I do this.