Cycling to the industrial park for smoked salmon bagels

Regular readers will know well of our Saturday habit of having smoked salmon bagels for breakfast, a tradition that started many years ago at Kim Dormaar’s stand at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market.

During the most severe weeks of the lockdown, when nothing was open, I made do with ad hoc homemade bagels; in early July the market re-opened but, alas, without Gallant’s, our current bagel source.

However, Tyler and his crew are now opening their shop out past the bypass on Saturday mornings, and we’ve been driving out there every week, getting our bagels, and then clandestinely eating them whilst walking about the newly-all-outdoor market. 

This has meant, however, that we weren’t cycling to the market, a prime source of both exercise and father-and-son collegiality each week. This morning that changed, as I convinced Oliver that we had it in us to cycle all the way out to the end of beyond for our bagels.

We left home at 9:30 a.m., riding down Richmond Street to Cumberland, out the Confederation Trail past UPEI and the Charlottetown Mall; we left our bicycles near the Mount Edward Road intersection, as there’s no shoulder and lots of dangerous trucks on Mount Edward North of the bypass. The walk from there to Gallant’s was only a few minutes, and we arrived at 10:10 a.m.

Our bagels, ordered by phone once we were near, were ready to take with us. And as tasty as ever.

We ate the bagels on our way back to our bicycles–an egregious violation of protocol that Oliver generously allowed–and cycled (almost all downhill) to the market. After some market shopping we cycled down to Purity Dairy for milk and butter, to Receiver Coffee for bread (an effort we abandoned as the hipster lineup was out the door) and home, riding in the driveway at 11:30 a.m., exactly two hours after we’d left.

The total journey was about 12 km, so we’re getting closer to my end-of-season goal of seeing us cycle 20 km in a day.