Oh, I do love me a good seafood restaurant. Perhaps that’s because I’m a native of an island nation, no part of which is more than an hour or so away from the sea, so when Dad was home on leave from Nigeria, fish was always fresh, plentiful, and on the menu. Or perhaps it’s because I spent most of my first decade living just south of the Sahara, in a place where salt-water fish was simply unavailable, and fresh-water fish was largely suspect. Whatever the case, I really started to get my fish fix on in 1967, when I was twelve years old and my family traveled, for the first time, to Canada’s smallest province, the place known to the indigenous population as “Abegweit,” (meaning “cradled in the waves”), which was called by the French settlers, Isle St. Jean, but which has been known to us, since Confederation in 1867, as Prince Edward Island.

We had other goals on that long-ago trip–we visited Expo 67 in Montreal and explored a bit of New Brunswick on the way over, and Maine on the way back. We weren’t terribly well-off, so we camped on our travels, and had rented a small beach cottage in Cavendish (at Shining Waters Lodge) for our stay on the Island, which I think was about ten days. Confining my large (physically speaking) and boisterous parents, my sister, who was six at the time, and myself, in any sort of close quarters was always a dicey proposition, but we did so well that, three years later, we returned to PEI, and then repeated the annual performance for several subsequent years of idyllic and sun-drenched summers. By that time, we’d bought a 19′ trailer, and augmented the family by one (my brother, born in 1968), and added a dog, and on occasion, a friend, so space was still pretty tight, and we were still on a shoestring budget. But we managed, and I’m glad because the memories of those many years are totally worth the price of admission.