Cafe Maplethorpe Blog :: PEI Restaurant

We cooked and served at Maplethorpe right up to December 23, then dropped everything and rushed to the Halifax airport to open our Christmas gift—a week ‘s vacation in sunny Southern California. 2008 was a busy year for both the bed and breakfast and the café, and we had earned a change.

And what a change! Every suburban community has 200,000 people or more—almost half again more than then entire year-round population of PEI. Hundreds of identical Southern California communities along the beach, millions of people connected by a crazy patchwork of freeways. It sure isn’t University Avenue in Charlottetown, people.

Southern California Beaches

California Style

To blend in with the locals we were required to wear tiny shorts paired with furry knee boots and start every morning at a Starbucks. We elbowed our way through all the crowded tourist sites and gorged ourselves on Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican food, washed down with good California wine. It was all great, except one thing. We wanted to visit a bookstore called the “Cooks Library,” billed as “the place” where the hottest LA chefs go to research new recipes and purchase exotic cookbooks. I deliberately packed light on the trip out just in case I needed to drag home half a suitcase of new cookbooks from this place. We spent a morning finding it, then took another half hour finding a parking space within a mile of the shop, only to read the handwritten sign on the door that said the store was closed for a week.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe in some ironic twist they had read about Café Maplethorpe and were on Prince Edward Island right now standing on our porch reading the handwritten note on our front door…

Vacation was just about over. We watched the New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York’s Times Square on the television at 8:00 pm local time and went to bed in anticipation of our early flight back to Halifax the next morning. The week had gone by fast.

Back to Reality

The LA to New York portion of the return flight went well. Flying reminds us how anchovies feel, all packed on top of each other in those tiny cans. We got a bad sensation when we got off the plane in New York and surveyed the departure gate monitor for our Halifax flight. It wasn’t listed. As we soon found out, the Halifax airport was closed due to high winds and snow—blizzard conditions.

I asked the nearest gate agent what we were to do and she directed us to go to the gate printed on our boarding passes even if it wasn’t listed on the departure screen. Skipping past the long and ugly confrontation between the pathetic, stranded passengers and the cold-hearted airline representatives, we found ourselves several hours later on a flight to Bangor, Maine—the closest place we could get to Prince Edward Island without sleeping in a New York airport terminal for the next 3 days.

Welcome Home to PEI

I am by nature a stoic person, but my feet started to get cold in New York when we walked out on the tarmac to board the commuter airplane. They stayed cold during the flight and got even colder in Bangor where the windchill was minus about a hundred degrees. (“That’s Fahrenheit, dear, not that wimpy Celsius you people have in Canada.”) I think my husband slept on the motel room floor that night to guarantee that I didn’t touch him with my feet. Despite extra socks and a hot meal, my feet stayed frozen all the way to Prince Edward Island aboard the Acadian Bus Lines coach that brought us home the next day. Exactly one week later to the day, my feet are still cold.

When my feet are cold, I am miserable, and I can’t think of anything except warming them up. Hot baths, hot soup, hot tea, wool socks—I’ve tried them all. In case you’re wondering, it really isn’t that cold on Prince Edward Island, either. Although there is snow on the ground, the temperatures are just a few degrees below freezing. Before Christmas I could practically go outside barefoot in this weather.

Lessons Learned

I blame it on that week in California. When you live in a cold place, it is just too much of a shock to your body to go to a really warm spot for a week then immediately return to the cold. As wonderful as it seems at the time, it is just too confusing for all of the blood vessels, capillaries and internal organs. Maybe I will write a letter to the Island’s Chief Medical Officer and suggest a Provincial ban on all of those Spring Break trips from Charlottetown to Cuba, the Dominican and Florida. It could save a lot of Islanders the misery and expense that I’ve recently endured.

I know that next time we plan a winter trip south to warm up, we’ll be thinking of sunny southern North Dakota or perhaps Upstate New York. We’ll probably drive.