Sunday 7 June 2026--Gray day, and a bit wet early on. I stop at a Tim's outside town for a bagel and coffee. Then I'm off on the hour-long drive to Souris, across eastern PEI's gentle pastoral landscape. Stop at an Irving station to top up my tank; who knows how much fuel will cost where I'm going. Then it's the long wait in the ferry queue, and the protracted process of boarding several hundred vehicles onto MV Madeleine II. Nearly all of them have Québec plates...les Îles de la Madeleine seem to be virtually unknown to the rest of the world. That's perfectly okay with me.

I like ferry trips, and I've taken quite a few. Some are mere conveniences--crossing Halifax harbor, say, or the St Lawrence at Quebec City--while others are indispensable lifelines without which island communities could not exist. As a traveler, I love the slow ride, but for non-tourist traffic, the ferry is a bottleneck. It's not lost on me that routes are replaced by bridges, causeways, or tunnels any time it's deemed feasible. The Confederation Bridge, Skye, Øresund, are all crossings I've made that replaced ferries, as are virtually all river crossings, when you get down to it. I've benefited from the increased ease and speed of travel...but as Joni sang, something's lost and something's gained. I still dream of the hauntingly gorgeous half-hour trip from Leirvík to Klaksvík in the Faroe Islands, long ago rendered obsolete by a tunnel.

Places like the Magdalen Islands and Shetland and the Outer Hebrides will never be served by bridges or tunnels, and so I get my boat rides here and there. One can hardly fail to notice, however, the love/hate relationship islanders have with the ferry services they depend on. Appreciation for the large sums of money spent by governments to subsidize service is often obscured by a fog of frustration with the particulars. The folk of the Hebridean Islands of Scotland, for example, seem to be perpetually at war with Caledonian MacBrayne, who nonetheless make their island lifestyles possible. It's much the same here. I heard a fair bit of grumbling about CTMA, the corporation that runs this route, the last time I visited the Magdalens. Since then, the MV Madeleine has been scrapped, a brand new vessel commissioned, and the Madeleine II purchased to cover the gap until the new ship is ready. Curiously enough, this vessel, built in Spain, was meant for a route between Sweden and Åland. That contract was canceled when construction lagged, as it always seems to do. When it was finally finished, it served briefly in the Canary Islands before being sold to the province of Québec, which leases it to CTMA. Construction of the new vessel, the MV Jean-Lapierre, was assigned to the Davie shipyard in Lévis, near Quebec City. An early timetable had it being put into service sometime this year. Unsurprisingly, that is not going to happen. The project is now on hold for some obscure reason, and delivery is at least five years away. The Madeleine II is expected to be out of service for a period of scheduled maintenance in 2028, so something will have to be done--another round of musical berths, perhaps. The one certainty is that there will be unhappy islanders.

The passage takes about five hours. The atmosphere is misty, which dulls the sense of anticipation that is typical on a trip like this. I nap in a lounge chair, rather than taking my usual post on the sun deck to scan the horizon. Entry Island slips by nearly unnoticed; there's nothing much to see until we are pulling into port at Cap-aux-Meules. I nonetheless feel a level of excitement at making my return to these isles, after so long away. I'm thinking we've arrived quite a bit ahead of schedule, but waiting in my car belowdecks, I realize that the time needed for the lengthy process of disembarkation has been factored in.

Knowing that arrival would be late in the day, I tried to book a motel in the center of Cap-aux-Meules, but there was no vacancy. Settled instead for Château Madelinot, a half a mile or so north of town. It's a bit of a splurge, but the location is good, the room is comfortable, and there's a highly-rated restaurant in the house, which makes my first evening here easy. Dinner is even more of a splurge...it's very good, but I'm not sure it's $120 good. I resolved ahead of time not to think too much about it.