jeanives: Winding down

My gym membership expired last week and rather than renew I tromped all over Charlottetown. Jim has had an Achilles tendon irritation so my walks have been solo and what I re-learned is that the old part of Charlottetown is compact. You can walk almost anywhere in about 20 minutes, not counting the burbs of course which sprawl as they do everywhere.

For context, we were 3 blocks from Confederation Centre and 4 from Province House. All the restaurants, coffee shops, amenities of every description including “my” gym are in that midtown area.

I went into the building that Used to be Prince of Wales College and found a photo of the 1930 intercollegiate rugby champions in the front hall. My father, age 15, was on the team; while the printing is faded, the names I could decipher were all very familiar.

Dad, upper right

Our apartment was on the east side of the street and the house of Betsy’s and my teens is on the west side. Of the 8 houses on that side, one is a museum, one is an inn, one is being converted to a B&B, one is apartments, and 4 are single family homes. Those four houses are circa 1945-50 and modestly sized while the conversions are all the beautiful but huge and drafty Victorian mansions.

And then there is this oddity going up at the end of the street...

While you might get all googly-eyed about the gorgeous architecture, that first house I owned had 11 foot ceilings on the first floor, 10 on the second, and 9 on the third in a cold climate. My grandparents had boarders on the third floor and when that era passed, the stairwell was closed off with heavy drapes backed by blankets. The house has 2x4 construction with newspaper for insulation and single pane windows and the fireplaces burned coal as did the furnace before the Grands retro fitted it for oil. We put on storm windows in the fall and took them off in the spring and it took 3000 gallons of oil to heat the place.
There are hundreds of viability conversions all over town: inns, vacations rental apartments, B&Bs, or long term apartment conversions.

Not a wise investment opportunity despite having a lot of bolts holding it together; a distinct bulge!

It is October 10 and we are down to 10 days left in the Maritimes and we have moved out of the apartment and are in Nova Scotia for Thanksgiving weekend.

Today we went to Grandparents' Day at Kings-Edgehill School, the co-ed amalgamation of my alma mater and Kings College School (oldest independent school in the Commonwealth apparently). Rachel and Jillian started at KES this year as day students, about an hour from home for them. The school is a dramatic cultural and social change for them but they seem to be liking it. Hilarious is that the girls’ uniform is almost identical to the one we wore in the mid-sixties at Edgehill: a knee length tunic over a white or blue shirt, tie, dark knee socks, and “sober” shoes.

Different is that when I was there the two schools, Kings and Edgehill, were on separate hills and only very occasionally did the twain meet.