Taking Penny to the Maggies

Let me start by explaining the title before we tell you about the trip we've got planned. Last Fall, we bought a little used travel trailer. It's a Prolite Mini, so Marlene affectionately named her, Penelopy Prolite, or Penny for short. We're hoping that  in coming years she'll be our vehicle for many retirement trips in Canada and the USA. So far, we've taken her on a couple of short trips to work out the bugs, and help us find our camping stride, but we expect this trip to be a little more adventurous.

Now for the rest of the title, "the Maggies". This is the tourist-friendly name for the Magdalen Islands, or as they're called in French, the Iles de la Madeleine. They're an archipelago or cluster of islands in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River that belong to the province of Quebec.

The travel plan is to take a couple of days to arrive in PEI, then take a five hour ferry ride to the Magdalen Islands where we'll camp for a week, before we retrace our steps.

Anticipated challenges include:

We're pulling Penny with a 2.4 Litre four cylinder Jeep Compass. On our earlier trips, we were a little light on power when climbing long hills and driving into headwinds. We're not expecting a lot of hills, but the winds could be another story.

The Island residents are mainly Francophone. To arrange our campsite reservation, I used my 10 words of French, while the receptionist was using her 10 words of English. Given that we both did our best, Marlene and I are just hoping we have a place to stay when we get there.

Camping in September can be wonderful if the weather is good, but cold and wet is something else. To add to the weather mix, apparently it's always windy on the Islands situated in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. We've emailed a weather request to Mother Nature, but she has yet to respond.

If you've never been to the Maggies, come and take a look through our camera lens. If you have been there, come along and relive the experience.

We're taking our hiking boots, bicycles, shorts, and of course, Penny to the Maggies.

Click here for the next story in the series:
http://travellingwithsteveandmarlene.blogspot.ca/2015/09/slowing-down-in-old-quebec.html