Kinloch Cottage: 2016

Last September, we went on vacation with the intention of "finding the retirement place." This is an ongoing theme in our marriage. Every summer for the last fifteen to twenty years we've talked, planned, and/or looked.

Bob had rotator cuff surgery in the spring of 2015, so there would be no golf until the spring of 2016. This meant an Island vacation that would double as a serious property search. This would be the year—we could just feel it.

Using the family cottage near Naufrage as our base of operation (a perfect location ... no WiFi, hardly any cell service unless you sit upstairs in front of a window and no landline) we sat down to plot the expedition. Eastern Kings, for sure. Montague is definitely in the running. Morell is delightful. Souris has my heart ... so many memories, so many great people. Souris West. Rollo Bay. You could make a list as long as your arm, and every place on it would have something to offer.

And St. Peter's. Ah, St. Peter's. Twenty years ago, we considered a house there across from the Provincial Park. One big problem, though. We had no money, no time and three minor children. And ... we lived eight hundred miles away. It wasn't tenable, but it sure was a nice dream. So yes—St. Peter's has always been on the list.

Our first stop was Souris. We drove up and down the streets and wound up at, of course, The Main Street Mall. The bulletin board had lots of numbers on it, which we dutifully jotted down. We pressed our noses up against the Realtor's door, as well. Before we committed to a Realtor, though, we thought we'd do some more driving around. We headed east, checking out every nook and cranny in Eastern Kings, our vision narrowing down to anything that looked like a "For Sale" sign sticking up at the end of a lane. We backtracked back up the Souris Line Road and drove down to Rollo Bay. We turned left by the Rollo Bay Inn and came out by the old Platter House. We went down the New Zealand Road. Back on Rte. 16, we headed west and wound up in St. Peter's. We drove across the bridge and up to the Provincial Park. We saw the house we liked twenty years ago. It looked nice and was not for sale. We turned around and headed back to the family cottage.

As we crossed the bridge again, Bob said, "Let's take that left that goes by St. Peter's Church. Greenwich Road, I think."

"Okay," I said.

We ended up, of course, at the Greenwich Dunes National Park. Breathtaking, but nothing there for us. We turned around in the parking lot of the Visitor's Centre and went back the way we came. As we approached the end of the road, Bob said, "Let's take the right in front of the church. It swings around and comes out at the bottom of the hill and hooks up with 16."

"Okay," I said.

Can you see the "For Sale" sign?

And that's when we found it. It's called, officially, the Peter MacCallum House, but we didn't know that at the time. To us, it was this perfect house in a perfect spot and it had a faded "For Sale" sign nailed to the front deck. We parked the car and walked right up to the sign. Though not discernible from the road, there was the ghost of a phone number, so we called it. The number was disconnected. We wrote down the civic number and went back to our base of operation, the cottage. There wasn't much we could do except take a walk on the beach, eat dinner and talk about the house.

The next day, we decided to go check out Montague. It was a nice drive and Montague is a really pretty spot, but we decided that it was too far away from the family cottage. Thinking ahead, you know—we want to be closer when the kids and grandkids are up. Not too close, though.

We went to Souris for a nice meal at 21 Breakwater, our favorite restaurant. We had reservations for an early dinner, but there was some time to spare and the Visitor's Centre with its lovely WiFi was still open. We fired up the laptop and googled the civic number for the MacCallum House and voila! There was a listing on the PropertyGuys.com website. We emailed the owner through the website and went to dinner. (Side note: Pedro's pork chops are the best I have ever had. And yes. I had pork chops. Just because a person is on PEI doesn't mean they have to eat seafood ALL the time.)

Two days passed, but we never heard back from the owner of the house.

So we went to Morell, about 8 kilometers west of St. Peter's. It's another community on St. Peter's Bay, and would be a delightful village to live in, but we couldn't find anything. On our way back to the family cottage, though, we had to pass through—you guessed it—St. Peter's.

Bob said, "Let's stop at the Visitor's Centre and check our email. Maybe the guy got back to us."

I said, "Okay."

Mike letting us in.

We got to the Visitor's Centre (and if, dear Reader, you are thinking, "What ... are there a zillion Visitor's Centres on Prince Edward Island?" the answer would be "Absolutely there are!"), checked our email and were crestfallen to find there was still no response. I walked up to the information desk with my laptop, the PropertyGuys.com listing on the screen.

"Excuse me," I said to the lovely woman running the place. "Do you know anything about this place?"

"Sure. The fellow who owns it lives next to the hotel just over the bridge."

"You mean the hotel that's about three hundred yards away from this house?" I asked.

"That's exactly the one," she smiled.

A bedroom.

Hope rose in my heart. "You wouldn't happen to have a working phone number for him, would you? The one off the "For Sale" sign is out of order."

She grinned. "Even better. He's home. Just go knock on the door."

So that's what we did.

Mike and Helen turned out to be lovely people and, yes ... I will use the word lovely a LOT because it seems most everyone on the Island is lovely. We had a nice chat, they supplied us with a working phone number and told us to call in a couple of days. We did, and set up a time for Mike to show us the house.

Look, Ma! No rails!

In the meantime, we approached our dear friend, James. James is a terrific carpenter and I've known him for over forty years. Our families have cottages near each other, and we have been annoying James for many years with our plans and schemes to build or find a summer home. "James, what do you think of this?" and "James, what do you think of that?" and James has been patient and non-judgmental and probably really happy when we'd leave the Island so he could enjoy not being pestered for eleven months or so. But this time, James seemed to sense we were about to actually DO this, so he agreed to go with us when we looked at the house.

The pictures in this post were taken during that visit. James had an ominous air about him, looking into corners and holes with a flashlight and he and Bob even crawled into the basement. He said nothing as I chattered away to Mike, taking pictures.

We were there about a half hour. When it was time to leave, we said goodbye to Mike and thanked him for the tour. We got in the car and James said, "Well, I think it's a tear-down."

Living room with view of cellar via heat grate in floor.

"But, James," I protested. "The lines are so straight!"

"Straight lines or not, it's rough. Quite rough. I think we should go talk to Jerry."

Uh oh, I thought. When James says "rough", he doesn't mean "rustic." He means, "needs a shitload of work." And when he says "quite rough," he means, "Well beyond a shitload of work." And Jerry, as it turns out, is another lovely Island person and is the proprietor of G&P Trucking and Excavation, which happens to be less than a minute away from where we're standing, right behind (you guessed it) the Visitor's Centre. They also do a lot of demolitions.

Look! There's even a garage!

So, we went and talked to Jerry. As we drove away, I thought I saw the house looking at me; pleading with me.

Jerry agreed with James, knew exactly how much it would cost to tear the place down, and even sympathized with my distress over demolishing it. Kind of like a really compassionate dentist who has just told you that, yes, it's a tough thing, but your tooth has to come out.

With all this in mind, we made our way back east to the family cottage to think about what kind of offer we would make for the house. My jubilation of the previous days was flattened. "Quite rough" was NOT what I wanted to hear.

I still don't want to tear the place down.

To be continued (because this is, after all, a saga.)