When Islanders found something fun to do during this ongoing pandemic, they did plenty of it.
Baking, bicycling, and bashing a little white ball around were among some of the more notable activities that were quite trendy in 2020 on the East Coast.
Professional baker Glenda Landry, 68, of Stratford, P.E.I. describes the “unbelievable’’ number of people that turned to baking bread, muffins, and pies - among other tasty creations - over the past nine months.
“What I observed is the pandemic gave people the gift of time,’’ she says.
Many ovens were getting unusually heavy use once the East Coast, like the rest of the world, ground to a halt in mid-March.
Landry heard Islander after Islander voicing pure joy at suddenly having the time to rediscover the art of good, old-fashioned home cooking.
“People were just thrilled,’’ she says.
“They were making their mothers’ old recipes again. They remembered that they could still cook – they absolutely could cook.’’
Landry was delighted seeing so many people “finding the dining room table again,’’ rather than eating fast food fare on the way to a child's hockey game or while returning home with an offspring from a ballet lesson.
“I just saw an incredible shift back to the way our Island life used to be,’’ she says.
“Mostly the thing about cooking and baking is it is immediate…you get the result right away.’’
Landry needed to look no further than neighbouring grocery stores back in March and April to realize baking was back with a vengeance. On average, she had to go to three or four stores to find flour. In those first two months of lock-down, she needed to drive from Stratford to Souris to get her hands on some yeast. Landry even took to Facebook to offer baking lessons.
However, she estimates less than half of the people who plunged passionately into baking in April and May kept at it once everything started opening up again on P.E.I.
“People gave that a whirl,’’ she says.
“It was kind of nice, but onwards and upwards…it was a great time while it lasted…I was glad that people discovered it or rediscovered it.’’
Hitting the greens
Golfers, on the other hand, never seemed to grow tired of hitting the links over a long season that stretched well into November.
Courses across the province opened in early May, with public health-approved protocols put in place.
Golfers turned out in droves, escaping cabin fever to play 18 holes in the great outdoors. Enthusiasm to hit the ball never seemed to wane over the next half dozen months or so.
Even before the Atlantic Bubble opened P.E.I.’s borders to allow tourists from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland to literally come play on our Island, locals kept many courses busy.
Belvedere Golf Club in Charlottetown, the oldest course in the province dating back to 1902, saw a whopping increase in play, recording roughly 42,000 rounds in 2020 – a jump of more than 10,000 rounds from a typical year.
Jeff Affleck, operations manager at Belvedere, says golfers that had been restricted to their home for the better part of two months were simply chomping at the bit to get out on the course.
It wasn't just familiar faces making their way to Belvedere, either.
“We saw many, many new golfers – people that have never played before and people that had given up the game for an extended period of time,’’ says Affleck.
CJ Keliher of Charlottetown, P.E.I. certainly got in more than his share of swings. With the pandemic halting his work at Island Gymnastics Academy, the avid golfer started beating a regular path to Belvedere.
“I got off to a prolifically more profound start than usual,’’ he says.
“It gives you something to look forward to all the time.’’
The Island Gymnastics Academy was completely shut down for about 90 days due to the pandemic, but even when it came back in July, it did so only in a reduced capacity.
For Keliher, that was simply an invitation to keep golfing as much as he could. That turned out to be a dizzying 193 rounds of golf, which included at least 50 days where he played two rounds.
“Even when I did go back to work, I was fortunate enough to plan my work schedule around my golf,’’ he says.
Big bike boom
The pandemic also got many Islanders pedaling, particularly when the weather improved in April, but options to do things did not.
“We had a big boom at the beginning,’’ says Dayan Gonzalez of MacQueen’s Bike Shop in Charlottetown.
“We were very busy even though we didn’t have the tourism sector.’’
Gonzalez said quite a few people brought in bicycles for repair that likely had not spun on the pavement in several years.
He feels the strong embrace of cycling this year will not be a short, well, cycle.
“It’s a shift in mentality that is happening…the healthier lifestyle,’’ says Gonzalez.
“I don’t see us (MacQueen’s Bike Shop) slowing down.’’
