PEI - Bottle Houses...

After my trip to Howard Finster's Paradise Garden (go here, here & here to see more...I obviously loved that place!) I became obsessed with bottle houses and sculptures and the like.  Ya'll know how much I love outsider art and this has become one of my favorite mediums of it.  I had a bottle tree years ago and I did a border of bottles in my garden (kind of like this) but they don't have nuthin' on the Prince Edward Island Bottle Houses we visited last month.  Holy gaboley!

Over 25 000 recycled bottles ingeniously cemented together to create the Bottle Houses, a must-see tourist attraction situated in Cap-Egmont, Prince Edward Island, Canada. They were built by the late Édouard T. Arsenault. He gave birth to these houses after having received a postcard of a glass castle from his daughter in 1979, an attraction she had visited on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. That same summer, he started collecting bottles from his community, mostly from a local restaurant, community dance halls, friends, relatives and neighbours. He spent the winter in the basement of his home, cleaning bottles, removing labels and dreaming of his project. In the spring of 1980, at the age of 66, he began his construction, a mere hobby yet. As his six-gabled structure was taking form, visitors started coming in. Impressed by his work, they encouraged him to continue and to advertise it as a tourist attraction. And so, in 1981, the first Bottle House was open to the public.

From 1980 to the spring of 1984, he cleverly cemented over 25,000 bottles of various shapes, sizes and colours, into three fantasy-like buildings. - source

Oh, and just a warning that Brady will be making goofy faces in many of the pictures.

Not pictured are some of the MOST BEAUTIFUL GARDENS IN THE WORLD.  Seriously, these layouts put many botanical gardens I've visited to utter shame.  There was even a helpful identification guide so you could find out names, zones, medicinal purposes, etc, for all the plants and flowers.  The pond picture is just a teeny tiny smidge of how big and full the gardens were.  Unfortunately, my battery died before I could get some good shots of my favorite finds.  I was super po'd but, hey, camping is awesome despite the lack of power for stuff like cameras and phones.  Unplugged all the way...

We met quite a few nice folks while tooling around the place.  One of them, a very hip Grandma from Toronto, told me about seeing the bottle cap house in Siberia.  You can see it via the interwebs right here.  I've put it on my 'list of places to go for really weird roadside attractions' and Brady is giving me lots of side-eye about it.  Whatever.  Goals!