Our time on Prince Edward Island this week was cut short by the threat of Hurricane Fiona, but we did manage to enjoy its red sand beaches, a walk in the capital of Charlottetown, and a visit to the Anne of Green Gables house.
If you’re a fan of the 1908 book Anne of Green Gables and its author Lucy Maud Montgomery, this is the place to visit. We started our day on Wednesday by driving just a few miles down the road to the Anne of Green Gables Heritage Place. The house and visitor center are located near the small town of Cavendish on the north central coast of the island, where Montgomery grew up. The house belonged to a cousin of hers from the Macneill family. Montgomery was a frequent visitor and the charming house and surrounding woods became the imaginary model for the home that took in an 11-year-old red-headed orphan from Halifax.
The Canadian government has refurbished the house with green shutters and trim to match the house Montgomery describes in the book. It has also been furnished with period pieces and the rooms arranged to reflect the life of Anne’s little family. You can see Marilla Cuthbert’s room featuring the broach and shawl from one of the more memorable chapters in the book. Park staff inside the house did a wonderful job of relating the objects in the house to the book as well as the author’s life. From the house we took two lovely walks in the nearby woods that were favorites of both Montgomery and her fictional teen—the Haunted Woods and Lover’s Lane.
Elizabeth and I learned a lot at the visitor’s center about Montgomery’s life and her famous book. The manuscript for Anne of Green Gables was rejected by five publishers before being accepted and becoming an international bestseller. One wall display shows translated versions of the book in 40 different languages. I found it telling that several of the translated works—including those in Russian, Romanian, Czech, Serbian and Ukrainian—were not published until the 1990s, after communism ended in those places. Apparently, even the story of a lively, adventurous and imaginative young girl living on a private farm on a small island was too much for the communist censors!
Just down the road from the Heritage Place is the Cavendish Cemetery, where Montgomery and her husband are buried. We noticed that many of the headstones bore Scottish names, including many with the names of her Macneill relatives. The copy editor in me did spot one interesting anomaly on the joint headstone for Montgomery and her husband, Rev. MacDonald. (See if you can spot it in the photo.) It speaks well of Montgomery’s character and modesty that her headstone is not one made for a world-famous author but for the faithful wife of a Presbyterian minister.
That afternoon we took advantage of a break in the weather to drive 40 minutes to the provincial capital and port city of Charlottetown. It’s a pleasant city of 35,000 with a boardwalk and a pedestrian shopping district called Victoria Row. Elizabeth spent time in the Northern Watters Knitwear and Tartan Shop where she admired the skillful work of the employees on the knitting machines at the back of the store. The boardwalk along the waterfront connects up to the Irish Settlers Memorial, dedicated to the thousands of Irish immigrants who came to the island, and further up to Victoria Park.
During our time at the campsite, we strolled the distinctive beaches of Prince Edward Island National Park. The beach sand, rocks, and small cliffs are all of a reddish hue and the beach is strewn with small, flat rocks ideal for skipping–if only there had been any still waters nearby! We walked the beach our first evening there as the sun was setting, and I took a longer walk this morning as the sun was rising. For photos, I experimented with a few different iPhone settings, such as “Vivid” and “Dramatic.” If that resulted in images a bit more idealized than reality, that only seems fitting for the idyllic setting of Anne of Green Gables! (Less dramatic but just as beautiful in its own way was the rolling green farmland of PEI–corn and potato fields, giant rolls of hay, and cows grazing in pastures.)
* * *
We had planned to stay on PEI until Friday, but the campground told us that they would be closing today (Thursday) out of “an abundance of caution” at the approach of the storm expected to arrive by the weekend. So we hitched up this morning and drove back across the 8-mile-long Confederation Bridge and on to our current campsite in central New Brunswick. Tomorrow we plan to drive across the border into Maine and then make our way home over the next week.
We’ve loved our time in Canada and highly recommend that you consider a visit. If you have your Covid shots and a passport, crossing the border is no problem. Gasoline and other items seemed a bit more expensive than in the states, even with the strong dollar, but not so much that it should put anybody off. You also need to convert from metric and Celsius to American here, but that’s true of virtually everywhere else you might go in the world. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about Canada other than it’s a beautiful place and friendly to American tourists and we’re glad we visited.
Daniel Griswold's Blog 
We toured many of these places this fall. Our first time on PEI. We did a self guided bike trip for 11 days and saw lots. I am a huge fan of L.M. Montgomery and the Road to Avonlea series and so loved all those stops! We also noted that her headstone was that of a faithful wife not a successful author with loads of books and hundreds of stories published. Bernie
We left exactly 1 week before Fiona hit — think it was a good thing you left when you did. Bernie