It's been almost two weeks since I returned from a short visit to the opposite side of the continent. My husband, having pinched pennies on various work trips, gifted me with a trip to Prince Edward Island and St. Johns, Newfoundland, for my birthday. I'm still revelling in the memories.
These places are not top destination locations for friends from southern California. Most people travel from here to vacation in Cabo or Hawaii or maybe Europe. But friends who share my youthful love of all things Lucy Maud Montgomery understand my enthusiasm for this trip.
The trip was not long in planning. I complained one day shortly after my husband returned from his uncle's funeral about never getting to go anywhere by myself. We also happened to watch an episode of "Anne with an e" on Netflix and I said I wanted to go there. The next day he had a flight reserved for two weeks in the future. I felt a mite guilty for complaining. The third motivation for going was that my sister-in-law and her family have been living in St. Johns for almost four years, and we've talked about visiting. They are in the process of moving as I type, so time was expiring. I still regret that we never visited them when they lived in Darlington, England, and I am always grateful that we did take advantage of the MAC flights to go see them in Spain with all the kids ($165 for 8 of us to fly. Why we haven't tried to MAC flight more I'm not entirely sure...)
So I packed up in one of the kid's little rolling bags plus a backpack because I was concerned about exceeding the allowable size and weight of a carry on, and off I flew.
I should say I started my trip at a slow crawl through LA traffic. To save a few hundred dollars, I flew from LAX. The drive took an extra hour and a half because of midmorning traffic. Then security took another extra long time because people's bags had liquids or knives or something in them. It was not the easiest start to the morning, but I had planned ahead for the madness of traffic and congestion associated with getting to and out of LAX, and although I was uncomfortably close to showing up to the gate after boarding had begun, I was fortunate that the plane was little late.
Customs in Toronto was similarly bogged down. Lined up like cattle with a lot of Asian tourists we waited in a queue watching another line move ahead even though those travelers arrived after us. I remained calm but watching the other angry fliers around me. But I could have kissed the customs agent who showed up and beckoned all Canadian and US passport holders. I was through in no time.
I arrived in PEI at one a.m. The rental car agent greeted me by name, handed me the keys with quick directions to where the car was parked. When I came back in a minute later because I couldn't find it, she was gone. Good thing the car park wasn't large.
At almost 2 am, I arrived at my little motel that charged $43 a night. I was a bit worried it might be seedy. While it wasn't luxurious, it was quaint and tidy. The clerk was waiting for me in her pajamas. She handed me the key with a cheerful but whispered welcome and told me to check in with the office in the morning. I could have driven off at sunrise had I been of that mind, but the trust and friendliness of the people I'd met in the middle night were reassuring that I didn't have any need to worry about traveling alone.
Despite the length of the travel day, I was grateful for the air time to indulge in long reads and short note taking. I finished The Story Girl, which I had never read, and started Emily of New Moon, which I loved more than Anne at one point. I also dipped in and out of Bishop Barron's well-written, concise, insightful and entertaining Vibrant Paradoxes. Loved them all.
I awoke the next morning refreshed and ready to start exploring. First stop: Lucy Maud Montgomery's grave. It is not particularly notable. Even the plantings are unremarkable. But I love that she wanted to be buried in Cavendish, PEI, instead of Toronto, where she spent her last years. Where else had she been so happy?
Then I walked down a boardwalk to the beach to kill time before heading to the Green Gables house, which is actually L. M. Montgomery's cousins' house. The boardwalk was lovely. Giant lupines lined the path leading to sandstone cliffs that overlook the Gulf of St. Lawrence. They were blooming everywhere on the island. Miss Rumphius must have been there.
The Green Gables heritage place was equally beautiful with bounteous blooms. I think I came at just right time of year. The weather and sunshine and blooming flowers were glorious. All my favorites were in full bloom: Lilacs, bleeding hearts, Iris, forget-me-nots, apple trees, the lupine, a large variety of wildflowers. A taste of spring.
The heritage site was free in honor of the 150th anniversary of the confederation of Canada, but it wasn't crowded, even though a group of schoolchildren with a checklist of items to spy in the home preceded me. I was happy to listen to their teacher, whom they called "Madam" in the French manner, give them some reminders about Anne's adventures in this home that was the inspiration for the storybook version of Green Gables. One gap-toothed little boy asked me what a hair wreath was, and I told him it was a round decorative object. "Is that one?" he asked, pointing to the chamberpot. I pointed out the correct item, but I didn't explain what the pot was for.
After walking through the house twice (it is much smaller in real life than it was in my imagination), I walked along the woodland path designated "Lover's Lane." The new leaves were bright green and the forest floor was covered with forget-me-nots and bunchberry. I was the only one on the path, and was grateful for the silence. The spring leaves were enough to screen the golf course that borders the trail, so I could pretend to be walking in a bigger forest. Again, a gap exists between reality and imaginary woods, but on this day, everything was charming.
The rest of the day I spent travelling from place to place on the L. M. Montgomery tour map. From Green Gables, another trail leads through the "Haunted Woods" past the post office where she worked for some time (and where a friendly cat approached for a scratch. In honor of Montgomery's love for cats, I gave him one.) The trail ends at the site where Montgomery spent her youth, her grandparents the MacNeill's homestead. That actual house is not standing, but a small shop and a foundation of the home are open to tourists, even though relatives of the MacNeill's still live and work on the property. It is a tiny spot, but set in a grove of trees that became the friends the Anne loves. These places loomed much larger in my imagination.
After leaving this beautiful spot, I made a quick stop at "Avonlea Village," which is a little block of replication 19th century shops plopped down amidst the fields. I meant to get an ice cream cone, but the ice cream place wasn't open, only a few tourist shops. An old church that Montgomery had attended as a child had been moved there and restored. I moved on quickly to the house where Montgomery was born, a tiny little place that was crammed full of interesting memorabilia like her scrapbooks and pictures of her family and dresses and china. The lady in the front wanted to give me a tour, but a small tour group of women from China showed up after her first few lines of a memorized speech, so I toured myself. After reading multiple biographies of Montgomery before I left home, I felt I was familiar with the basic history of her life, which goes something like this:
In 1876 when L. M. Montgomery was a toddler, not quite two, her mother, a beautiful woman, died. Her father was an entrepreneur who wanted to travel to the western provinces of Canada for investment opportunities, so he left her with her strict, but loving, grandparents. He returned from time to time to see her, but eventually remarried and had a new family in the West. Montgomery went to school and spent time with cousins in Cavendish, where she had some adventures that were recreated in her stories. Her life was centered in a small farming community, where she began to write in her teens, publishing small stories in local papers and eventually in magazines. She saved enough money to attend a college in Charlottetown and then in Halifax, but after a couple years returned home to care for her grandmother. Aside from a trip west to visit her father when she was in her teens, she did not travel very much. She had a brief, tempestuous romance with a man who was a laborer and didn't like her writing, and thus not suitable for a husband, and also had a longer, dull relationship with a man whom everyone thought she would marry. She ended up marrying neither, but continued writing and earning a small bit of money publishing short stories and a few poems. She eventually was engaged to the Scottish minister of the Cavendish Presbyterian church, Ewan Macdonald, but their romance was not a passionate one. They married a couple of years after her first great success, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 when she was 32. People began writing her letters to tell her how much they loved the book, and she maintained an epistolary friendship with two gentlemen for many years. Both of them had families, too, but they wrote about world events, philosophy, religion, writing, and the life of the imagination.
Anne was such a great success, that Montgomery's publishers asked for more. She ended up writing twenty novels and hundreds of short stories, and was beloved by her readers. Her personal life was a bit more troubled, especially in her later years. She had two sons, one of whom became a successful doctor, but she was not an affectionate mother. Her husband suffered from depression and could not work in his later years. They had resettled in Toronto, but she always missed PEI. She was involved in a lawsuit with her publishing company eventually when she discovered they were treating her unfairly after her books were a success.The two world wars greatly upset her, and she died in 1942, on April 24th, in Toronto, after suffering from the flu and exhaustion from caring for her husband, who died a year and a half later.
The heaviness of her later years is not evident on the tour of homes where she spent her youth. I avoided following the Chinese touring group by stopping for ice cream and coffee at a tiny little shop with friendly keepers, and then visiting a lighthouse off a dirt road, which was only accessible by tromping down a path through the sea grass. For a time I sat on the deserted beach, enjoying the solitude and making a few notes on the trip before moving on to the home where Montgomery's aunt and uncle lived and where another Green Gables museum is now maintained in homage to the island's most famous writer. This home is where she was married. An orchard is maintained and a blue chest is on display for fans of The Story Girl, and visitors can take a carriage ride with "Matthew" around a second Lake of Shining Waters. Montgomery's wedding dress and a quilt she made as a girl and the glass bookshelf where her imaginary friends lived are also all on display. But a highlight is the walk through the woods and around to the lake. It is easy to imagine a young girl running happily around this farm, as content with the stories in her mind as with real children.
I ended up skipping a couple other sites on the tour - the school house where Montgomery taught a couple of years, the White Sands hotel, a train station - in order to look for another light house. That one turned out to be inaccessible on private property, so I drove a little farther just to look at the long bridge that crosses the Northumberland Strait to New Brunswick. The bridge is free from New Brunswick to PEI, but $47 back across. According to the coffee shop lady, islanders feel a little trapped. But based on my drive back across the island, passed well kept farms, over rolling fields, through a small woods, and by an oyster bed in brackish water, I felt I could live a long happy life there rarely leaving the island.
I meant to watch the sunset from the national park beach, so I ended my tour there, a spot which is apparently pretty popular for beach goers when the weather is a little warmer, but now was quiet enough that a bold little fox sat and watched me walk across the parking lot to the board walk leading to the beach. I strolled along the shore for a distance when I came across a group of bald eagles. (Google says a flock of eagles is a "convocation.") Here were five magnificent birds sitting at the mouth of a small waterway that lead to a little inland lake. They must have been fishing, but I never saw them catch anything, so it seemed rather that they were there just waiting for the sunset, too. I sat for a long time watching them. Occasionally one or another would take flight and circle around the lake before returning to a tree where there must have been a nest, but when I left some time later, after remembering that east coast sunsets are much later than west coast ones, they were all gathered again on the beach.
Instead I watched the sun set from the little breakfast balcony at my little motel, where I ate a sandwich and cheese and crackers for dinner. Perhaps I should have gone out to dinner for the local specialty, oysters, but I don't really like them, nor do I like eating alone in a restaurant. I was content to spend the last hour or so of the day reading on the big comfy bed without any worry that my nightlight was bothering anyone.
So it was a long, full day. It felt several hours longer than my days do normally, perhaps because I wasn't on anyone else's schedule, or perhaps because of some magic on the island. I don't know that I would enjoy solitary travel everywhere, but here I spent the day enchanted with everything. Spending a few days far afield from home in a place starkly different, yet nostalgically familiar, startles the soul awake. It was one of the best birthday presents ever.
A few - or many - photos. It's tempting to overshare, but I'm not a gifted photographer capable of capturing the charm of the place. I have more photos to come from the second half of my trip, which I spent with my sister-in-law and her family in St. Johns, Newfoundland.
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| Lupine along the trail |
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| Lilacs at the cemetary. |
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| Lucy Maud Montgomery and Ewan Macdonald's grave |
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| Sandstone cliffs overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence |
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| A lamppost in the woods. |
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| The young author full of hope. |
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| A glimpse of Green Gables through the lilacs |
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| Montgomery's typewriter |
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| Being a tourist |
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| Lover's Lane |
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| Forget-me-nots in profusion |
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| More views from Green Gables |
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| Anne's room. |
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| Ok, I admit I took a couple of selfies... |
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| In the haunted wood. |
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| The Macneill homestead foundation. |
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| Postcards of original covers of some of Montgomery's novels. I wanted them all. |
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| Letters and photos about the MacNeill homestead. |
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| A list of trees on the property. |
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| The friendly cat from the post office |
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| Montgomery's birthplace |
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| The little room where she was born. |
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| Mongomery around the time she published Anne of Green Gables. |
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| One of her first published poems |
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| A selection of biographies and collections of poetry. |
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| Cape Tyron |
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| I couldn't decide if the name of the minister, Rev. Pix Butt, was a joke. |
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| The glass windows where Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray lived |
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| Montgomery's childhood quilting |
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| The Lake of Shining Waters in the distance |
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| Bridge to New Brunswick |
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| An oyster bed is in the far left. |
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| A convocation of eagles on the shore |
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| The Silverwood Motel |
