Avonlea

Even today, Prince Edward Island’s Cavendish is a small community mostly made up of motels and cottages that are rented to tourists who come to take the Anne of Green Gables journey. There’s one general store, restaurants and a lot of tourist shops along Cavendish Road. Just off this road is a cluster of historical buildings in Avonlea.

Green Gables Heritage Place

This site in PEI’s Cavendish was dedicated to Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, one of Canada’s most famous authors. In 1911 before Lucy turned two, her mother died, and she lived with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish where she grew up. She completed a teaching degree in Charlottetown and later a literature course at Dalhousie University in Halifax while teaching. When her grandfather died, she gave up teaching and returned to Cavendish to care for her grandmother and help her run the post office.

(Featured photo: Anne of Green Gables in different languages)

Summerside

By the wide Summerside Harbour was the six-and-a-half-kilometre Bay Walk that passed the marina and several tourist shops around Spinnakers’ Landing. Beyond the shops a search and rescue vessel was moored. 

PEI’s Confederation Trail

When railways were abandoned on Prince Edward Island in 1989, Islanders gravitated to the idea of using the routes for hiking and cycling. The main route extended from Elmira in the east to Tignish in the west—a distance of nearly three hundred kilometres. As well, branch trails extended out to other areas such as Charlottetown, Souris, and Montague adding over a hundred kilometres to the trail.

Canoe Cove

A short distance south of Charlottetown was Canoe Cove. Mi’kmaq once brought British soldiers ashore by canoe, hence its name. Later the region had been settled by Scottish newcomers in the 1700s who farmed and fished. But that was not what drew me to this quiet location. It was the cliffs.

Prince Edward Island National Park

This national park on the northern side of the island was established in 1937 to protect the beaches and sand dunes as well as the region’s wetlands and marshes. The twenty-seven square kilometre park faced the Gulf of St Lawrence and consisted of mostly access to its many sandy beaches. But there were some trails away from the dunes.

Prince Edward Island’s eastern tip

I drove on a rainy morning heading to P.E.I.’s East Point lighthouse. As I drew nearer the rain clouds lifted and the sight of the lighthouse of 1867 against a blue sky was breathtaking. A climb up the precarious lighthouse steps offered a view of the surrounding coastline where in 1882, a British war ship had run aground on the offshore reef. A year later the lighthouse was moved to the tip of the point where it stands today.

Charlottetown

In 1720 the French arrived in what later became Charlottetown and placed guns at the entrance to the harbour against British attacks. But after the British defeated the French in Louisbourg the region came under British control despite French and Mi’kmaq resistance. A century later after the American Civil War, the Maritime provinces feared an attack from the Americans and began talks on uniting. By the end of the conference the Maritime provinces had created the foundation for a united Canada. Not long after the conference, a fire devastated four blocks of buildings. The shanty-like buildings were gone and replaced with brick homes, stores, and warehouses that still stand today.

The Ovens Park

Twenty kilometres south of Lunenburg was The Ovens Park. The seventy-three hectare site had once been known as Indian Ovens. This was probably due to a Mi’kmaq legend about a man who entered a cave in his canoe and emerged in Annapolis on the other side of Nova Scotia.

Lunenburg

Between 1630 and 1680 Acadians settled in the area where they survived by farming and logging as well as trading with the Mi’kmaq. Like many locations in Nova Scotia, the British followed a century later. They put pressure on the Acadians to declare allegiance to the British Crown. Additionally, tension between the British and the Mi’kmaq began to undermine the French community so that by 1753 only one Acadian family remained. The English encouraged protestant settlers to the area who began farming, but soon found fishing more lucrative. Fishers travelled as far as the Grand Banks catching cod that were plentiful at that time. During the prosperous eighteen and nineteenth centuries, beautiful homes were built. In 1862 the area west of Old Town was developed to make way for an increasing population. In less than twenty years the area doubled in size and became known as New Town.