“Anne of Green Gables” is a book by Lucy Maud Montgomery published in 1908 about a precocious red-haired girl growing up in rural Prince Edward Island.  You may know nothing about the book or its fictional character before you arrive on Prince Edward Island, but you certainly will by the time you leave, because Anne is everywhere - from the official Anne of Green Gables souvenir shop to the many boutiques selling Anne-related arts and crafts in Charlottetown; from the Green Gables house shown here to Montgomery’s nearby home in Cavendish, an hour’s drive north of Charlottetown; and from the annual Lucy Maud Montgomery Festival to the musical theater productions, to the Avonlea theme park, to the Anne dolls available in many retail shops throughout the island.

Every year, twice as many people visit the Green Gables house in Cavendish than live on all of Prince Edward Island.  The book, which spawned many sequels, has been published in at least thirty countries in at least seventeen languages and is believed to have sold over fifty million copies.  The Japanese have a particular affinity for the book: it became required school reading, spawned a theme park and schools and houses, and led many there to make pilgrimages to Prince Edward Island.

Green Gables belonged to cousins of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s grandfather; the house and its environs provided the setting for the book.  Montgomery lived not here, but at her grandparents’ home nearby; that farmhouse, no longer standing, is where she wrote the book.  This is one of the bedrooms upstairs in the Green Gables house.

Near Cavendish, along the north shore of Prince Edward Island, is the little fishing village of North Rustico.  This is one of the more distinctive lighthouses in Atlantic Canada; it has some rather unusual characters living nearby as well.

A unique multimedia art exhibition on display in a North Rustico trailer park near the lighthouse.

A fisherman’s shack in North Rustico, constructed half a bubble off plumb.

On another day I traveled to the western part of Prince Edward Island, to Région Évangéline.  This is the Cape Egmont Lighthouse; though lit, the true warning beacon is generated by the tall radio tower nearby.  The island is known for its unusually red dirt, and souvenir shops even sell t-shirts and shorts colored to look like they've been stained from rolling around on the beaches of red sand.

Rolls of baled hay, another common sight throughout Prince Edward Island, in Région Évangéline.  The houses I saw along the way here were wonderful - huge and traditional with porches wrapping around three quarters of some of them, seemingly ready for both long winters and pleasant summers.

The Church of Our Lady of Mont Carmel (Église Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel) is a stunning sight along the flat, sparsely populated coast of Région Évangéline; the sea is right behind the church.  A wedding was taking place here this day; no doubt they got wet on their way out from the huge storms moving in.  Région Évangéline is the largest Acadian region on Prince Edward Island; the residents speak both French and English.  The Acadian flag, noted on the earlier Cape Breton page - the blue, white, and red French flag with a gold star in the blue field symbolizing the Virgin Mary - is flown everywhere around here; in fact, this is the place where the Acadian flag was adopted, at a convention in 1884.

The graveyard beside the church, with tombstones all in French.  The Northumberland Strait in the background separates Prince Edward Island from New Brunswick, about fifteen miles away.  The Acadians - the French who settled in the Maritimes during the 1600s - first came to this area from Nova Scotia in the 1720s.  After British military victories against the French in the 1750s, the Acadians in Nova Scotia were deported, and some of them came to this area.

St. Mary’s Church in Indian River.  Though somewhat east of Région Évangéline, this church was the venue for a traditional Acadian music performance on this evening.  Suzie LeBlanc, a soprano who usually sings renaissance and baroque music, also has two Acadian albums to her credit, and as part of the summer-long Indian River Festival here, she and her ensemble performed the newest, “Chants d’Acadie: Tout passe”, in its entirety - a most excellent concert, and a most excellent CD as well.  The intensity of those storms I mentioned earlier made the first half of the performance a bit more exciting than intended, but during intermission, the sun began to set below the rain clouds, allowing me to run outside to take this photograph just before the concert’s second half.

Midway along the southern coast between Région Évangéline and Charlottetown is Victoria, a tiny fishing village that also has art galleries, shops for antiques and quilts and chocolates, and even its own repertory theater.  In other words, this village of two hundred has an arts community.  And it has a lighthouse. 

Another lazy day in Victoria.  The village setting is indeed serene, which is apparently what drew the artists and craftspeople here, but unless one is spending the night to see a play, there is little to hold a visitor’s attention here.

Lobster traps, boat, and lighthouse, suspiciously placed in a way that guarantees a good photograph.  I stopped here on my way off Prince Edward Island to my next destination, which turns out not to be the best way to see Victoria; it’s better to spend the night in order to get sunset and sunrise shots along the water, which I’ll have to save for another trip.