Anne of Green Gables and So Much More!

Nikki Layton
Dec 27, 2024
3 min read

Sept 26-27, 2023

The first thing for people to know is that she is not a real person. She is a fictional character from a children's novel, Anne of Green Gables, written in 1908 by Lucy Maud Montgomery. The story is about an 11-year-old orphan, named Anne Shirley, who was mistakenly sent to siblings, Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert, who were looking to adopt a boy to assist with the family farm in the fictional town of Avonlea, Prince Edward Island. Much of the book is based on Montgomery’s experience visiting family in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island (PEI). The home in which Montgomery grew up and wrote the novel is now a museum. The property of her home in Cavendish makes up the backdrop for the characters’ farm and home. As such, fans of the Anne of Green Gables book and others written by Montgomery travel to this remote region of PEI by the thousands every year. The novel is so popular that it has been translated into 36 different languages and this means that the tourists that visit this area are from all over the world.

We visited the museum, Montgomery’s home, walked the grounds of her family farm, and even walked the local streets, trails, and the amazing beach that became part of this internationally famous story.

Although the Anne of Green Gables home and museum were nice to visit, Cavendish Beach and the sand dunes in the area were truly fantastic. After touring the Green Gables grounds, we headed to the beach and walked the boardwalks that led to the sand dunes.

Nikki here….Barry didn’t think much of the home and museum because he had never read the books. It was pretty cool to explore the areas that you had read about in book and use your imagination to see the characters walking through the woods with you. Also, do you remember playing Marco Polo as a child? Cavendish is where the real Marco Polo sunk and the people of Cavendish rescued the sailors and Lucy Maude Montgomery wrote an article about.

The next day we drove the Gulf Shore Parkway which takes you along the coast through Prince Edward Island National Park. There are stunning views along this road and there are several viewpoints that allow you to stop and take in the red rocks and sand dunes that make up this rugged part of the island.

The parkway took us to North Rustico Harbour this area had a fair amount of damage still from Hurricane Fiona that hit in September of 2022 almost a year before we were there. After a brief stopover to play Zorro on the beach that matched his fur colour almost perfectly it was time to continue.

Next stop, Brackley Beach to walk the boardwalks and sand dunes of this picturesque area as a friend of ours had been here many times as a child and we wanted to say we’d been there as well!

So many beaches, dunes, and cliffs to explore today! Nikki and I wanted to go for a walk along the Greenwich trail which has boardwalks that take you through some marsh ponds and out to the dunes it was a great walk with some interpretive signage in the beginning talking about the indigenous persons that live in this area.

East Point Lighthouse sits on the most easterly point of the island and there was no way we were going to miss it. We have been to all the big lighthouses on PEI and some of the small ones and there are a lot to see. East Point Lighthouse is beautiful and very well-maintained. It sits out on a point surrounded by red rock cliffs, the colour contrast really makes the lighthouse really stand out.

It was starting to get late and we had one more stop we wanted to make at Basin Head Provincial Park. This park has a fisheries museum, beach, and several outbuildings that would have been super cool if they were open but unfortunately, they were not. We still walked around and took in the basin, the beach, and the outbuildings.

It was getting late so we needed to get to what turned out to be one of the funkiest Bed and Breakfasts we have ever stayed in.