P.E.I. a prince among Canadian provinces

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The fake red braids are everywhere. As are the “Anne of Green Gables” soda, keychains, T-shirts and potato chips. And the commemorative Anne license plates. And of course the “Green Gables” movie – all three parts – and the animated series.

The 11-year-old freckle-faced orphan is a heck of a marketer, as it turns out, and the guardian of a killer franchise that has helped lift Prince Edward Island, Canada’s tiniest province, out from the shadow of Nova Scotia, its better-known, craggier neighbor. Anne lurks around almost every corner, and even a hip home-furnishings store in the island’s capital of Charlottetown can vow, in a sign, that it is only “95 percent Anne free.” But if any islanders resent the fact that their homeland’s most enduring symbol and chief tourist attraction is a fictional character, they’re not talking.

As for me, I prefer P.E.I. unadorned, with its rolling green hills, royal blue sea, fresh lobsters, and the modesty of a place that – with the notable exception of the Anne machine – feels little need to shout its virtues.

Nearly two years after my father died, curiosity has brought my mother, two sisters and me there, to the land he left as a child. He had, repeatedly, expressed no interest in returning.

Half expecting a lonely and left-behind outpost, we find instead a tidy island idyll dotted with family farms and wildflowers, undisturbed pink-sand beaches and the quiet hum of a less-traveled place. Things are slow in this pocket-size speck of the world’s second-largest country, and no one seems to be complaining.

After an 11-hour slog from Boston, we cross a sleekly modern bridge from the lonely tip of New Brunswick, and there we are, smack in the middle of a paint-by-numbers canvas: Bucolic Landscape No. 1.

We pull over in Victoria, a tiny bayside artists village. The bay is there, all right, but the artists are nowhere to be found. All but a couple of the town’s shops are shuttered on this warm, sunny Sunday, and one gets the feeling that it wouldn’t be whole a lot peppier on any other day of the week. But there is a shop that makes its own chocolates – OK, I’ve done my homework – and a roomy porch on which to loll and watch people pass by (or not) as we drink coffee and lemonade and sample the wares. For me, it’s better than fine, and on this point there seems to be broad consensus.

This, I realize later, is vintage Prince Edward Island. There’s not much to keep you busy, but plenty to keep you happy. It’s a bloom that unfurls, petal by petal, at no one’s pace but its own.

But a certain perennial preteen is allowed – encouraged, even – to break the staid isle’s rules, as we discover on a trip to Cavendish, a town on the north-central coast, a region that’s better known as Anne’s Land.

Cavendish, the childhood home of “Green Gables” author Lucy Maud Montgomery, is the vortex of Hurricane Anne, the belly of an excruciatingly amiable beast. If you’re looking for Anne-themed miniature golf or an Anne-style gas station, or if you want to get married in the Green Gables museum – some people do – then the Cavendish area is your place. About half of the island’s 800,000 annual visitors pay their respects to the Green Gables house, a farmhouse once owned by cousins of Montgomery that inspired the setting for the novel.

In a world in which travelers are more often seduced by action and glitz, the little orphan Anne is pretty much all that islanders are willing to offer up to the gods of tourism. But they do so with a gusto that can be somewhat disconcerting, elevating the celebration of the feisty but pure-hearted redhead to something between a cult of personality and a fetish.

“Is Anne of Green Gables really real?” The question posted on a tourism Web site acquires a certain existential heft. The answer proffered is almost mystical: “You have posed a question to which there is no short answer.”

No one embraces Anne as tightly as the Japanese, who were introduced to Montgomery’s 1908 novel when Canadian missionaries gave a copy to a former student just before World War II. The woman translated the story of the orphan who was taken on as a farmhand under the mistaken belief that she was a boy, and something clicked.

For decades, the book has been a staple in Japanese classrooms and bookstores, better known there than in its native country. A theory, espoused in more than one scholarly tract, is that Japanese females, especially, admire Anne because she has it both ways – being a bit of a high-spirited rebel while ultimately remaining true to her homeland’s traditional values.

Today in Japan, there are Anne fan clubs (one of which created a 350-pound model, in sugar, of the Green Gables house), a line of Japanese homes modeled on the original Green Gables, and an Anne bed-and-breakfast in Osaka. Planeloads of Japanese tourists arrive in P.E.I each summer to pay homage to “Akage no An,” or Red-Haired Anne. The Anne-quests are so popular that menus at some harbor-front restaurants in the island’s capital are printed in Japanese.

Having no preteens (or Japanese) among us, we steer as clear as we can from all things Anne. Not that it’s so difficult – on P.E.I, one is never far from a quiet corner. We find refuge less than a mile from the Green Gables house, along the red-sand beaches of Prince Edward Island National Park. Here, away from the water, lucky visitors might spot red foxes and other endangered species. Offshore, the Gulf Stream delivers some of the warmest water north of the Carolinas. And there’s not an Anne memento in sight.

Another day, we head east from our base in Charlottetown to Montague, where my father and his family lived. Distances are funny on P.E.I, very un-Canadian. What looks like a long journey on a map is only about 30 miles, and we’re there in about 40 minutes. Indeed, almost every place on the island can be reached by car within an hour from the capital.

Montague was a faded shipbuilding center even in the 1920s, when my father was there, populated largely by Scottish immigrants like his father. There still isn’t much there, although the town is one of the biggest on the island, with about 1,800 residents. You could drive through it and scarcely realize it.

We are pleasantly surprised to find a recently restored riverfront, complete with a prosperous-looking marina and boat captains offering seal-watching tours. At a waterfront restaurant, my mother and I devour bowls of plump, tender mussels that clearly enjoyed happy childhoods in the surrounding waters. Lunch for the four of us comes to some $20.

The town, bolstered by a renowned golf course nearby, gives off the whiff of a place that has managed a modest turnaround. Though we have no enduring connection to the place, it’s good to see that it’s doing all right.

Even when we return to Charlottetown – the province’s biggest town by far, with about a third of the island’s 142,000 residents – the sense of quiet remains.

The historic center is a snow globe of a place, a town under glass, with Victorian street-scapes leading to a gentle harbor at the foot of the hill.

Along a main street, an old man in shorts and socks sits on the steps outside his shabby-yet-chic row house, doing a crossword puzzle. He’s in the same spot, still working on a clue, as night falls about three hours later. There’s little but a fresh breeze off the water to break his concentration.

In the town center, a marquee advertises a Gordon Lightfoot revue, featuring renditions of the Canadian singer’s hits. Apparently the capital isn’t big or hip enough to rate an actual visit from the aging balladeer.

From our hotel, between trips to outlying towns, we stroll from art gallery to outdoor cafe to waterfront boardwalk. Over parts of three days, I thirstily eye a brew pub that beckons, a mere block away. I never actually get there. It’s hard to explain, but we’re … not busy, exactly, but we always have other places to check out.

At night, we retire to our inn, a recently restored row of historic homes in the heart of the town. It’s a great place to come back to, with tea and warm cookies always waiting in the expansive yet cozy lobby. Even on an unusually warm summer evening, the grand fireplace makes me think the inn would be a great place to be – briefly – in the winter, as the snow (I imagine) blows into huge drifts outside.

For however toasty the island is on this trip, with temperatures climbing to near 90 for several days straight, in the winters it returns to its true Canadian spirit, with temperatures frigid enough to make the other provinces proud.

Such weather – and, of course, the fact that it’s an island – helped keep P.E.I off the beaten path for decades. Indeed, in the 1870s, islanders were wooed into joining the Dominion of Canada partly because they were promised that, under such a union, they would be able to travel more easily to the mainland and Nova Scotia.

But the passage to its neighbors, though not far, wasn’t easy. The strait that separates P.E.I from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia can be icebound from January through late April, so the men who made the trip during the winter in the early years sometimes had to help push the boat over the ice. According to one account, early passengers and crew were harnessed to each other, and to the boats, for the perilous journey.

As recently as seven years ago, the trip to New Brunswick was somewhat of an ordeal, taking as many as six hours if the island was icebound. But all that changed in 1997 with the opening of the Confederation Bridge, an eight-mile, S-shaped span that the province touts as the world’s longest bridge over ice-covered water.

In some ways, the bridge changed everything. But while some mourned the presumed passing of a distinct way of life, to a visitor who hadn’t been there before the bridge, it seems as much a symbol, a helping hand across the water, as a radical change in the rhythm of the province.

It’s still a peaceful place, it still takes ages to drive there from any major city, American or Canadian, and Gordon Lightfoot still isn’t singing his own songs there.

And although the bridge has caused a welcome swell in the number of tourists, the island still seems uncrowded. We tour the province for a third day, on near-empty roads. It’s the second week in August, the height of the eight-week high season.

Our final foray is to the rural eastern shore. On an island where the ocean is never more than about 12 miles away, in the east it seems to be hardly more than 12 feet away. The region is P.E.I distilled – more “country” than the rest of the rural province, more removed than other parts of an island that is already pretty remote.

It’s perfect bicycling territory. My younger sister and I leave my mother and other sister happily ensconced with their books in rocking chairs on the porch of our inn, perched a couple hundred feet from red-clay cliffs that drop into the sea.

As we cycle, a dirt road leads to a quiet harbor; up ahead, a finger of the bay curls back toward the shore. The pines here are more spindly, and all of the outdoors looks more unkempt – nature with a five o’clock shadow. Form takes a back seat to function.

The houses are simple and utilitarian, not the trophy palaces you might see on a similarly serene patch of waterfront real estate south of the U.S. border. Quite often, stands of trees hug the rocky coastline, obscuring the postcard view – the better to break winter’s fierce winds.

But for all its spartan demeanor, there’s also some pampering to be had along the eastern shore. Up the road a couple of miles is the Inn at Bay Fortune, a Cape Cod-style, elegantly weathered manse that used to be actress Colleen Dewhurst’s summer home.

The heralded hostelry, set on almost 50 acres overlooking the water, is also home to the province’s most acclaimed restaurant and to a back yard striped with organic gardens. A few miles to the south is our hotel, the Inn at Spry Point, Bay Fortune’s younger sister and an up-and-coming contender in the best-food-on-the-island sweepstakes.

Of course, at these inns and elsewhere on the island, you’ll often pay a fraction of the price you would at home. As with the euro, the Canadian loonie’s value has climbed relative to the U.S. dollar over the past year. But with many Canadian prices roughly what they would be in the United States, and $1 U.S. worth about $1.40 in Canada, Americans still get a hefty discount. (High-season rooms at the Inn at Bay Fortune, for instance, start at $145 Canadian, or about $104.)

On our bikes, my sister and I stick to the roads that meander close to the shore. The lay of the land is fun yet forgiving, with the island’s elevation topping out at less than 500 feet.

So we roll along, with green all around us and blue up above and shimmering down below. Here, in this six-hundredths of 1 percent of Canadian turf, that feels just about right. And I can’t help but think: My father would really like this place.

If You Go…

From Nova Scotia, you can take a 75-minute ferry from Caribou, on the Nova Scotia mainland, to Woods Islands, Prince Edward Island, for about $8.50 round trip per pedestrian or $35 round trip for cars. Information: Northumberland Ferries Ltd., 888-249-7245, www.nfl-bay.com.

Where to stay (All prices are in U.S. dollars.)

. In Charlottetown: The Inns on Great George (58 Great George St., 800-361-1118, www.innsongreatgeorge.com) is an inviting cluster of historic buildings in the capital’s tiny center and a five-minute walk to the harbor. Rooms in summer start at about $125, with breakfast. Among recommended bed-and-breakfasts is the EdenHurst Inn (12 West St., 877-766-6439), a Victorian mansion built for a wine merchant in the late 1890s. All of the EdenHurst’s rooms have only one bed but cots are available. Rooms start at about $82. Both are open year-round.

. On the east coast: The Inn at Bay Fortune (Route 310, Bay Fortune, 902-687-3745, www.innatbayfortune.com), a sprawling former artists’ retreat overlooking the water, was built in 1910 by a Broadway playwright and later was the getaway of actress Colleen Dewhurst. High-season rooms from about $104; open from late May through mid-October.

If you really want to be out on the edge, drive several miles south to its sister property, the Inn at Spry Point (off Route 310 on Spry Point. Rd., 902-583-2400, www.innatsprypoint.com). The 15-room property sits on a 110-acre peninsula surrounded by water and woods. Bring books and bathing suits – it’s time to relax (there isn’t a whole lot else to do in the immediate area). High-season rates from $125; open end of May through September.

Where to eat

. In Charlottetown: For Italian, try Sirenella (83 Water St.; entrees from less than $10), or for Lebanese cuisine, check out Cedars (81 University Ave.; $5-$15). Between meals, don’t miss Cows, a P.E.I-born and bred ice cream shop that has several locations around the island.

. In Montague: Windows on the Water (106 Sackville St.) is the place for mussels and a long, lazy lunch on the wraparound deck. Live it up for about $10 at lunch; about twice that for dinner.

. In Anne’s Land: The northern coast is known for its lobster suppers, which started as charitable affairs in churches. Some are now commercial and cavernous, but one that has stuck to its roots is St. Ann’s Church Lobster Suppers, in the town of Hope River. Closed Sundays. A lobster dinner with all the fixin’s will set you back $19.50.

. On the east coast: The Inn at Bay Fortune and Inn at Spry Point (see above) feature acclaimed restaurants that specialize in fresh ingredients and just-off-the-boat seafood. Bay Fortune (entrees $17-$21.50) is said to be the best on the island, but I preferred Spry Point’s fixed-price food fest for $30.

What to do

. In Charlottetown: If you’re a little rusty on the capital city’s role as the “Cradle of Canadian Confederation,” visit Founders’ Hall (6 Prince St., 800-955-1864, www.foundershall.ca; $5) on the harborfront. Next door, the touristy Peake’s Wharf, a dining and shopping area, is eminently skippable – unless you’re in dire need of T-shirts and P.E.I potatoes served a dozen ways. Instead, stroll along the nearby boardwalk to the parks and grand residential areas around Victoria Park, or take a harbor cruise. Up the hill is the pedestrianized Victoria Row, flush with cafes and craft shops.

. In Anne’s Land: Cavendish, a 30-minute drive north of Charlottetown, is where you’ll find Green Gables (902-963-7874; about $4), the farmhouse originally owned by relatives of author Lucy Maud Montgomery that helped inspire “Anne of Green Gables” and other Anne-centric attractions. Virtually next door is Prince Edward Island National Park, (902-672-6350 , www.pc.gc.ca), which features prime beaches and pink-sand dunes. Admission $3.50.

. Touring the island: For bicyclists, the Confederation Trail, which follows a former rail line, can be picked up from Charlottetown or any other point along the way. About 140 miles of the path have been groomed; eventually it will wind 215 miles across the island. For those who prefer their mobility motorized, a series of scenic drives circles the province.

. Potatoes: In the United States, Idaho boasts “famous potatoes”; in Canada, it’s P.E.I. Travel to O’Leary, near the western coast, to pay your respects to taters at the Prince Edward Island Potato Museum (902-859-2039, www.peipotatomuseum.com; about $4), which, boosters note, “has been recognized for exhibiting the largest collection of potato artifacts in the world!”

For information, call Tourism Prince Edward Island, 888-734-7529, www.gov.pe.ca/visitorsguide.