PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND - the place of L.M. Montgomery

The little house where Anne was born.  I had looked at lots of these little two storied houses and wondered  about how they were configured inside - but it was remarkably compact there were three small bedrooms upstairs.

I grew up on the books of L.M. Montgomery, who grew up on Prince Edward Island and set many of her most famous books there.  When the grass around me was brown and crackling, and the sun pinged off the corrugated iron roof in inland New South Wales, the place of my dreams had a "Lake of Shining Waters", a shingled barn and a wood with soft green leaves and wildflowers.

"Silver Bush",  or at least said to be the setting for the book.  It was the home of of Lucy Maud's cousins - a place where she spent a lot of happy time and the place where she was married.  "Lake of Shining Waters" in the background in front of the huge white painted shingled barn.  They were offering Matthew Cuthbert wagon rides.  I did not take up the offer, but it added to the picture.

Gog - or Magog.  A pair of green spotted dogs featured in the story of Anne's student years, and they captured my imagination as a child.  And here - in the home of Lucy Maud's grandfather, Senator John Montgomery, was one of the originals - its partner, sadly long since broken.  The house is still owned by a family member, who told me that  Lucy Maud also coveted the dogs and when she visited England later in here life she tried to buy a pair.  She had to do with a pair of gold spotted ones, the race, she said, of green spotted dogs,  being extinct.

I was nervous about visiting Prince Edward Island.  One has to allow for artistic licence and modernistion and all of that kind of thing.  Dream places are easily shattered.  But absolutely, it did not disappoint.   From the rolling agricultural fields, with their shingled barns, to the little white house where Lucy Maud was born, to the austere sparsely north west shoreline, to the soft pink, white and yellow wildflowers growing lushly by the side of the road .... it was the place I had imagined.  I loved it.

Shingled barns and wildflowers.  They were so lush and pretty everywhere on the sides of the road.  There was also a wooden eyrie in a field with an osprey in residence, but I didn't get a picture.  Alvin assures me that it was most unlikely to have been nesting in fall, but it was definitely sitting there when we first went past.

Of course it had its modern conveniences - its service centres, malls and hardware shops, which we found as we headed south for the ferry back to Nova Scotia, but the PEI of L.M. Montgomery is a real place.

Leaving Prince Edward Island on the ferry  - but this is typical of the sparsely settled coast of PEI, with the white shingled lighthouse and the little white church.

We fly back home later today.  The countdown has begun, the books I have acquired have to be disposed of in the least weighty way in the luggage - so the last posts for Nova Scotia and Vancouver Island will have to wait.  It has been a wonderful journey.