The Canadian Island Called P.E.I.

If you collect islands for your memory book of travels, here’s one to fulfill many a fantasy.

It’s an island measuring only 40 miles at its greatest width and scarcely 120 miles long.

To the Maritime people of Atlantic Canada, the island is affectionately known as P.E.I. But however you identify Prince Edward Island, odds are that anything you may have heard about it is only a small part of the mosaic of its attractions.

For years this small island has appealed to special interest travel that ranges from angling for the world’s largest bluefin tuna to reliving years of youth with “Anne of Green Gables,” the classic novel about a young girl written here in 1908 and destined for renewed attention in 1992.

Other visitors come here from across Canada and the United States to wind surf, sun and swim in “solar-heated waters” and along some of the best beaches of northern North America. They stroll over sand dunes that seem to have been transplanted from the Sahara and set down between the sea, the cliffs of red sandstone and tranquil farmlands.

Harvest time is a mellow season and with it comes the color of gold to island trees. Winter is the season to make your own cross-country ski trails across unmarked fields of snow between farm and village homes that offer bed and breakfast.

Lobster and Culture

Gourmets trek to this island for dinners of fresh lobster. Most travelers seek out the museums, folk arts and crafts, the music, theater, architecture and festivals of a diverse cultural heritage. Active travelers from springtime to autumn are drawn by kayaking, canoeing, hiking, biking, horseback riding and the continent’s greatest collection of golf courses with ocean views.

The many special interest attractions of Prince Edward Island are working closely together, each enhancing the other.

We began to feel this as soon as we got off the ferry with our rental car at Wood Islands, after the hour and a quarter crossing from Caribou, Nova Scotia.

From August into October, sportfishing enthusiasts are lured to North Lake Harbor on the island by dreams of catching the world’s largest bluefin tuna. The largest to date, 1,201 pounds, was caught here in the early autumn of 1978. Giant tuna are being brought ashore daily for the traditional weighing-in ceremony, while tales are exchanged about battles that lasted for hours.

Meanwhile, other visitors enjoy the “singing sand dunes” of Basin Head and one of the finest marine museums on the North Atlantic coast. The dunes sing with the sounds of the birds, the winds and the sea.

In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier sighted the island and called it “the fairest land ‘tis possible to see.”

Prince Edward Island is more than just an island of fair land separated from the mainland by the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the north and Northumberland Strait to the south. It is also a province, the smallest in Canada, with its own governmental structure comparable to a U.S. state. Historically, the capital city of Charlottetown on this island is where the fathers of confederation met in 1864 to discuss a united Canada.

The very smallness of the island is part of its appeal. The total population in the 1981 census was tabulated at 122,505, with 15,282 in Charlottetown. We’ve been staying at the Silver Fox Inn of Summerside, the second largest town, population 7,828.

Our hostess, Julie Simmons, welcomed us into the bed-and-breakfast inn built as a luxurious private residence in 1892. It was designed by famed architect William Critchlow Harris and was a showplace during the halcyon early years of this century when silver fox pelts from P.E.I. were a symbol of high fashion around the world.

Six Bedrooms

The inn has six bedrooms, all with baths and period furnishings. Our room was $45 (Canadian), about $30 (U.S.), which wouldn’t have paid for many silver fox pelts.

Before the pelts went out of high style one was sold in Summerside in 1911 for the then princely sum of $20,000. This kind of wealth is reflected in the stately homes seen in a walking tour of the town. Civic center today is in the gothic town hall beneath the tower clock.

Tourism has become a major source of income for this town that is still an important shipping port for potato growers. Fiddling, step-dancing and harness racing are highlights of the annual carnival held here in mid-July.

The new 52-room Linkletter Inn is built on the site of the 1839 Summerside House. Its Coach Room for candlelight dining has the atmosphere of an old English inn. We found our first fresh lobster dinner on P.E.I. at the nearby Brothers Two restaurant, which also is the box office for The Flyer’s Feast dinner theater.

Driving Trails Beckon

Three driving trails beckoned us to explore P.E.I.--Lady Slipper Drive, Blue Heron Drive and Kings Byway. Lady Slipper took us west along Bedeque Bay to the land first settled by the French from Acadia. P.E.I. was Ile St.-Jean before the expulsion of the French by the British. Many of the French fled to the woods to escape expulsion and their descendants carry on the Acadian heritage in museums, re-created pioneer villages, festivals and handcraft exhibitions.

Woodstock changes the pace with a resort that includes an 18-hole golf course, tennis courts, nature walks, windsurfing and canoeing. Skinners Pond reminds visitors that Stompin’ Tom Connors, the singer-songwriter who gave the world “Bud the Spud,” grew up here.

The midsummer oyster festival in Tyne Valley beckons us back for fiddling, oyster-shucking contests and the enjoyment of clams and quahogs as well as the shucked oysters. We lunched this time at the Tyne Valley Studio and Tea Room where my wife Elfriede found a lovely hand-screened batik scarf made by our artist/hostess Leslie Dubey.

Drive to New London

Blue Heron Drive took us to New London and the green-trimmed white cottage where Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874. When she wrote of Avonlea, she was describing this countryside. Green Gables, the old farmhouse she immortalized in her “Anne of Green Gables” novel, is a museum in Prince Edward Island National Park. Sites that can be recognized as Anne’s Babbling Brook, Haunted Woods and Lover’s Lane are around the park’s 18-hole golf course.

The world-famous author, whose popular novels for young girls were translated into virtually every language, died in 1942 and is buried close to Blue Heron Drive in Cavendish Cemetery. She kept a diary that spanned 55 years of her life, during which she married a Presbyterian minister whose worldly possessions were far less than her own affluence.

Her youngest son, a Montreal gynecologist who died in 1962, published the years of her diary up to 1910, but stipulated that the rest could not be published until 50 years after her death.

That will be in 1992, and it is a publishing event awaited by a world that continues to read her novels.

The Green Gables farmhouse shares P.E.I. National Park with more than 200 species of birds. The shallow waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence become solar-heated along the sandy beaches of the park and are always a discovery for visitors who don’t expect to frolic in a rippling white surf this far north. Dalway-by-the-Sea Hotel in the park was built as a summer estate in 1895 by a Cincinnati oil tycoon.

The bed-and-breakfast homes and farmhouses add to the magic of the three driving trails that encircle the island. How can you resist stopping at places with names like A Nest to Rest, Murphy’s Sea View Farm, Just Folks, Always Welcome, Right at Home, Windsong Farm?

Founding Meeting in 1864

From our ferry landing at Wood Islands we followed King’s Byway Drive into Charlottetown, Canada’s smallest provincial capital and considered the birthplace of the country, as this is where the founding fathers of the confederation first met in 1864.

The capital city’s Confederation Centre of the Arts was built in 1964 and opened by Queen Elizabeth II to commemorate the centennial of that meeting. Covering two downtown blocks, it includes a 1,100-seat theater for year-round productions, a restaurant, memorial hall, a museum displaying contemporary fine arts and an art gallery that houses more than 1,500 works by Canadian masters, among them Robert Harris and Jean-Paul Lemieux.

The center’s gala summer festival of musical theater is highlighted by a production created around the story of the orphan girl who won everybody’s heart in “Anne of Green Gables.”

The self-guided walking tour of Charlottetown leads quickly from downtown into tree-lined streets of 19th-Century homes and spacious parks. Grace notes to the walk are added by such architectural classics as the Kirk of St. James with its stained-glass windows and soaring spire. Gas lamps light Great George Street down to the waterfront, where you may see a cruise ship coming into the harbor.

When it came time to leave P.E.I., we took the ferry from Borden for the 45-minute cruise to Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick. Two of the ferries on this route are icebreakers to assure that the waterways are kept open in winter.

The 10 visitor information centers on P.E.I., including the central office in Royalty Mall on University Avenue in Charlottetown, provide information on the highways and byways, accommodations, camping sites, activities and attractions.

To plan a visit, write to Visitors Services, P.O. Box 940, Charlottetown, P.E.I, Canada C1A 7M5.