Anne's Land

The summer before my junior year, I worked at a plant nursery with my friend Cathryn. We learned all about plants, pruning, and working hard. In order to get through the monotonous and hot days, we would plan out our future (and oh-so exciting) lives. These plans included; who we would marry (which always included someone just like Gilbert Blythe), how they were to propose (of course over the Lake of Shining Waters bridge), and then the rest of the time went into planning out our weddings. You know, the typical girl-stuff, maybe with a little more fairy tale and a lot less realism. One of our other plans included taking a trip to Prince Edward Island, the backdrop of Anne of Green Gables. I'm sure we had planned this trip to be with our future husbands, but either way, the trip must have always been at the back of our minds.

When Cathryn moved back east, we found it was either now or never. I would fly in near Boston, and then we would drive up through New Hampshire, then the Coast of Maine, through the Canadian border and New Brunswick and then we would travel the Confederation Bridge that leads into the beautiful Prince Edward Island. Anyway, that was the idea. Unlike most ideas that float away like childhood, we actually made this one happen!

We arrived in Prince Edward Island just a couple weeks before the tourism season began. The good thing about that is we pretty much had the entire island to ourselves. We really began to think we were Anne and Diana, except for the paved roads. There was hardly ever another car or person in sight. It made it easy to stand in the middle of the road.

The down side of that was that it rained for the first two days of our trip. One of those days was a full on down pour. It didn't stop us however. We went everywhere and were just as excited as we would have been. There wasn't anything that could have damaged the beautiful landscape. If anything, the rain made the green even greener, and the red fields and roads even redder.

The best parts of the trip were losing ourselves to our imagination, which isn't hard to do on Prince Edward Island. We had to keep reminding ourselves that, no, Anne was not a real person. She was just a ficticious character. But when they have a village created after Avonlea and all the characters from the book are walking down the center of town, you start to question.

We were even able to dress ourselves more appropriately for the time period and had quite the time posing for the camera. I never said we weren't a little off. Oooh, but are we not elegant?

We were able to separate a little better the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, from the books that she wrote. She wrote everything from her experience and she lived every detail. From the Green Gables home, which was actually the property of one of her relatives, to the haunted wood, which was near her home. It was no wonder she had so much 'scope for the imagination.'

While it was really weird and hard being away from our husbands and kids, we took full advantage. We ate out every meal, we went shopping, we went where we wanted without towing kicking 2 year olds, and we also had time to pamper ourselves with a spa. Yes, it was a totally girly trip. We kept saying that it was good our husbands didn't come because they wouldn't even appreciate it and they would just make fun of us. We do appreciate them however, for staying home with the kids for a week while we went off on this amazing trip. I was so happy to come home to a clean house and happy kids. I really did marry a Gil-bart! Thanks so much hon!

It was hard to leave the island, but we were also ready to get home. We were happy that we saw this beautiful sunset on the last evening on Prince Edward Island.