July 23rd - 18th Day Biking!
Biked to Charlottetown, biked to New Glasgow, stayed at a B&B.
Mileage: 28.8 miles
July 24th - 19th Day Biking!
Biked to Cavendish, Green Gables, Cavendish Shoreline and back to the B&B
Mileage: 19.38 miles
July 25th - 20th Day Biking!
Biked back to Charlottetown, boxed up the bikes, walked along the harbour
Mileage: 18.16 miles
It's funny how throughout this trip when we've been in the "depths of despair" something or someone always comes along at exactly the right time. PEI proved to be just as hilly as Nova Scotia and since we were all the more anxious to arrive because we were that much closer, the hills seemed harder, more bothersome. In New Glasgow we reached our limit and pulled out the guide book to see if there were any available and close B&Bs. All were full or 9 more miles away... except for the very last one. Carol semi-giggle/cackled on the other end of the phone, "did they try to tell you that PEI is flat? Well they lied! Don't worry, I'm just half a hill away." We trudged up the last hill and were greeted by the old, cute, bubbly innkeeper standing in front of her very stately 1800's estate. The inside was exceptionally quaint - the kind of quaint that comes apart when you try to analyze all the small pieces in each room but all together seems to work. We settled in and walked back down the hill to the "town" to poke around the stores. It was here that we stumbled across something very important, something that would influence the rest of our stay in PEI: a biography on Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Since it was just a thin book, we read it that night, merely trying to prepare for our visit to "Anneland" the following day. In retrospect it seems ridiculous that we traveled 600+ miles and didn't know anything about the author of all the beloved characters. Lucy Maud was apparently a very solitary person who was fiercely defensive of PEI and was so adamant that it remain a private place for the imagination that she almost tried to not let Anneland become a national park. Only when she realized that it was the only way to preserve it from unbridled tourism (the ironic result of her novels) did she agree to not put up a fight. She was a very private person who almost lived a double life: by day she was a very devoted, pious, and dutiful minister's wife who endlessly entertained and set the town example but by night or by the moments she could steal away she was the penpal of two men from overseas (apparently a usual practice of those times, but possibly not usual for a woman) to whom she communicated her deeply-rooted criticism of religion and even doubt of God's existence. She was thrilled when Anne of Green Gables was finally accepted for publication and even more excited when the publishers asked for Anne of Avonlea, but she soon grew tired of churning out books 3-7 and actually disliked her protagonist by the end of the series! She wanted to create new, fresh characters and plots but her other novels were never given the same attention.
We had originally planned to spend a whole day seeing absolutely every Anne sight available, but seeing Green Gables turned out to be enough. It certainly was amazing to be there because it was the end of an epic journey, but in terms of the Anne hype, it all seemed simultaneously sanitized and blown out of proportion. None of the displays on Lucy Maud mentioned anything that wasn't utterly cheery and the rooms of the very beautiful old house were labeled by the characters in AGG, instead of telling about her relatives who had actually lived in them. Many of the tourists hadn't even read the book; they had just been drawn by the celebrity aura. The haunted woods was surrounded by a golf course and the gift store was a blur of Anne dolls, Anne spoons, Anne mugs, Anne posters, Anne calendars, Anne everything. (A good 50% of the people working there had red hair - it must be a lot easier to be employed in PEI if you have red hair!) We couldn't shake the feeling that we were accidentally, or actually very deliberately (600 miles of deliberation) participating in Lucy Maud's worst nightmare.
Knowing that our final destination was somewhat of a fraud did not dampen our experience in the slightest; we were destined to arrive there and were very much in awe of our discovery. To realize a wise lesson at the pinnacle of our trip was actually quite providential: we learned that literature is best left in the much richer realm of imagination; it is not meant to be sought out and pigeonholed into reality. The ironic part is that we had to see it for ourselves to understand what happens when a novel is turned into a quest.
We cancelled the rest of the AGG tour and decided to do some extra (gasp!) biking along the Cavendish shores. They were actually quite deserted even though the rest of Cavendish was aflutter with tourists. The empty red cliffs, purple flowers, and very blue water offered us the sense of discovery that we were craving.
The following day we biked back to Charlottetown, disassembled our bikes (very sad!) at a local bike store and boxed them up for the bus trip. Luckily there was a grocery store next door, so we borrowed a shopping cart and wheeled them back to our hotel for the night (while many people watched us).
Even now, back in Atlanta, we can't believe how fast it all went. It was such a great, fabulous, hard, rewarding trip and we're sad it's over! It was cool how time worked on the road; our days were measured in miles, grocery stores, and campgrounds and we only arrived anywhere if we were willing to physically work hard enough to get there. It was very simple yet more difficult than regular life and somehow refreshing. We're already planning our next trip.
