Rob-n-Hild, Eastward Ho!

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Green Gables 11.6 km walking. 2:40 hours. 245 metres climbed

After work and weather got in the way of our plans yesterday, today we made no mistake and got going early to walk to the site of the house immortalized in the book Anne of Green Gables (Anne fra Bjørkely in Norwegian). Although a fictional place, it was based on a real farm owned by L M Montgomery's cousins and some special places from the book are preserved in a historic site. "Lovers Lane" and the "Haunted Wood" are places which Montgomery walked herself and claimed were inspirational in her writing.

Although we had planned to come to PEI for a long time, we only realised the whole Green Gables thing while we were away - and neither of us had actually read the book! Luckily, we could download it to our Kindle reader and Rob finished it in time (Hild is still working on it because she has been doing real work most nights!) and it was good to have some context, but the information at the heritage site was excellent. There is a whole center with displays about both Green Gables and L M Montgomery which we walked to from our Bunkie. Montogomery was a prolific writer, starting at a very young age and very methodical about both her work and her diaries so there is a lot of material to work with.

After a look around the house, we did the two walks and there were a lot of interesting signs talking about Montgomery's work as well as the plants and animals. One plant is called Herb Robert a small pretty plant (not at all like Rob) which Hild found out later is a type of geranium (Geranium robertianum).

We tried to go to Avonlea (a mock-up of the the village from the books with a number of original buildings) for lunch, but nothing was open yet - the season does seem to start late here. So we walked back to our Bunkie for lunch and as rain was forecast for the afternoon, we went for a drive to Charlottetown to go back to COWS Creamery for ice-cream and T-shirts! We had to special order our T-shirts and the man did them in front of us - and even invited us into the printing room while they were being done! It turns out, Hild's design is one of his ideas so he was pleased with her choice. The system them have for single shirts involved a printer with special ink that gets baked into the fabric using an infra-red heater - which gives it a better sheen that the hot press, apparently. For multiple copies of the same design, there is a rotating system with multiple silk-screen stations, each wth a separate colour. Lots of fun to watch. And we couldn't leave without testing a couple more ice-cream flavours: Gooey-Mooey and Wowie-Cowie. We had these in a cup rather than a cone this time - the waffle cones are great, but too big!

The other thing Rob wanted to visit in Charlottetown was the CFIA laboratory where potato lines imported for breeding go though quarantine. Having done quite a bit of work (for one of his clients) in getting import permits he really just wanted a picture with the sign (the way Hild gets pictures at CRA Tax offices and we got a shot of the Sydney immigration office), but the lab building looks really special. Maybe we should have asked for a tour..... By this time (and after the ice-cream) we were ready for a flop to recover and get ready for tomorrow - both Hild and Rob have meetings before we are going to catch the ferry to Nova Scotia so we should try to get an early night.

Coming up: Back to Nova Scotia!

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