Plan the Perfect Anne of Green Gables Vacation

To plan the perfect Anne of Green Gables vacation, you’ll want to know:

1. What books should I read?
2. What sites can I visit that relate to Anne of Green Gables and L. M. Montgomery?
3. Are there experiences I can do that will feel like stepping into the story?
4. Where should I stay?
5. And how do I get around?

I have compiled the answers to these questions below and linked to the websites you will need.

Disclosure: This post contains some affiliate links, meaning if you purchase a book or hotel stay through one of these links I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting the blog!

Books for your To-Be-Read List:

Sites to Visit:

Green Gables Heritage Place

Green Gables Heritage Place looks just like you’d expect Anne’s Green Gables to look. The outside of the house is painted white with green trim and inside the rooms have been fixed up to look like Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert’s home. In “Matthew’s room” off the kitchen his suit is laid out on the bed as if he’s just stepped out. Upstairs in “Anne’s room” a dress with puffed sleeves hangs on the closet door. If you’ve seen the 1985 Megan Follows TV mini-series adaptation, you’ll feel like you’re walking through the film set.

While this house was the inspiration for Green Gables (although it was a gray house with green ivy on the gables at the time!), this was not the house the author lived in. It was the home of the Macneill family, cousins of L. M. Montgomery on her mother’s side. The author often visited her cousins here because she lived with her grandparents in a house just a short walk through what she called The Haunted Wood.

A visit to Green Gables also includes the displays about the author and her works in the site’s visitor center, a cafe where you can quench your thirst with a raspberry cordial, and a short loop trail named after Anne’s Lover’s Lane that takes you through woods behind Green Gables. At the visitor center you can also purchase entrance to the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home Site, which you can get to by walking the Haunted Woods Trail found down the hill from the front of the Green Gables house.

Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home

Lucy Maud Montgomery was left at 22 months old to be raised by her mother’s parents. Almost nothing but the outline of the house’s foundations that she and her grandparents lived in is left today. Almost- the small attachment that sat beside the house that was the Cavendish Post Office, and an external kitchen during summer months still survives and was returned to the family and site in 2019. The site of the home is still privately owned and maintained by direct descendants of the grandparents. The family has installed a small bookshop on the site and the building that was once the Post Office / Kitchen where Maud worked for her grandparents and wrote Anne of Green Gables (and mailed out her manuscript to publishers) sits beside the bookshop. The old kitchen is not currently open to the public, but the family hopes to eventually to raise the funds to research, plan, and restore the building so it can be opened. In the meantime, the post office desk and a few other original items from the old kitchen can be seen inside the bookshop.

For a small fee, which you can pay either at the bookshop or the Green Gables Visitor Center, you can enter the grounds where you can view the site of the former home and stand at the location where Maud once looked out her bedroom window. The orchard that was her view is no longer there, but the family is working on bringing back trees to the site by building Anne’s “White Way of Delight.”

Cavendish Church & Post Office

Just a short walk from the Lucy Maud Montgomery Cavendish Home Site, you can find the church where L. M. Montgomery married her husband and next to it, a real working post office. Although L. M. Montgomery never worked in this little post office, you can purchase and mail postcards from here that have pre-paid postage and will be stamped “Anne of Green Gables” once you’re ready to mail them.

Lucy Maud Montgomery Grave Site

L. M. Montgomery passed away in Ontario where she lived for the second half of her life, but she always wanted to be returned to her beloved island. So she has been buried in a plot next to her husband under his name, Macdonald. The Cavendish Cemetery can be accessed by car, or you can find it on foot by taking the Haunted Woods trail from Green Gables Heritage Place.

Montgomery Park

Across the street from the cemetery where Lucy Maud Montgomery is buried is a park with picnic tables, a play space for small children, and a statue of the author. The park can be accessed both by car or by foot by taking the Haunted Woods trail from Green Gables Heritage Place. Take a moment to sit with the author and her cats. There’s just something different about the air in Prince Edward Island, maybe you’ll notice it too.

Read my blog posts from various visits to Green Gables: 

• Looking for Anne & Finding Maud at Green Gables Heritage Place, P. E. I.
• The Real Cavendish Home That Inspired L. M. Montgomery’s Green Gables
  
• The Netflix Effect on Green Gables Heritage Place

Avonlea Village

In its heyday, Avonlea Village was a historic village with character actors that would walk the streets and perform snippets from Anne of Green Gables so that you felt like you’d stepped into the fictional Avonlea Village from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. Today Avonlea is free to visit and there are no longer character actors. Instead, the little village is filled with gift shops and restaurants. It’s the perfect place to go for lunch after visiting Green Gables Heritage Place because it’s right next door.

There are, however, two historic buildings of note in Avonlea. One is the church that has been moved to the property. It was the church that L. M. Montgomery and her family attended, but today is a Boom Burger. Though you can still sit in the church pews upstairs.

The second building of note was the former Belmont School House that L. M. Montgomery taught in and has since been moved to the Avonlea property. This was the second school house she taught in, after teaching at Bideford. Today it is a small gift shop filled with artisan products from local PEI creators.

Lucy Maud Montgomery Birthplace

The Lucy Maud Montgomery Birthplace is the house that was built for Maud’s parents upon their wedding. Unfortunately tragedy struck a short 22 months after Maud was born. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery, was forced to leave the island in search of work and her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, contracted TB. This forced Maud and her mother to leave this house and move into the Cavendish home with Clara’s parents.

Maud’s Aunt, Eliza Montgomery, who much later inspired the Blue Chest of Rachel Ward chapters in L. M. Montgomery’s The Story Girl, briefly lived in the house after Maud moved out. But that was the last of the Montgomery family to live in the house.

Amazingly, the house not only still exists, but today is a museum dedicated to the author. Artifacts from her married life and related to her works fill the downstairs while upstairs the rooms have been decorated with period appropriate furniture to recreate Clara’s room and the room Maud might have grown up in if they’d stayed in the house.

Read more:

• PEI: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Birthplace & the Anne of Green Gables Museum

Anne of Green Gables Museum & The Lake of Shining Waters

The Anne of Green Gables Museum was the former home of Montgomery’s aunt and uncle, the Campbells, and the house museum is still privately owned and run by the Campbell family. Montgomery spent a lot of time here, she even got married in the parlor of this house. Inside you can stand by the fireplace where Maud and her husband married, as well as see several pieces of furniture that appear in Maud’s books. The first piece is a blue hope chest right inside the entrance. Although it has books for sale on top of it now, a slightly fictionalized version of the chest’s history appears in Maud’s book The Story Girl. In the parlor is a cabinet with glass windows in the doors and as a child, Maud pretended her reflections in the glass were imaginary friends. She later wrote the cabinet and its imaginary friend into Anne of Green Gables.

Downhill from the house museum at the end of the lawn is a lake that truly sparkles when the sun is shining. This is the lake that Maud dubbed “The Lake of of Shining Waters” and she put into Anne of Green Gables. And you can even sign up for a tractor-drawn “Matthew’s Carriage Ride.”

Read more: 

• PEI: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Birthplace & the Anne of Green Gables Museum

Lower Bedeque School House

The Lower Bedeque (pronounced: bed-eck) School House is the third school that Lucy Maud Montgomery taught in on Prince Edward Island. The school house has been restored and moved from Lower to Central Bedeque and is now maintained by the Bedeque Museum. The museum operates out of the former William Callbeck General Store building, so you can purchase entrance to both the museum and the school house in the Callbeck building across the street from the school house.

Inside the school house you’ll learn about the questionable love affair Maud may have had with the son of the family she boarded with while teaching in Lower Bedeque.

Bideford Parsonage Museum & School Site

L. M. Montgomery lived at the Bideford Parsonage house for one year during her first post as a teacher on PEI. It may be this experience Montgomery drew on when writing about Anne becoming a teacher on PEI. After arriving in Bidford, Maud inquired of the Minister and his wife who lived in this house if she could rent a room because the Parsonage was only a half mile walk to the one-room school in which she taught. The house has been restored to look as it would have during Maud’s stay there so today we can see what a rooming situation would have looked like at that time.

Today the schoolhouse is gone, but a park with picnic benches has been put on the former schoolhouse property in memory of the school and Montgomery’s post there. (Note: you’ll need lots of mosquito repellent to picnic here during the summer!)

Read more:

• Miss Montgomery of Bideford Parsonage: A Teacher To Us All

Kensington Railway Station (Island Stone Pub)

L. M. Montgomery writes in her journals about taking her first train ride from the Kensington Railway Station. today the station still exists, but it’s the Island Stone Pub. So you can eat at the railway station where Maud once waited, full of anticipation.

Once cars were introduced to the island, which could move faster than the train, the train became obsolete, so there is no train on the island today, but one of the stations, the Elmira Train Station at the Easter tip of the island has been preserved and today is the island’s Railway Museum. So it’s the perfect place to re-enact the scene of Anne waiting for Matthew at the station.

Experiences

In the Time of Maud at Orwell Corner Historic Village

Orwell Corner Historic Village is exactly what I thought Avolnea Village was going to be. Except this historic village has not been created, it has been preserved. A couple of the buildings have been re-built after fires burned down the original ones, but otherwise the buildings are all original and stand where they once did. The buildings include a school house, a general store, a church, farm buildings, and even a blacksmith shop (the blacksmith shop has moved since the original one attached to the general store burned down).

Historically dressed reenactors are available inside each building to teach you about each space and will break character to answer questions.

Orwell’s connection to Lucy Maud Montgomery it tenuous, in that she once drove through the village and mentioned the drive in her journals. Despite that, each summer Orwell runs programs called In The time of Maud during which you can experience what life in the village was like during Maud’s lifetime on the island. During the program you’ll write on postcards with ink and nibs in the school house, take a carriage ride, visit the blacksmith, mail your postcards at the general store, have tea, and perhaps even end the day with dancing!

And if you’ve watched the 1985 adaptation of Anne of Green Gables and The Road to Avonlea TV series (and if you haven’t, you can find both at GazeboTV), you may recognize some of Orwell’s buildings. The exteriors have been used in a number of L. M. Montgomery film adaptations.

Read more:

• Experience Anne’s Avonlea at Orwell Corner Historic Village, PEI

For the Love of Maud Afternoon Tea at the Sir Andrew Macphail Homestead

In September of 1910, L. M. Montgomery wrote a funny anecdote in her journal about a visit she made to the home of Sir Andrew Macphail. She was invited to tea because a guest of Mr. Macphail, the Governor General (England’s Canadian representative to the crown), wanted to meet the author of Anne of Green Gables. Today you can follow in Montgomery’s footsteps and also have afternoon tea at the Macphail homestead, and twice a week the homestead runs the For the Love of Maud Afternoon Tea programs in which tea is accompanied by a reading of the journal entry.

Anne of Green Gables – The Musical

The Anne of Green Gables- The Musical performed at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown is a big deal on Prince Edward Island. Islanders are proud to have taken part in the production previously and audience members return again and again to see it. It’s entertaining and certainly worth an evening on the town if you’ve got a night to spend in Charlottetown.

Unfortunately, bringing in snacks from outside is not allowed, so I’m not saying you should shop beforehand at the Anne of Green Gables Chocolates shop just down the street from the Centre. I’ll just note that the Centre’s concession stand did not include any chocolates from Anne of Green Gables Chocolates…

Read more:

• Charlottetown, PEI: A Matter of Perspective

Where to Stay & How Long:

When planning your visit to PEI, I would suggest a stay of 3 to 5 days. If you just want to see the Anne sites in Cavendish, 3 days is plenty.  I would recommend staying a few days more to experience the sites beyond Cavendish as well as have time to take in the beauty of the island. The island is small enough that you can stay in one place and take day trips by car to other parts of the island.

Kindred Spirits Inn & Cottages

Kindred Spirits Inn & Cottages is next door to Green Gables Heritage Place, so it is an excellent location to base yourself in Cavendish if you want to stay practically on the Green Gables property. It, like many accommodations on the island has an Inn with rooms as well as separate cottages if you’d like a little more space to yourself or for a group. Kindred Spirits is family friendly with space for kids to run and play, and has a pool. And it even has an Anne of Green Gables Package.

Read more: 

• PEI Accommodations for the Anne of Green Gables Fan

Dalvay By the Sea

The exterior of the Dalvay by the Sea* hotel was used as the White Sands Hotel in the 1987 Anne of Avonlea film as well as in The Road to Avonlea TV series. The White Sands Hotel is where Anne wore her Sunday best and gave her first community poetry recitation. You’ll definitely want to wear your Sunday best while staying at the Dalvay or even just having dinner at the hotel restaurant. You’ll probably even feel the same sense of awe Anne felt for the White Sands as soon as you walk in the lobby of the Dalvay, even though the interior was not in the TV shows.

*This is an affiliate link, meaning if you book through this link, I’ll make a few cents at no extra cost to you. 

Read more:

• An Unexpected Honeymoon at Dalvay by the Sea, or Anne’s White Sands Hotel [A Year Early]

How to Get Around Prince Edward Island:

There is very little public transport on Prince Edward Island, so you’ll need to rent a car to get around on your own.

Read more posts about PEI:

• How to Pack for Summer on Prince Edward Island
• Good Eats: Prince Edward Island
• Explore the Beauty of Prince Edward Island Beyond Green Gables
• Where to Shop Local on Prince Edward Island
• The Kindred Spirits of PEI Restore Faith in Humanity

Watch my PEI Vlog:

Have you visited Prince Edward Island? Do you have any tips? Do you want to visit? Do you have any other questions? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

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