Continuing on the whole fake farm theme, the ones that make me giggle the most are those that don’t try very hard in the ambience department. When my friend Elizabeth and I went to PEI together, our whole trip was centered around our childhood (and adult!) love of Anne of Green Gables. But even we were hesitant to visit Green Gables Heritage Place, because what could it actually offer? There’s no real Green Gables farm—Anne is a fictional character, the 1980s miniseries that everybody knows so well were mostly filmed in Ontario, and even the author’s home is now only a ruined foundation, located on a different site nearby.
Well, I’m sorry to tell you our fears were well-founded. The “Green Gables” house is just a replica farmhouse, filled with random period furniture and staffed with somewhat bored university students in Edwardian garb—all with the aim to give the busloads of cruise ship tourists a misplaced feeling of nostalgia, rather than information about the author or a detailed recreation of anything tangible. If it had been irredeemably hokey (you should have seen our reaction to the Green Gables post office in Cavendish!), we probably would have loved it—instead, we found it vaguely depressing.
Until we got to the barn, that is. The shiny fiberglass Jersey cow gave us a bit of much-needed comic relief—while Rachel Lynde’s imagined voice echoed in our heads.
