There is majesty here, but the usual rules on travel destinations don't quite apply to Prince Edward Island.
The one major historical site -- Province House in Charlottetown -- is a place where, on the record, nothing actually took place. The creation of a nation called "Canada" got its start on the second floor, but as an idea, not as legislation or resolution or a declaration of anything. That came later.
The island's two "cities" are hardly cities. Charlottetown's population is slightly over 30,000 soaking wet. In Kansas, Summerside, the other "city," would be just another dot.
There is no famous geyser or mountain or cape on Prince Edward Island. The big tourist draw is a fictional house. Thousands of people -- including a sizable number of Japanese, annually flock to Prince Edward Island just to see Green Gables, an ordinary farmhouse where, in real life, nothing extraordinary happened.
On the other hand, the town of O'Leary does have a 14-foot potato.
So what is Prince Edward Island? Pretty wonderful, once you understand it.
P.E.I., as it's commonly known, is Canada's tiniest province -- about a fifth of the size of Maryland -- a spit of red-dirt potato farms floating between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Because of the high amount of iron oxide in the soil, the dirt is red, and the sand on most of its beaches is red, and the soft cliffs that continually crumble into the sea are red.
It is a land of countryside -- some rolling, some not -- and shingle-sided cottages with clothes drying in the sun, and historic white churches, and fishing villages little changed (aside from satellite TV dishes) in a hundred years.
It is a place of lighthouses and those red beaches. One of the beaches, at Basin Head, is famed for its "singing sands." The sand, supposedly because of its silica content, "sings" when a foot slides across its surface. It's more like a dog's yelp, but "yelping sands" doesn't have the same dash.
One thing Prince Edward Island isn't is as isolated as it was.
When the 8-mile Confedera-tion Bridge opened five years ago, connecting P.E.I. with the New Brunswick mainland, that ended total reliance on ferries (and, for some, small airplanes), and maybe its happy feeling of separation.
"The potential for P.E.I. is in being different, something ... that gives us a special character," one local leader recently told the Guardian, Charlottetown's newspaper. "The sense of being an island was really important to that. I see the bridge as being sort of a backward technology."
