I paddle-boarded and swam on the serene Miramichi River in New Brunswick, where we also jet-skied and boated.

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, Canada – I couldn’t stop exclaiming over the lupines. Waves and waves of wildflowers, bright stalks of pink and purple and white popping out of green ditches, framing rolling hills of farmland and the ocean beyond.

The vistas were ripe for painting – and poetry, which the island’s most famous resident penned a century ago.

“You never know what peace is until you walk on the shores or in the fields along the winding red roads of Prince Edward Island in a summer twilight when the dew is falling and the old stars are peeping out and the sea keeps its nightly tryst with the little land it loves,” wrote L.M. Montgomery. “You find your soul then. You realize that youth is not a vanished thing, but something that dwells forever in the heart.”

Wilson's Point, once home to a Scottish settlement where branches of the Miramichi diverge, has a replica church.

Maud, as Montgomery preferred to be called, is best known for her beloved Anne of Green Gables, the red-headed orphan who starred in nine novels and countless adaptations since the book’s first edition in 1908. Her books – full of plucky, ambitious, mishap-prone girls – got me through middle school, and her flowery language comes to life in the landscape of rural, colorful PEI.

Mud sliding at low tide.

The island was the second of three stops on our two-week family road trip through the Maritimes, the Canadian provinces north of Maine that hug the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We took the high-speed Cat ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Nova Scotia, then drove to PEI on the 8-mile Confederation Bridge and finished on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick.

The three provinces share a slower pace, wide open space, quaint small towns set amid lush landscapes and everywhere, water.

The crowds at Peggy's Cove.

Part of our draw was family, with compounds of cousins we stayed with in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. But the charm of the Maritimes makes for a dreamy backdrop. Sure, they’re a long drive from Cleveland, at least 15 hours. But you could fly into Halifax, Nova Scotia, the region’s biggest airport, with plenty of adorable coves within a three-hour radius.

The Bluenose II tall ship, docked in her home port of Lunenberg.

June was a perfect time to visit, with sweatshirt-and-shorts weather before the Canadian summer tourist season really begins. But the area is also beautiful with changing colors in the fall.

Here are a few destinations to put on your bucket list.

Prince Edward Island

The main draw for PEI? Green Gables, of course, the 1831-built house that served as the inspiration for Anne’s home and now welcomes tourists as a national park. An engaging interpretive center opened in 2019, with quotes galore from Montgomery scattered around the property and nearby sites, including the houses where she was born and married.

The red cliffs of Cavendish.

My husband and my kids mocked Montgomery’s embellished prose, as I shepherded them along Lover’s Lane behind Green Gables. But my soul felt positively inspired reading the signs and roaming the landscape I spent so much of my adolescence imagining.

The island of 180,000 residents feels much the same as it did when I first came in 1992, despite visits from 1.7 million tourists annually.

We stayed in one of many rustic cottage enclaves in Cavendish, the community Montgomery fictionalized as Avonlea, about a 40-minute drive from the provincial capital of Charlottetown.

I rose at sunrise to run to the red cliffs and white sand beach of the nearby national park. We rented e-bikes to ride the cliffside path a few miles to North Rustico harbor, where fishing boats line the docks of brightly painted huts. We saw the Anne & Gilbert musical in Charlottetown and ate unlimited mussels at the New Glasgow Lobster Supper, which started in the 1950s as a fundraiser for a farming organization.

Yet it was the unexpected encounters that thrilled me, like the lupines or the red PEI heart affixed to the Port Borden Pier lighthouse, which greets visitors at the entrance to the island, by the 1997-built Confederation Bridge.

That’s the magic of travel: Whether it’s a piece of sea glass or a fabulous French fry, you never know what you’ll discover.

Nova Scotia

I had been most excited about seeing Lunenburg, a UNESCO Heritage site recognized as the best surviving example of a planned British colonial settlement in North America. The 1753-founded town is as bright as lobster buoys, with tiers of colorful wooden homes and businesses perched over the harbor. The tall ship Bluenose II, which graces Canada’s dime, is docked there.

These calves, which we met while renting e-bikes from their owners, must have one of the best animal views on PEI.

The town is pretty, but it wasn’t my favorite spot we visited. Neither was Peggy’s Cove, a tiny fishing village with a lighthouse that has starred in many a calendar. Though my son did rave about the lemon aioli fries at Hunky Dory, a new food stand nearby, and I was thrilled to buy two vintage lobster buoys from a well-worn shanty.

Peggy’s Cove, on St. Margaret Bay, is just one of such picturesque coves dotting the winding shoreline of Nova Scotia. You can explore such coves around Yarmouth or along Cape Breton on the Cabot Trail, which is supposed to be gorgeous in the fall.

Peggy’s is only about a half-hour from Halifax, though, a city of a half-million residents. The city is home to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, where my Opa entered the country in 1951. He sailed on the S.S. Volendam from Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and we saw his name written in the passenger records. The museum shows what immigrants encountered at the pier, and detailed the country’s immigration policies, which until 1967 favored northern Europeans under the guise of climate adaptability. The timeline was eye-opening, grappling with history of discrimination.

We shared what we learned with the cousins we stayed with, north of Halifax. They took us mud sliding on the banks of the Shubenacadie River, where every day you can watch the tidal bore, where a wave of water surges up the river against the current. The river empties into the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the world, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Over two weeks, my family drove 2,600 miles to tour the Canadian Maritimes.

My kids loved getting sliding down the bank and getting covered in red mud, feeling like they were in Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Note: wear old, dark clothes, since that red mud will never totally wash out.

New Brunswick

Our landing spot with cousins in Canada’s only officially bilingual province was the Miramichi, a wide-branching river that empties into the gulf. The river is a magnet for bass fishing in May.

It’s not the most touristy area of the province. That belongs to Fundy Trail Parkway, a scenic drive with hiking and biking trails, lookouts, beaches and waterfalls. Other popular destinations include the Hopewell Rocks, the Reversing Falls and Magnetic Hill.

But in Miramichi, we toured Wilson’s Point, a historic Scottish cemetery, and Metepenagiag Heritage Park, a First Nations museum that focuses on the Mi’kmaq people, who lived there for thousands of years. The museum is built near the Augustine Mound, a 2,500-year-old burial mound with artifacts that show relationships with other First Nations communities as far as the Ohio River.

It’s built on an oxbow bend of the river.

And yes, I couldn’t stop exclaiming over the river view, either.