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Prince Edward Island

Best of Prince Edward Island

Program No. 22391RJ
Discover why Prince Edward Island is known as the “Garden of the Gulf” as you explore verdant landscapes, savor locally grown cuisine and experience grand traditions of art and culture.

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Prefer to enroll or inquire by phone? 800-454-5768
Select your type of room
Price will update based on selection
Prices displayed below are based on per person,doubleoccupancy.
DATES & starting prices
PRICES
Jun 11 - Jun 17, 2024
Starting at
2,649
Jul 16 - Jul 22, 2024
Starting at
2,699
Aug 6 - Aug 12, 2024
Starting at
2,699
Aug 27 - Sep 2, 2024
Starting at
2,699
DATES & starting prices
PRICES
Jun 11 - Jun 17, 2024
Starting at
3,219
Filling Fast!
Jul 16 - Jul 22, 2024
Starting at
3,299
Aug 6 - Aug 12, 2024
Starting at
3,299
Aug 27 - Sep 2, 2024
Starting at
3,299

At a Glance

Explore Prince Edward Island, a land of undeniable yet simple charms, where Maritime and Acadian history is proudly told. Set out in Charlottetown to discover the city’s heritage as one of the earliest crossroads of European exploration and settlement in North America. Experience rural P.E.I., coastal outposts and the extensive National Park system, home to the splendid and well-preserved dunes.
Activity Level
Keep the Pace
Walking up to two miles during field trips; some destinations will have stairs but no elevator. Full days, including some bus rides of 4-5 hours.
Small Group
Small Group
Love to learn and explore in a small-group setting? These adventures offer small, personal experiences with groups of 13 to 24 participants.

Best of all, you’ll…

  • Experience P.E.I.’s agriculture and cuisine firsthand, and get to know the landscapes and people driving the island’s world-class food industries.
  • Immerse yourself in the island’s cultural heritage, including the settings that inspired the classic "Anne of Green Gables" and the life and times of its author, as well as the island’s unique musical tradition merging Scottish, Irish and Acadian roots.
  • Learn about the National Park system’s diverse ecosystem of hundreds of species of plants, animals and birds, archaeological digs from 10,000 years of settlement and a unique dune system overlooking white-sand beaches.
Featured Expert
All Experts
Profile Image
Susan Dalziel
Susan has lived on Prince Edward Island for her entire life. As a teacher with 30 years of experience and Road Scholar group leader for 10, Susan loves sharing knowledge of her home province with visitors. For the past 30 years, Susan has dedicated herself to the promotion and development of women’s hockey. Getting others involved and spreading the joy of Canada’s favorite sport is a true passion of hers. When the snow melts, Susan can often be found gardening, and she knits year round.

Please note: This expert may not be available for every date of this program.

Profile Image of Susan Dalziel
Susan Dalziel View biography
Susan has lived on Prince Edward Island for her entire life. As a teacher with 30 years of experience and Road Scholar group leader for 10, Susan loves sharing knowledge of her home province with visitors. For the past 30 years, Susan has dedicated herself to the promotion and development of women’s hockey. Getting others involved and spreading the joy of Canada’s favorite sport is a true passion of hers. When the snow melts, Susan can often be found gardening, and she knits year round.
Profile Image of Wayne MacKinnon
Wayne MacKinnon View biography
Wayne MacKinnon grew up on a family farm in Prince Edward Island and has always been interested in agriculture and rural issues. An award-winning author, Wayne has written extensively on Prince Edward Island politics and history. He co-wrote a study on traditional, sustainable agriculture on the Island and is a lecturer in political science at the University of P.E.I. For over 20 years, Wayne has held senior communications roles at the Prince Edward Island Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and later, the Department of Finance.
Visit the Road Scholar Bookshop
You can find many of the books we recommend at the Road Scholar store on bookshop.org, a website that supports local bookstores.
The Atlantic Coast, A Natural History
by Harry Thurston
Thurston illuminates the geology, plant and animal life and nature of the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland and Labrador through the Maritime Provinces and the Northeastern United States south to Cape Hatteras in this illustrated, engaging survey.
A Traveller's History of Canada
by Robert Bothwell
A readable and admirably concise march through Canadian history from prehistory to today, including a timeline.
Four Fish
by Paul Greenberg
New York Times journalist Paul Greenberg interviewed producers, fisherman and conservationists from across the globe for this eyewitness report on the past and future of wild fish, offering sensible alternatives to our current unsustainable interest in eating mostly sea bass, cod, salmon and tuna.
Fodor's Nova Scotia & Atlantic Canada, With New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador
by Inc. (EDT) Fodor's Travel Publications (Editor)
With its many photographs, great introductory chapters and practical travel information, this book is an excellent overview of northeast Canada and its attractions for visitors. Featuring separate sections on suggested places to visit, recommended walks, practical information, descriptions of restaurants and hotels, ratings of sights and a chronology of historic events.
Riptides: New Island Fiction
by Edited by Richard Lemm
A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away - Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster's aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies' candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor's scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the "red tongue...In the ranged jaws of the Gulf," and revising our perception of "the land of Anne."
A Field Guide to North Atlantic Wildlife
by Noble S. Proctor, Patrick J. Lynch (Illustrator)
A comprehensive pocket guide to commonly encountered marine mammals, seabirds and other marine life of Northeastern North America, from North Carolina to Newfoundland and the Canadian Maritimes.
Anne of Green Gables
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
This Norton Critical Edition of the immensely popular 1908 novel includes excerpts from Montgomery's journals, letters and juvenilia, as well as selections by Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and Louisa May Alcott.
Saltsea
by David Helwig
Birdsong, wind: here by the ocean every noise was surrounded by silence that reached all the way to the stars. Monica studied the white shingled building above the slope of green lawn, deep bays rising two storeys on each side of the front door and the windowed porch. You felt the big rambling construction must have a memory, old thoughts. Listen, I am the voice of what once was. I am as real as the beating of your hungry heart. A flash of sun blinded her, a pirouette of the dazzling god." So begins David Helwig's Saltsea. A lovely, meditative novel, a story about memory, and about how what once was continues to affect what is and what will be. It is the story of a place, of the family that used to own it, and the people who have been its caretakers. Saltsea, a hotel on the shores of Prince Edward Island, where people come for a brief time, their lives intersecting in intimate and unforeseen ways. The characters of Saltsea are finely drawn, with humour, love and compassion. Sadness and even tragedy are a constant here, but Helwig handles it all humanely, without sentimentality, and with the control of a writer at the height of his powers. Saltsea, befitting a novel so concern with memory, is not something you will soon forget.
The Silver Chief: Lord Selkirk and the Scottish Pioneers of Belfast, Baldoon and Red River
by Lucille H. Campey
Belfast, Prince Edward Island, founded in August 1803, owes its existence to Lord Selkirk. Its bicentennial is a timely reminder of Selkirk's work in Canada, which extended beyond Belfast to Baldoon (later Wallaceburg) in Ontario, as well as to Red River, the precursor to Winnipeg. Aptly named "The Silver Chief" by the five Indian chiefs with whom he negotiated a land treaty at Red River, the fifth Earl of Selkirk spent an immense fortune in helping Scottish Highlanders relocate themselves in Canada. Selkirk has been well observed through the eyes of the rich and powerful, but his settlers have been neglected. Why did they leave Scotland? Which districts did they come from? Why did they settle in Canada? Why did Selkirk help them? How successful were their settlements? What impact did they have on Canadas early development? Did Selkirk realize his ambitions for Canada? In answering these questions, Lucille H. Campey presents a new and powerful case for re-assessing the achievements of Selkirk and his settlers. Using a wealth of documentary sources, she reconstructs the sequence of emigration from Scotland to the three areas of Canada where settlements were founded. She shows that emigration took place in a carefully planned and controlled way. She reveals the self-reliance, adaptability and steely determination of the Selkirk settlers in overcoming their many problems and obstacles. They brought their rich traditions of Scottish culture to Canada and, in doing so, helped to secure its distinctively Canadian future. Together, Selkirk and his settlers succeeded against overwhelming odds and altered the course of history.
Across Canada by Story, A Coast-to-coast Literary Adventure
by Douglas Gibson
One of Canada’s premier storytellers shares a bunch of literary gems featuring his country’s preeminent writers. Inspired by the power of great stories, the raconteur guides readers from Haida Gwaii to Labrador with pieces on Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje and many more.
Anne of the Island
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Eighteen-year-old Anne leaves P.E.I. for college in Kingsport in this third heartwarming book about red-haired Anne Shirley.
Tide Road
by Valerie Compton
When Stella disappears, leaving her toddler and husband behind, her mother Sonia, a widowed farm wife and former lighthouse keeper, struggles to face the possibility that her daughter may not have slipped through the ice. She may have been pushed. In a intensely memorable narrative with the deceptive pull of an undertow, Sonia's past, a flotsam of lost dreams, bruised hopes, buried love, wells up to meet her. Confronted with her own history of choices and failures, Sonia is compelled to revise her perception of her daughter's life and dramatically change the way she lives her own. Compton is a deft draughtsman of character, whose powers of description, timing, and astounding revelation coalesce into a splendidly nuanced account of the unguessed-at legacies of a life shaped by choices.
National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America
by Jon Dunn
This guide is the veteran's choice for birding anywhere in the United States. Practical to use in the field, it has maps, illustrations and descriptions of the birds on facing pages.
1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal
by Christopher Moore
“In the 1860s, western alienation began at Yonge Street, and George Brown was the Preston Manning of the day.” So begins Christopher Moore’s fascinating 1990s look at the messy, dramatic, crisis-ridden process that brought Canada into being – and at the politicians, no more lovable or united than our own, who, against all odds, managed to forge a deal that worked. From the first chapter, he turns a fresh, perceptive, and lucid eye on the people, the issues, and the political theories of Confederation – from John A. Macdonald’s canny handling of leadership to the invention of federalism and the Senate, from the Quebec question to the influence of political philosophers Edmund Burke and Walter Bagehot. This is a book for all Canadians who love their country – and fear for it after the failure of the constitution-making of the 1990s. Here is a clear, entertaining reintroduction to the ideas and processes that forged the nation.





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