I'm sitting on the deck out in back of Lilly's Garden Guest Home, just outside O'Leary, Prince Edward Island. In a vivid, cloudless sunset, the red dirt of the newly furrowed potato fields – which begin where the lawn ends – looks like hot lava.

"Dave, take a look at the potato fields," I say to my son, who is behind me in our room.

"Yup, those are potato fields," Dave answers, and goes back to watching "Dragon Ball Z" on TV. Dave is entitled to ignore the sunset, and not just because you get a pass on sunsets when you're 14.  He is dead tired, all but immobilized – granted, not as tired as his old man, who is immobilized without qualification. We got off our bicycles an hour ago, after pedaling 40 miles from our starting point. Most of that distance was covered on the Confederation Trail, Prince Edward Island's 190-mile-long link in what will one day be a recreation path clear across the second-largest country on earth.

We were crossing an entire province, end to end, and the trip would take six days. Of course, Prince Edward Island is the smallest Canadian province, by far – you won't see us crossing Ontario anytime soon – and we kept things reasonably cushy by putting up in a snug B&B each night. Another thing working in our favor was the nature of the trail. Since it was created along an abandoned railway right-of-way, there wouldn't be any hellaciously steep climbs. Track grades generally keep to around 2 ½ doable for locomotives and for 51-year-old guys who are built more like locomotives than like Lance Armstrong. As for lithe, boundlessly energetic 14-year-olds – well, I wasn't worried about Dave.

Confederation Trail, Wiltshire

Still, 190 miles is 190 miles. I had plenty of time for this to sink in as I watched the island breeze by during the three-hour shuttle from Charlottetown, where we had picked up our rental bikes, to North Cape, where a lighthouse and a gift shop/information center mark the extreme northwestern tip of Prince Edward Island. Three hours, at 50 miles an hour . . . and the bike trail is a lot loopier than the highway.

Dave and I pedaled beyond the lighthouse, to where the Gulf of St. Lawrence nearly nipped at our spokes. One of the things I like about this kid is that he doesn't roll his eyes when I suggest something like this. A lot of teenagers would think it all too enthusiastic, and therefore uncool, to practically dip your wheels in the surf. But Dave, cool as he needs to be in his world, has no problem with going the extra distance just to say you did it.

At the info center we picked up our yellow ribbons that said "I visited North Cape." The idea is to show them at the other end of the island, at East Point, to get your end-to-end certificate. I also bought a copy of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, a book about a winsome orphan girl that is Prince Edward island’s iconic work of fiction.

That, of course, is when Dave got really cool.

The opening miles of the trip revealed one of the most surprising and wonderful aspects of Prince Edward Island. Here we were, bicycling along mile after mile of gorgeous oceanside, and the only development was the modest, well-spaced homes of lobstermen and farmers.  On our right were potato fields; on our left a short apron of grass led to the gravel shore, with a lobster boat beached here and there. There were no McMansions, no gates proclaiming "The Townhomes at Lobster Point." There was the land, and the ocean, and a small scattering of people who made their living on one or the other, or both. In North America, A.D. early 21st century, this was all but unheard of.

After five miles we turned inland to pick up the start of the Confederation Trail at the little town of Tignish. "The trail begins in the park, just a block behind us," said the woman in the post office, and there it was. It began in the park, and disappeared into the woods.

In the woods it stayed, for those first few miles. We were on a trail a bit wider than a railroad car, tunneling through a hardwood forest. After the headwinds we had hit coming down from the point, the trees were welcome protection.

The trail surface took some getting used to. We were riding hybrids, more mountain bike than road bike, and the fat tires bit into the gravel just enough to make even the gentle inclines strenuous, yet never letting us coast on the equally gentle downgrades. You do this trail, and you've come to pedal. Do it with a 14-year-old, and you've come to watch him pedal, getting smaller and smaller as he recedes ahead of you.

A few miles south of Tignish, though, I saw Dave stopped up ahead.  He wore a lingering look of surprise when I reached him, and I asked if anything was wrong.

"Did that bird attack you?" he asked.

"What bird?"

"A mother something – a quail or something – she had about 15 chicks behind her, crossing the trail, and when the last one flew after me and dove into the bushes, she puffed out her feathers and stretched her wings and came after me. I took off on the bike. Did you see her?"

I hadn't. We looked her up in our bird book, and sure enough it was a ruffed grouse, exhibiting typical mother grouse behavior.

By mid-afternoon, the woods-tunnel had become sporadic, and we were treated to  expansive vistas of this jewel box of a province – open, rolling farm country, the soil brick red. "The million-acre farm" is one of Prince Edward Island's sobriquets, and potatoes are by far the main crop. All I wanted was to stop and enjoy the view for a while. But damn the mad grouse and full speed ahead, Dave was far out in front.

It was nearly 7 p.m. when we got to O’Leary, where we had reservations at Lilly's.

"This town doesn't look too big," I said to Dave. "Probably no restaurants close by. You want to just call for a pizza if we can, and have it sent to the guest house?"

"I don't feel like pizza."

"You want to get back on our bikes after we check in, and go looking for a restaurant?"

"Mushrooms and green peppers," was all Dave answered.

The next day, we pedaled 44 miles to the south shore town of Summerside. It was our longest day on the trail, and as the forest gave way it revealed more and more of the island's character. I had started reading

Cyclists in Summerside

Those mansionless shores along North Cape had been just a prelude to the main event: lovely neat farms, and settlements almost Brigadoon-fey in their lack of bustle or gimcrack commercial architecture. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the bike path's delivering us into old railroad depot towns that the main highway had passed by; here and there weÕd see an empty station or freight house, and even where they were gone their shades remained.

"Station used to stand right there, between my house and where you're standing," said an old man who got up from his garden work to get us cold water. "I miss the sound of the whistle. It wasn't a bad sound at all."

And then the man and his five-house junction were gone, and we were slicing through the fields, among the red-winged blackbirds and goldfinches.  Dave stopped and halted me with his hand, motioning for me to look at the hare that stood stock-still ahead on the trail. Not much later, a fox ran before us. The island seemed a self-contained place, a closed working loop of foxes and hares.

The next morning, we took a temporary detour off the trail and onto the streets of Summerside. I was curious about a place called the College of Piping, which is not a plumbers institute but a school devoted to teaching Highland bagpiping.  Almost too appropriately, we found it when we came upon a building where a man in full Scottish regalia – kilt, short cutaway jacket, the works – was practicing his pipes on the front steps.  Inside, a half-dozen men were similarly attired, amidst a gathering in conventional clothes. We had arrived just in time to see the dignitaries piped into a reception hall, where they were to announce the opening that weekend of the annual Summerside Highland Gathering.

We couldn't stay for the music and dancing and sports, but we did hang around long enough for me to have a word with a tall, square-shouldered fellow who stood out among the kilted company. I wasn't surprised that my first conversation with a man wearing a kilt took place in one of Canada's Maritime provinces, and not in Scotland itself. The local dedication to Celtic culture is earnest and intense, not unlike the Gallic loyalties that fire the Quebecois. The man turned out to be Scott MacAuley, director of the college, and he told me a bit about the place. "We have programs that last a week, a month or a year," he said. "You could start the beginner's week-long program this Monday. The year-long course is a sort of piper's finishing school."

Piper at Sea Cow Head

Instead we finished our Summerside sojourn with a round of miniature golf, a passion of ours, at a course next door to the College of Piping. Needless to say, it was called St. Andrew's. Ten minutes later, we were out on our bikes in the potato fields."They don't have suburbs here," Dave observed. "They have spudurbs."

An easy day's cycling, a bit over 30 miles, brought us close to Anne's own corner of the province – the Green Gables house itself is preserved not far away near the Gulf of St. Lawrence – and into the town of Hunter River. Our innkeeper there drove us to dinner, then came back to pick us up afterwards. (As one waitress remarked, "It's the Island way.")

"Wouldn't it be great if we could hit an all-you-can-eat mussel place tonight?" Dave had remarked earlier in the day, and he got his wish.  We plowed through three gallon-size buckets of the local mollusks, growing boys that we are.

"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." The Emerson quote was inscribed at the bottom of a painting in the dining room at the Trailside Cafe in Mount Stewart, our next-to-last night's stop. The painting was a copy of a work by Frank Patterson, an English artist of the 1920s who specialized in cycling themes – it showed a chap lounging against a tree, pensively smoking his pipe, his bike lying next to him and the open road beyond.  Health and a day . . . just the sort of day we had the following morning, when a half-dozen great blue herons took flight as we pedaled round the edge of a salt marsh. Rising gawkily into sudden grace, the big birds were emperors themselves.

Anne of Green Gables House

This would be a day of spectacular vistas, and buggy disappointment. By noon we were cruising along the shores of St. Peter's Bay, looking across to the tawny dunes of the Greenwich Peninsula. Neat rows of floats dotted the bay's calm waters. Too small and close together to mark lobster traps, they were a puzzle to us until another cyclist told us they were attached to mussel "socks" – strips of mesh to which cultivated mussels cling, awaiting harvest. "It's good to see," I said to Dave as we looked out over a float-speckled inlet, "that there's many another bucket out there."

The disappointment came in mid-afternoon, after we'd wheeled gradually uphill through a gloomy stretch of forest that seemed to belong not to grouse or herons or hares or foxes, but to deerflies. We came to a crossing where I was sure a spur trail would lead south to Souris, our final evening's destination.

"Is this Harmony Junction?" I asked a woman working in her yard.

"No, this is Bear RIver."

That meant six additional miles. Dave dragged me up off the grass, where I was guzzling water like the Not So Little Engine That Maybe Couldn't, and sheer will carried us on. But here our fortunes turned – it was all downhill, including the spur into the little seaside town of Souris.

"Dave," I said as we sped along the three-mile spur, "I don't care if I have to grow old and die in Souris. I'm not pedaling back up this thing to the main trail tomorrow."

I didn't have to grow old and die in Souris. The last day brought our only rain of the trip, and our B&B hostess kindly drove us back up to the main trail. We devoured the last 10 gentle downhill miles of woods in an hour. We both sped up as the rain tapered off and the end came into sight: a trellis, big enough to ride through.  We high-fived, coasted through the trellis and pulled up at the old station, now a railroad museum. There among the dining car china and the signal lanterns and the preserved stationmaster's office, it seemed as if we had biked back to 1928 and could easily catch the express back to Charlottetown.

But even if that had been possible, it would have been cheating: we weren't at the end of the island yet.  We took a left at the museum and hit the blacktop. From here, it was less than 10 downhill miles, with the Gulf of St. Lawrence crowding the land down to nothing, to the lighthouse at East Point. Of course Dave shot ahead. When I got to the left turn for the mile-and-a-half run to the lighthouse, I figured he was there already.

But there was no sign of him at the lighthouse, where there was a gift shop just like the one back at North Cape. Only one thing could have happened – in his exhilaration over finishing, Dave had overshot the lighthouse turn, and was now heading back toward Souris along the south coast road. There was no way I could catch him. I found a tour van driver who was heading back that way, and he said he'd watch for him. I all but shooed the driver's clients back on board so he could get going – I'd have flapped my wings at them if I'd been a mother grouse. After what seemed like hours, the van headed back for the main road.

But only a minute later, there was Dave, rolling down to the lighthouse, red dust on his saddlebags and a smile on his face. "I figured it out," he said.

"Well, don't get off," I said, picking up my bike. "Let's ride together out past the fence, to the edge of the cliffs."

So we did, with as much enthusiasm as at the beginning, tired uncool guys at the end of an island lark.

It all but says so on our certificates.