Ottawa, Canada






Backside of Parliment with library.




East Block Parliment Buildings

Honestly, before finding Ottawa on my map to locate the best route in order to go visit my friends Sarah & Steve’s parents house (Sarah’s parents), I probably couldn’t have correctly stated that it was the capital of Canada or pinned its location on a map…and I have a pretty good grasp of global geography.  I might have said that Toronto or Ontario was the capital, which are sorta technically correct, except that Toronto is the Capital of Ontario and Ottawa is in Ontario.  It was never on my list of places to visit, but I sure am glad that I did.  It was great.  First, Valerie and Sherman were really nice, hospitable, interesting to get to know and fun to hang out with.  Might have had a little too much wine and a little too much fun even and Valerie and I may be taking an RV excursion together sometime next year.  The visit to Ottawa gave a really great historical basis and focal point for all of Canada, which has a surprisingly rich history and vast diversity that remains nearly fully intact today between French, British and First Nation indigenous populations that are now fully recognized with their own province (Nunavut as of 1999).  All of this history, governmental systems and cultural diversity was of course well represented and explained in Ottawa.  The parliamentary buildings were extremely gothic and gargoyle infused, and it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see a quidditch game going on overhead.  The guided tours were very enlightening, the view from the top of the Peace Tower (how awesome is it that they have a Peace Tower at the center of their government) was great, and the museum of Civilization had some amazing presentations on the Arctic Circle and Canadian History.  Still a little fuzzy on all the details of the governmental system, but then apparently so are many Canadians (well, for that matter most Americans are of course fuzzy on our own system…electoral college and all that).  Queen Victoria selected the site for Ottawa in the 1800’s specifically because it was defendable against America.  Hard to remember that Canada is still technically semi-British and that Britain and America spent nearly a hundred years attacking each other by way of the Canadian and American frontiers. 



Native art.  Museum of Civilization.



I found a great campground just on the edge of town that is run by the government as the municipal campground, but then got booted from there for Labor Day weekend because I didn’t have reservations to ensure my space through the weekend.  Seems that America and Canada share the same holiday on the same day…who knew.  I moved over to another RV park even closer to Valerie and Sherman’s house and ended up meeting the nicest Canadian guy from Ontario now living full time in his RV with his wife.  The two of them have been to every far reaching point one can drive in Canada.  He gave me a lot of pointers and information and blew flames on my desire to see the Maritimes.  Did not know before this trip that they were called the Maritimes, but they include Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island (didn’t even realize that this was its own province), and Labrador & Newfoundland (Labrador being the mainland and Newfoundland being the island).  He also fueled my fire to drive the RV down into Mexico. He gets scheduled into an RV caravan down through Mexico and breaks off onto his own in the Yucatan where they park for the winter and tour around in their truck seeing the sites, beaches, ancient ruins, etc…I am so there in the next couple of years!  Better go get my Rosetta Stone Spanish edition dusted off.



Museam of Civilization...how cool is that building face!



 

A funny theme that I kept hearing from people that I talked to in Ottawa is the official bilingual status of Canada…French and English of course.  Ottawa is strategically placed across the Ottawa River from Quebec and a portion of the capital buildings and offices are actually in French speaking Gatineau across a relatively short bridge.  The English speaking mostly British heritage citizens of Canada seem a bit incensed with the official bilingual status of Canada for a few interesting reasons.  One being that everything in Canada must legally be in both English and French and there is a Language Police division that constantly enforces this law and applies fines to anyone that breaks this law, except that in Quebec (the only French speaking province) this law is apparently not enforced at all.  Nothing in Quebec is in English…and I know this first hand (see my story from my first few day in Montreal where I spent a very frustrating  30 minutes trying to get gasoline into my Jeep), no street signs, no instructions, no visitor signs, no tourist placards, nothing governmental nor commercial is in English.  But, I heard some interesting stories about how the language police will shut down a website or apply fines to a local retailer that might be situated in British Columbia and thousands of miles away from Quebec and selling local goods only to local customers that haven’t printed all of their signs in both languages or included a French language option for their entire website.  I can also tell you that only half of the websites that I visited in Quebec have an English option.  The second interesting story that I heard is that any official communications going out of any official offices in the local, regional, provincial or central governments must all be translated into both languages even if you are simply generating an announcement to 5 colleagues that you know all speak English.  Their version of the Library of Congress (which I visited and has some amazing architecture) is filled with everything in duplicate language.



Ridea Canal Winter - Stays below freezing the entire winter.



Rideau Canal Summer

   After more socializing with Sarah’s family and a great bike ride across and through the main sections of Ottawa on a nice warm day (was a comfortable 82 degrees, but they were all complaining about the extreme heat), I headed back out to Montreal for a couple more days, then plotted my coarse east toward Quebec City.



Parliment and Peace Tower





 


 

  
 

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

My view of the city from the Yacht Club.

So I finally made it, and WOW is it French.  I of course knew this to a degree, but I had envisioned something between how Spanish Mexico is and how French Louisiana is, where people held on to their culture strongly, but that getting around with English was no problem.  Montreal is the second largest French speaking city in the world, just behind Paris, and it is quite a large city with over 3 million people (the small town of Washington, DC has about 1 million people in all of the MD-DC-VA metro region.  The language barrier was definitely a problem at times.  One day I was exiting a parking lot and the lot attendant (who spoke only French) said “$%&#%$$ gauche $%^&$*##”, and since there was a double yellow line in the middle of the road, I figured he was reminding me not to turn left out of the lot, but when I turned right I realized that the lanes were all reversible, big red “X” above my lane ahead and all traffic coming my way…clearly he instructed me to “be sure to turn LEFT only.”  Another day, it took me literally more than 30 minutes to get fuel in my car because the only attendant on duty only spoke French and the damn automated fueling terminal didn’t have a working “English” language button and was apparently asking me stupid questions in French, like do I want to come inside to get a coffee after fueling, and crap like that. 

Other customers were extremely helpful in translating at retail shops, grocery stores, etc.  The city is very much like a typical East Coast city with some interesting historical sections, cluster of tall buildings and a huge amount of Catholic Cathedrals.  Honestly it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, but then again, I was making this excursion to discover and find out for myself.  Many of my East Coast friends over the past 20 years have raved about Montreal, but I now realize that was specifically geared toward club hopping and partying…it is very much like going out in Europe in that regard. 

Not only did people of Quebec (name of this French Canadian Province of course)  keep their language and religion in tact, but they also kept their French looks and cultural style strong.  Probably because much of their advertising, media, news and entertainment is  generated in France and carries with it a very European style.  They are very “French” looking, dark hair and pale skin is common, with lots of short old “French” men sitting around in parks or cafes. They all drive like crazy Parisians in little fast cars.  Driving is of course a fun challenge with everything in French and all road names using long 8 word Catholic names (blvd. Saint-Roy-du-la-Riche Rue).

My local grocery store was amazing with access to a huge selection of pate, terrine, cheeses, dried meats, olives, etc.  They carried bison, rabbit, moose, deer, emu and other exotics, and this was simply in their equivalent of a Safeway.  And again, back to the French theme, every single thing was in French.  How they would get every single package in the entire grocery store in French in North America surrounded on all sides by English speaking Provinces and States is amazing to me.

Farmer's Market.  Open 7 days a week and under permanent structure.  Why do we not have these in America?

The city sits on the St. Lawrence River (which of course Lobo had to go swimming in) and was established in the 1600’s.  It is named after Mont Royal, the mountain (no larger than the Laguna Hills, but typically called a “mountain” under East Coast standards) directly in the center of the city.  For half of my visit, I stayed in the “suburbs”, which like France is actually rolling farmland with clusters of “villages” that might include a tiny convenience store, maybe a commuter rail stop and a cluster of houses all tightly webbed together around the village.  Nobody was living out on half an acre in a McLean style McMansion.  The entire city is surrounded by farmland within 20 minutes drive in every direction.  For the second half of my stay, I had found that the local yacht harbor had an RV facility that was not advertised at all and only luckily did I stumble upon it while driving around.  It provided electrical hook ups and was literally 3 minutes drive across the river and into downtown.  Had a great view of the city.  I of course did all of the touristy stuff, saw the sites, took some tours and generally hung out for a few weeks soaking in the culture and language.  I chugged through my Rosetta Stone French every night for about an hour and by the time that I departed Montreal for Ottawa I could talk to the neighbor’s 2 year old just fine.

Canadian Border & Plattsburgh, NY

    After dropping Mike off at the rental car office in Burlington, Alex, Lobo and I headed north toward Canada.  It was only a one hour drive to the border and another 45 minutes from there to Montreal (apparently most of the 45 million Canadians live within about an hour or two drive from the US), so I started visualizing the border crossing elements…dog papers, fruits and vegetables, and my passport.  Hmmm…did I pack my passport?  I am pretty sure that I did because I remember getting it out and looking at the expiration date, but wait, maybe that was to make sure that it didn’t expire before Rhonda and I traveled to Morocco in February?  Then I realized that I can’t exactly pull up to the security line and start searching through the RV for my passport, that could take hours.  Well, turns out that I did leave my passport at home, which is pretty commonplace for me traveling in North America now that I have left it at home twice after crossing into Mexico and once attempting the same into Canada.  Before Sept. 11 one did not carry a passport into Mexico or Canada.  I have been to British Columbia at least 4 times and Mexico about 40 times without a passport.  It just doesn’t sink in for me…I guess old and set in my ways.  Long story short, I made new plans to hang out in Northern Vermont and New York for the weekend while waiting for my passport to arrive by FedEx.  I was about to pay for 3 nights at a campground when I shared my lame story with the ladies checking me in and they said that they were pretty sure that I could cross into Canada with basic ID and then have my passport FedEx’d into Montreal, for it was only needed to coming back into the States.  So I decided what the heck, I would try to run the boarder and see what happens.  I almost made it through, but the two French Canadian border guards (I picked a tiny crossing point on purpose…there were only two there total) argued with each other for 30 minutes in French about whether to let me in.   They kept asking me if I had a copy of my birth certificate…now who in the heck carries that around?  They finally decided that I needed some proof of US citizenship so that they didn’t get stuck with me in their country and no way for them to deport me if needed (apparently Canada now has a very high immigration flow and it is getting complicated for them to manage).  It was an interesting experience and worth the effort, but back to the campground.   I had a very productive weekend cleaning the RV, doing nearly 2 weeks worth of laundry, running errands and catching up on a pile of work that I ignored for the past 10 days.  I met a really great group of people from Buffalo that were really friendly and talkative and all my age.  I was the only one in my camping section when I went to bed, but when I awoke, the other 8 spaces were filled with a caravan of friends all with pop-up campers who had travelled from Buffalo to Plattsburgh, NY for a week-long vacation together.Still can’t figure out how Plattsburgh is a vacation from Buffalo?While on the road, I figured that I might catch up on my Spanish Rosetta Stone studies, but then Mike pointed out how lame that was while traveling through Quebec.  Plattsburgh, where I spent the weekend, is just 30 minutes from Quebec and wow were there a lot of French speaking Canadians vacationing there.  Most of the language around me was not in English.  So, on an impulse purchase, I grabbed the Rosetta Stone French package at the check out counter at Best Buy and decided that I would redirect my language plans.  Good thing…cause I had no idea how French the Province of Quebec was going to be!

Burlington, VT

Mike was originally going to fly back from Plattsburgh, NY, but there were some issues about all the connections that were needed and Maxx in a doggie carry bag…something that we had no experience with and could have turned out Tasmanian Devil bad.  So he decided to rent a car and drive home, but turns out that there are very few places that will rent you a car in one state for drop off in another state, so we had to redirect our travels toward Burlington, Vermont.  No problem…what do we care, it is all part of the adventure, and I was very happy to have the excuse to see Burlington.  Enroute to the ferry to cross Lake Champlain, was an interesting natural phenomenon billed as the Little Grand Canyon of the East, AKA Ausable Chasm, NY.  We decided that we needed to check that out, and were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just a tourist trap.  There was a pretty hefty fee for taking a simple hike through the chasm, but it turned out that the cost was well worth it and easily justifiable given that they have had to rebuild the trails, bridges, and cliff-hanging walkways a number of times in the past 15 years with massive floods that keep wiping everything out (wouldn’t want to be down there when a flash flood arrives).  The walk was great, the scenery was beautiful and we discovered at the end that the 20 minute raft or inner-tube ride down the rapids would have likely been a fun addition to our ticket, especially as warm as it was. The chasm by the way was formed over millions of years from water pressure caused by the river that flows through sandstone, causing collapses of the harder rock types until eventually the chasm that we experienced was well formed.  The ferry crossing point was only a couple miles away and was a fun hour long cruise down the middle of an extremely large lake with a drop off downtown Min St. Burlington, Vermont.  The city is built around the edge of the lake with Main St. running 2 blocks and parallel to the lake edge.  Apparently Burlington is the smallest capital city of any state capital, and the largest city in Vermont, and the smallest of all cities billed as the largest for their state.  Fun useless facts, but did describe Burlington quite well.  The airport where Mike picked up his car felt just like the Arcata / Eureka airport in my tiny Northern California college town of Humboldt.  Turned out that Mike’s trip home took him 10 hours, so we had in effect traveled for about 10 days to cover about 10 hours worth of geographical distance…and now I continue the adventure on my own.

Fort Ticonderoga, Lake Champlain, NY

Today we did another one of our “hmmmmm….that sounds intriguing” maneuvers after seeing the signs pointing off the highway toward Fort Ticonderoga.  Turned out to be a great decision where we enjoyed the scenic route out to and up around Lake Champlain before and after the fort visit.  The fort itself was saved over the years and rebuilt by the generosity of one individual William Pell, who acquired it the 1800’s and spent his whole life rebuilding it for us to see and experience.  Amazing how the government doesn’t have enough foresight to ensure that our heritage isn’t pilfered and left to crumble.  Without people like Pell we wouldn’t have Mt. Vernon, Monticello, Williamsburg and many other national historic landmarks.  During our visit we watched a well orchestrated presentation of the Drum and Fife corps, and learned that the purpose of the corps was to provide a communication system to the troops.  Always did wonder why they would be concerned with musical flutes in the background while cannons are firing, people are dying and mayhem is engulfing everything.  Well, the low base of the drum and the high pitch of the flute allowed the commanders to give specific commands that were broadcast by this corps, for both daily routines (they didn’t wear watches of course and didn’t know what time to get up, eat and get to work), and for the battlefield.  The fort was apparently a significant military control point between the British forces in Canada and American forces during the Revolutionary War, which started out as a British fortress and ended up under American control thanks to Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, both very famous names for very different reasons.  Poor Arnold, come to learn, mostly switched sides after the newly emerging American Government put him through the ringer, by giving away medals of honor to military personnel who lied and took credit for his achievements, continually pressing charges against him for “dishonorable actions” that were always disproven by investigators, and finally handed a bill for funds owed to the US Congress after having donated most of his fortune to the revolutionary cause…which is apparently the straw that broke Arnold’s back and drove him to the more noble behavior of his British ancestry.  Granted, he could have just walked over the line and switched sides without trying to take assets with him (the fort at West Point), but interesting to learn more than I ever saw in my high-school history books on the guy.  These are things that I did not learn at the fort, but rather part of my reasons for making this trek…find something interesting and dig into the culture and history online while having lunch in the parking lot.

Adirondacks, NY



Schroon River Kayaking



Last night we arrived to the Adirondacks and a nice RV park set in a grove of tall pine trees so that the atmosphere was soaked in everything pine…the ground…the air…the canopy.  We decided that we would stay here a couple of nights and do some kayaking on the Schroon River using our new inflatable kayaks that we purchased months ago and haven’t had the opportunity to try out.  After spending nearly two hours trying to figure out how they inflated (not as easy as putting your lips to the nozzle and blowing) we were finally underway.  The plan involved leaving the bikes at the camp, driving the Jeep and kayaks up river a few miles and kayaking down to the camp so that we could bike back later to get the Jeep.  Everything worked great except that it turned out that the only place where the river actually flowed downhill was at our camp where we saw some minor rapids, but everything else upriver was really just an extension of a lake and didn’t actually flow, thus a very long 3+ mile rowing exercise. After a long nap from so much exercise I got enjoyed a few chapters of “The Help” lounging around outside in our paradise pine grove.   The Adirondacks are much more vast mountains than the Poconos or the Catskills.  We decided to stick to the main route and skip along the edge of the mountains since we couldn’t have our luxury RV hookups and I couldn’t find too many motivating points of interest deeper in the mountains except for the experience of “getting away” and we were already doing that.  Would rather see more of Vermont, Canada, Maine and other places…so we pushed on our current path up the edge of the mountains and toward Lake Champlain and Canada.  We have lots of the same mountains nearby the farm in Virginia and a whole state of mountains just an hour away…West Virginia to explore and get lost in.

Adirondack Mountains

Hudson River Valley, NY

Hudson River Valley



We continued our trek through the Hudson River Valley, which was really beautiful.  It is surrounded by mountains on each side with rolling hills in the center and the Hudson River meandering down the middle.  It is unlike the flat farmland of the Shenandoah Valley and more of a wooded parkland dotted with massive homes and historic small towns.  We crossed the river and drove down to Hyde Park to visit Franklin Delano Roosevelt's summer home and presidential library.  He and Eleanor are both buried there.  We had a nice tour and learned a few things, such as that a part of the early Roosevelt fortune was made on the opium trade with China when it was still legal in America.  We had intended to visit the Vanderbilt estate, which is nearly next door, but our fat RV wouldn't fit through the entrance gates that were built in the 1800's to accommodate horse carriages.  We had also planned to visit the house and grounds of a NY artist from the last century called Olana, but decided to head on to Albany in order to gather some parts to repair the transfer case of my brand new Jeep, which only has 4,000 miles.  After dealing with our first city along this route, we crossed over the Erie Canal and headed into the Adirondacks.  They are more impressive than the Catskills or the Poconos and appear to spread farther and wider than the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  A bit like West Virginia, but much cooler.  We enjoyed our first night in the 50's last night...sleeping was nice.   We found ourselves a decent pine forest RV Campground along a river and may attempt some kayaking for the next day.  One very unfortunate reality for my goal of luxury camping using this RV is that the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation has been given the responsibility of managing all of the campgrounds in both  the Catskills and the Adirondacks, and they have decided that both locations should remain fully natural and primitive.  Not only have they decided to leave the campgrounds without water, electricity of dumping stations, they have actively ripped those things out of the campgrounds that were originally built to include them.  The state campgrounds in all other locations around the state are managed by the NY State Dept. of Parks and Recreation and all include full hook-ups...go figure.  I am sure that the decision to keep this place totally primitive (as if a road, parking space, picnic benches and fire pits is "primitive") has much to do with the politics of supporting hundreds of private campgrounds and resorts scattered all over the region.  Unfortunate for us and excelling our progress toward reaching Montreal sooner.

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