We have one of those Apple iPods onto which we have recorded every album and song we own (and some that we don’t). When traveling, we put it into shuffle mode, never knowing what will come up. Cruising toward our next three-night stop at Lake Superior Provincial Park, the iPod decided to play Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
The ballad, which came out in 1976, tells the tale of a Great Lakes freighter that sunk on November 10, 1975. A line in the song goes, “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they’d put fifteen more miles behind ‘er.”
Whitefish Bay, we quickly found out, lies less than a two-hour drive from our campsite.
Unlike the Fitzgerald crew, we didn’t have to battle the “gales of November…in the face of a hurricane west wind” during our stay. In fact, we had three days of mostly sunny, calm weather.
We’re camped at Agawa Bay in a beautiful campsite sandwiched between Trans-Canada Highway 17 and a huge sandy beach that arcs for miles. As dusk approaches (which happens around 9:30), that beach fills with campers gawking at the sunset.
We’ve got a lovely campsite close to a water spigot and the washroom/showers. Mosquitoes are few and so are children, which means the campsite is quiet except for one thing – the highway.
We are perhaps 25 metres off Trans-Canada 17, which means the traffic noise is constant. And it’s not just cars and trucks. I think that every Harley Davidson motorcycle in Canada is doing laps down Highway 17. They come by singly and in packs, their patented muffler noise reverberating off the walls. Fortunately, our A-frame is made from fiberglass bonded to inch-thick Styrofoam, which provides a fair amount of sound insulation.
One day we hiked a bit of the Coastal Trail along the shoreline. As it meandered away from the water, it passed through a tick-infested jungle so thick that Tarzan would have looked for vines so he could swing above it.
Our other layover day was spent doing chores with a short break to go down to look at some pictographs painted by ancient First Nations people. Located a few feet above water level on shoreline cliffs, the paintings have endured the elements for around 400 years according to the young naturalist on duty.
“Amazing,” I told her. “I’m lucky if the paint on my house lasts 20 years!”
We’re now in our fifth province, so I think it’s safe to relate some observations about driving in Canada.
Roads
While we’ve logged hundreds of kilometres on divided highways, we’ve not seen a real interstate-style highway with controlled-access overpasses and onramps outside of the cities. Elsewhere, side roads intersect divided highways and traffic lights control intersections in towns along the way.
Most of the Trans-Canada Highways seem to be well paved and a joy to drive on. So are some of the major provincial highways, but not all. We’ve motored on some that were in desperate need of repair. Pavement was crumbling and previous asphalt patches were disintegrating. The result was tire-shredding potholes in unexpected places. In other words, it was like driving across Colorado, so we felt right at home.
One of the more noticeable things about the highways are how clean they are. Roadside trash is seldom seen. Frequent pullouts hold animal-resistant trash and recycling bins, and we’ve seen many folks stop to simply deposit their trash.
Drivers
One nice thing about Canadian drivers is there aren’t that many of them. There are fewer Canadians than there are Californians, and they’re spread across the second largest country on Earth. We’re not alone on most highways, but we’ve yet to see anything resembling a traffic jam.
Across the prairie provinces, most drivers seem to obey the speed limit. In British Columbia and Ontario, nobody goes the speed limit, not even grandmas driving white Buicks. In Ontario, it might be because the speed limit is 90 kilometers per hour. That’s roughly the same as the 55 mph we had in the states, and we know how few ever followed that.
One thing that sets Canadian drivers apart from American is that they know how to pass. In the states, I’ll have drivers tailgate me for miles, afraid to pass on even long, downhill straights with no oncoming traffic. Up here, drivers pull out and go around given even the slightest opening. No passing zones are treated as mere suggestions.
Truckin’
Compared to the United States, there seems to be far less semi-truck traffic on the highways, although we’re finding more as we head east. Our experience with truckers suggests they are a very courteous group. On steep hills, we’ve seen drivers pull onto the shoulder to let faster traffic by. That’s something never seen back home.
Rest areas
Along the Trans-Canada highways, it seems every province puts up a huge rest area-information center at the entrance to their province. Beyond that, the highways are peppered with small rest areas featuring picnic tables and pit-toilet washrooms. They’re generally quite clean and they come about every 30-50 miles, which is very handy for those of us who OD on coffee in the morning.
Gas stations
Plan ahead seems to be the rule up here. Small towns along the highway frequently don’t have gas stations and even in fair-sized communities, there may be only one or two. With the Nissan averaging under 15 miles per gallon, our comfortable cruising range is around 200-250 miles. Even when we’re not down too far, we’ll fill up in major towns.
Petrol is pricy up here. We’ve found prices ranging from $0.83-1.20 per litre, which is the equivalent of $3.14-4.54 per gallon. Even at the current exchange rate, those are California-gagging prices. On the plus side, we’ve hit a few stations where attendants pumped gas and cleaned windows for us. And so far, stations which don’t have pay-at-the-pump, credit-card readers don’t require prepayment.
I’ll have to admit that there are some disadvantages to camping in an A-frame versus a box trailer, especially when it rains as it did as we were departing Ontario’s Lake Superior Provincial Park.
Breaking camp, all our box-trailering neighbors had to do is raise their stabilizer jacks, hitch up the tow vehicle and take off. Everything inside stays nice and dry inside.
We, on the other hand, must drop our top.
It’s a well-established (alternative) fact that the fiberglass covering the roof and sides has been scientifically formulated to cause water beads to cling to it with the tenacity of lint on a wool skirt. Folded up and driven down the road, that clinging water is ready to soak everything inside the trailer.
We’ve found two ways to alleviate the problem. The preferred way is to camp in the desert where rain is as rare as a mosquito-free campsite in Canada.
The other is to remove the clinging water before collapsing the trailer. Unfortunately, reaching the top of the trailer would be impossible for even the tallest NBA player. So, we’ve gone to the next best thing.
We bought a squeegee with a collapsible 12-foot pole, which we store in a tube of two-inch ABS pipe bolted to the trailer bumper. Using the squeegee like a window washer on a high-rise, I can scrape water from the roof and sides before Dianne drops the top. A quick wipe with a terry towel does the rest. We still put tarps over the bed and dining rooms, but the volume of water that we need to mop up afterwards is minimal.
Departing the Lake Superior campground, we look at those in drenched tents and canvas-sided tent trailers. We’re glad we’re not those folks.
From Lake Superior, we headed east to what (after Banff) may be Canada’s best known park – Algonquin. Lying more than a day’s drive away, we planned an overnight stopover at a lakeside provincial park a few dozen kilometres north of the main highway.
A year ago, we invested in a Garmin GPS navigation system to help us get around. Overall, I’d say it has been one of the best investments we’ve made. I can’t imagine trying to make our way through Canada using AAA maps, especially when my copilot-navigator could be the reincarnation of Wrong Way Corrigan.
In addition to directing us down the correct paths, Garmie, as we call her, tells us how far we still have to go and when we will arrive. She tells us our speed in kilometres (something my speedometer barely does), tells us what the speed limit is on our current piece of roadway and advises us to upcoming speed limit changes, railroad crossings and animal crossings. She tells us how far to the nearest gas station, the nearest restaurant and most importantly, how far it is to the next rest area potty stop.
Garmie does have two distinct weaknesses, however. The first is that she seldom knows where campgrounds are located, especially Forest Service campgrounds in the States and obscure provincial park campgrounds up here in the Great White North. We often resort to having her to navigate to the nearest town and hope that we can find directional signs from there.
The other weakness is that Garmie does not know road conditions. She is programmed to put us on the “fastest” route and sometimes that can involve some pretty rough pavement.
Such was the case when she directed us to Fairbank Provincial Park, our overnight stop between Lake Superior and Algonquin. Following her instructions, we turned off the main highway in a don’t-blink-or-you’ll miss it-wayside community. People stared as we negotiated a series of bumpy, residential streets, wondering why trailer-pulling Americans were cruising past their homes.
We cleared town and wove our way through hilly woods and farm country on a semi-paved road buckled with frost heaves and pitted with potholes. Years of attempted patches made the pavement look as if it was covered in asphalt pancakes. Fortunately, nothing fell off the trailer and by opening them carefully, our first beers in camp only sprayed a little.
Returning to the main highway the next day, Garmie directed us down a well-paved, far smoother roadway. Of course, we could have come in this way, but it would have been farther and thus a longer drive. That’s not how Garmie is programmed.
As they say around these parts, if you don’t like the weather, just wait. It’ll get worse.
We’re on a five-night stay in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. This massive reserve located in the hardwood “highlands” (our campground is 1,550 feet above sea level) lies due north of upstate New York. At 2,948 square miles, the park is larger than the entire state of Delaware.
One paved road cuts across the southern part of the park, accessing lakes, streams and forests. It offers at least six campgrounds ranging from pit-toilet primitive sites to those like ours featuring electrical hookups, flush toilets and free hot showers. About half the campers here are in tents, with the rest of us residing in smaller tent and travel trailers. Big rigs are few, perhaps because there are neither water nor sewer hookups, and the nearest and only dump station is eight miles down the road.
Day One – Clouds and Sun
The afternoon we arrived was sunny, the only such day they say they’d had for a week. We checked in, completed the paperwork and proceeded to our campsite which was flanked by a semi-dried mud puddle. Other than that, the site is wide, shady and with an electrical hookup reachable with our 30-foot cord.
Having a slew of chores to do, we spent our first full day hovering around camp. The previous day’s sunny skies were now partly cloudy but it was warm, dry and it felt good just to kick back and catch up on life.
Day Two – Not a Shred of Blue
Now under totally overcast, gray skies, we spent our second full day in Algonquin touring the park’s 56-kilometre main roadway. Our first stop was the Visitor Centre, which offered displays telling the story of this, Canada’s first provincialpark. Algonquin, was founded back in 1893 – a mere eight years after Canada’s first national park, Banff, was established.
Unlike American parks which are sometimes preserved to prevent logging operations, Algonquin was created partly for the benefit of logging. Our next stop, the park’s open-air logging museum, told the story of Algonquin’s timber history.
The cutting was done in the winter with loggers working from sunup to sundown in those frigid temperatures the Great White North likes to send our way in the height of winter. They bunked in dormitory cabins, neither bathing nor even changing their underwear for months on end. And to think we feel grody when we have to go two days without a hot shower.
On our way back to camp, we did a couple of short hikes that let us enjoy two of Canada’s national animals. Accompanying us on our hike down the Spruce Bog Boardwalk Trail were massive numbers of what we’ve heard is Canada’s national bird – the mosquito. We tried to follow the “don’t feed the wildlife” commandment, but despite dousing ourselves in repellant, they still managed to swarm in for a bite.
Our other major sighting involved beavers, Canada’s national mammal. Normally nocturnal, we spotted a pair of construction crew beavers repairing their dam in broad daylight. They would swim across the pond, gather mouthfuls of grass and then swim back to the dam where they apparently stuffed the grass to plug leaks.
Day Three – Wet and Drizzly
We’d already gone from sunny to overcast, so naturally our third full day started with rain. With the forecast predicting more of the wet stuff to follow, we cancelled our planned 10+ kilometre hike. Instead, we drove the main park road in the other direction to check out the park’s Art Centre. With the rain diminishing to a mere drizzle, we went for a short walk through the hardwood forest. That was followed by a drive to the Portage Store on Canoe Lake, which true to its name, was rife with canoers.
Besides renting canoes and selling souvenirs, the Portage Store features a small restaurant whose menu offered something for each of us – poutine for Dianne and burgers and beer for me. Dianne ordered pulled-pork poutine, which featured the meat and gravy poured over a bed of French fries topped with cheese curds. I had a bacon and cheddar burger accompanied by an unfiltered IPA brewed at an Ontario craft brewery. We never did make it to the canoes.
Day Four – All-day Downpour
Not liking the day three weather, of course, meant day four would be even worse. Sometime around 4:00 in the morning, the heavens opened and Noah-worthy rain drenched the campground. We awoke to a quagmire of campsite mud puddles. In the cold and wet conditions, we were glad to have a warm and completely dry trailer to retreat to. Three of our neighbors dwelling in tents were not so lucky.
We’d be even happier if we had reliable power. We’re connected to a 30-amp circuit, which should give us plenty of energy to run our portable space heater or trailer’s heat pump furnace.
The problem was voltage. To protect the trailer electronics, I installed a high-tech surge protector in the trailer. One of the things it does is monitor line voltage. If it goes too high or too low, the surge protector cuts off the power. The bottom limit on our 120-volt circuit is 103 volts and the power here has been ranging between 103-104 volts. With every dip, the electricity cuts off and the heater shuts down.
I think of those loggers from a hundred years ago. They went without heat for months during the winter. We’re complaining that we may have to resort to firing up the trailer’s 12-volt propane furnace.
As this shot of an arachnid atop Ottawa’s Notre-Dame Cathedral shows, the bugs in Canada’s capital can be frightening.
Actually, that’s Kumo a huge mechanical spider who will do battle with Long Ma, a huge mechanical dragon. It’s part of La Machine, a multi-part mechanical performance that took place on Ottawa’s streets the weekend we were there.
Fools that we are, Thursday night we joined a crowd larger than the Trump Inauguration to watch Kumo “awaken,” which proved to go slower than trying to get a teenager out of bed early. In all, it was about as exciting as a Lyle Lovett concert, which meant a lot of folks were enthralled. I wasn’t.
Other than that, our three days in Ottawa were productive. One day we went shopping for beer, shopping for propane, shopping for wine and shopping for more food.
The other two days we took the bus into downtown from our campground and wandered the streets. We visited the Asian Centre across from Parliament Hill. We crossed the river to see MosaiCanada, a park filled with plant-covered sculptures.
We walked the Rideau Canal, watched the locks in operation and saw a lot of people on pleasure craft who should have followed the adage of “dress for the body you have, not for the body you want.”
We walked around the Parliament building, photographed flowers at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories and walked down the Sparks Street Mall, which made Denver’s 16th Street Mall look like a second-rate imitation. [My editor disagrees. “Fifth rate,” she says.] Best of all, we drank craft beer and ate a dinner that included, of course, an order of poutine.
From Ottawa, we crossed over into French-speaking Québec province. I studied French for three solid years, just for the prospect of someday driving across French Canada. And here we are, camped in Québec, and I don’t remember a damn bit of what I learned.
It’s not my fault. Instead of one of those cute, young female grad students teaching beginning French, I got stuck with a guy who even his colleagues despised. Lacking motivation, it took me three full years to get the required two-year foreign language credit to graduate.
Fortunately, we’re finding that the locals know enough English to help us get by. But we’re in touristy areas – Mont Tremblant and Québec City. I suspect it will be far different when we reach the Gaspé Peninsula.
Now, if I could just remember how to order beer in French and ask how to find the bathroom.
It was good to get back to Québec City again. It was my fourth and Dianne’s third visit to the four-century-old capital of French Canada.
This time we did something different from what we’ve done on our previous visits. We finally saw the city in the summertime, not the dead of winter, and for the first time ever, we did not stay at the iconic Chateau Frontenac.
Instead of the upscale ($341 per night) Fairmont hotel overlooking the Saint Lawrence River, we stayed at an RV park (Camping de la Joie) where the only thing we looked over was our neighbor’s campsite.
We chose the campground not only because they got high reviews on RVparkReviews.com, but because they offered shuttle service to town. For a commercial campground complete with screaming kids, barking dogs and loud, cursing campers, it was quite nice. But it wasn’t the Fairmont.
Taking advantage of the shuttle, we headed into town to experience the city sans snow. Over a 10-hour walkabout, we revisited and photographed some old favorite spots, saw and photographed some new favorite spots and walked around, guidebook in hand, looking for spots.
Québec is definitely a tourist draw. While it’s the capital of French Canada, we heard more English being spoken here than at the Home Depot back home. Everywhere we stopped, the staff were multilingual, and even some of the signs and interpretative placards around town bore English translations. For us, knowing only how to kiss, not speak French, getting around was not a problem.
We were to meet our shuttle outside the Chateau Frontenac for the trip back. After shooting 884 photos and stopping for a farewell brew at Pape Georges, our favorite Lower Old Town bar, we climbed the endless stairs up the Cap Diamant cliffs to the hotel. We took a self-guided tour of their lobby restrooms, then walked around recalling warm memories of previous stays.
Tonight, instead of robes, slippers and evening turndown service complete with pillow mints, we will be bunking in our little trailer. We’ll hang out in our skivvies, don flipflops for the 50-yard walk to the bathroom and crawl into a bed whose pillows have never met a mint.
Our biggest problem will be trying to figure out just how to spend the $300+ per night we’ve saved by camping.
I’m not used to camping around kids. Other than occasional midweek nights spent in the mountains around Denver, our A-frame camping has been done in the spring or fall. We may encounter a few preschoolers out with their grandparents, but for the most part, shoulder-season campgrounds look like AARP conventions.
Now we’re up in Canada in the height of summer. School’s out and every campground we’ve hit has been filled with families enjoying the great outdoors.
Which brings us to an important discovery we’ve made about Canada. We now know what couples in the Great White North do to stay warm in the sub-zero temperatures of winter. About the only families we’ve seen without multiple offspring are young parents with infants.
Dianne’s family (five kids) were avid campers. Her parents, ages 91 and 85 still take their tent trailer out camping. She’s used to this.
My family were not campers. My dad’s idea of camping was a Motel 6. I only got out in the wild with my Boy Scout troop in Phoenix. That’s probably why for the most part I enjoy seeing kids camping with their parents.
It brings back a wealth of childhood memories I only wish I had.
Part of what makes camping special is the ability to converse with other campers, something that seldom happens when bunking in motels.
We’ve had long conversations with fellow campers as we’ve traveled through Canada, and through that, we’ve learned a lot about life in the Great White North. Because we don’t speak the language, that hasn’t happened yet here in French-speaking Québec.
The inability to converse in French has not been a problem for things that really matter. So far, campground check-in clerks have all spoken passable English, as have the gas station and store clerks we’ve dealt with. And because many of our words and theirs have similar roots, we do a passible job at translating signs.
It’s meeting strangers in a campground that has failed us. In English-speaking Canada, campers are constantly greeting each other with friendly hellos. I even had a guy who’s face was covered in shaving cream greet me when I rushed into the bathroom to relieve myself, and Dianne had a long conversation with a lady in the next shower stall over one day.
That hasn’t happened here in Québec. Both Dianne and I have made an effort to smile and say “bonjour” when passing other campers. At best, we get a perfunctory “bonjour” grunted back. Most of the time, we get nothing. More often than not, we’ve both found people averting their eyes when we approach, long before we utter a sound.
Please understand that we’re not neophyte travelers. We’ve extensively traveled independently around the world, often in places where nobody speaks a word of English. Not knowing the local language is nothing new for us. A smile and a friendly greeting are nearly always returned in kind.
Perhaps it’s our clothes that give us away, or maybe they remember we’re the couple with the Colorado car and perhaps they don’t like Americans. In any event, it’s a bit disconcerting to be rather rudely ignored.
Some English-speaking Canadians I’ve talked to over the years say they don’t like traveling in French Canada. Maybe we’re finding out why.
We just discovered a good reason for pulling a short trailer.
Today we boarded the ferry for the 65-minute voyage across the Saint Lawrence. We lined up behind a guy pulling a trailer that must have been about 30 feet long.
With the tide out and the boat heavily loaded, the ferry floated well below the entry ramp. Vehicles had to enter down a short, steel ramp that sat at about a 30-degree angle.
The 30-footer’s tow vehicle went down nice and easy, as did the front of the trailer. The problem began when the trailer wheels reached the boat deck. The front of the trailer leveled out while its hinter end was still high on the ramp.
The scraping of metal on metal was as piercing as a scream in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The driver stopped, but there was nothing he could do. He had to continue forward. By the time he parked, both of his rear stabilizer jacks were completely severed from the frame. His bumper had scrapes on its underside, but somehow remained attached.
