Category: Trips

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 provincial park.  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 16^th 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.

Our little A-frame boarded without an issue.

We spent a couple nights camped along the Fjord du Saguenay, an inlet off the Saint Lawrence.  Our next stop was to be a two-night stay along the seashore in the town of Saint Simeon.

Experience in the States suggested that reservations needed to be made months in advance for national and provincial parks, but I was assured by fellow A-frame owners that we wouldn’t need to worry about them for commercial RV parks in Canada.

Two weeks before our planned arrival, I sent an e-mail to our desired Saint Simeon RV park.  No response.  I then tried calling several times, but nobody ever answered the phone.  Figuring that was a bad sign, I began calling alternative sites.  None had spaces available.

Back when we camped in the bed of a pickup truck, that wouldn’t have mattered.  We would have just pulled off the road and camped.  These days, we need a legitimate campsite.

With Saint Simeon apparently out of the picture, I started looking for alternatives.  A provincial park across the bay had a site available complete with power and water hookups.  It was a good 50 miles out of our way, but it was doable and I quickly reserved the spot.

It was a 90-minute drive to the ferry terminal and the ferry folks advised riders to be in line 90-minutes before departure.  That meant we needed to leave Fjord du Saguenay by 6:30 a.m.  I normally don’t even get out of bed that early, let alone get packed up, hooked up and caffeined up.

But we did it.  We made the ferry and got to our next campsite in plenty of time to get set up before the rain hit.  A quick stop at a Tim Horton’s along the way took care of the caffeine need.

After starting in the Rockies, crossing the prairies and going for days through the North Woods, we have finally reached the Atlantic.  Our original plan, of course, was to go from ocean to ocean, but our start on the Pacific got nixed due to a three-week delay when my surgeon insisted on doing a slice-and-dice on my hand.

We’re now circling Québec’s Gaspe Peninsula on a road that hugs the coastline.  The breeze is stiff and the smell of saltwater perfumes the air.

Our route is peppered with brightly colored homes and dotted with small villages, each sporting a towering Catholic church steeple.  Nearly all offer municipal roadside pullouts complete with restrooms, picnic tables and views of the endless ocean.

We were parked at one of these yesterday when an elderly lady walked past our trailer on her way to the community mailboxes.  She stared at the state-and-provinces maps on the back of the trailer.  Although she barely spoke English, we were able to have a bit of a conversation.  We told her about our journey and she shared accounts of where she’d been in Canada and the U.S.

As we were ready to part company, she asked us the question we’d been asked repeatedly on our journey across our neighbor to the north.

“What do you think of President Trump?”

Québec is like a country within a country.  Through much of the province, about the only maple leaf flags we saw flew above post offices.  Instead of the national flag, Québec’s provincial flag flew solo.  It was worse than Texas.

From British Columbia through Ontario, about a quarter of the campers we saw displayed Canadian flags at their sites.  None in Québec.

And even though Québec was one of the four initial provinces that banded together to form Canada, we saw nary a 150^th anniversary of confederation flag or banner.  None of the gift shops carried any of the commemorative souvenirs so prevalent elsewhere.

Québec refers to their provincial parks as “national parks.”  That must confuse visitors who think they can take advantage of Park Canada’s 150-year anniversary free admission promotion.

Unlike provincial parks in most of the other provinces, Québec charges a daily, per-person admission fee in addition to a rather tidy camping fee.  And they’re the only provincial parks outside of Manitoba we’ve found that have coin-operated showers.  But the washrooms were clean (but small), and the parks abounded with activities from first-rate kid playgrounds to canoeing, kayaking and via ferrata climbs.

We saw very few big rigs in most of the Québec parks.  Instead, the majority of campers we encountered bunked in tents or tent trailers.  Families predominated, with nearly every camper clan having 2+ children, all under the age of 12.  We saw very few out-of-province license plates and precious few folks spoke English as their native language.

Still, every adult we talked with spoke passible English, so our lack of French was not a major problem.  One guy we met on a trail told us we should learn French in advance of our next visit.  Probably won’t happen.

Our travels through the province were predominately a series of two-night stands.  We would drive to a new campground, check in and set up.  The next day would be a layover allowing us to hike, explore the countryside or sit in the trailer and wait for the rain to stop.  The following morning, we would pack up and drive to our next site.

Our two-week journey took us to the Mont Tremblant ski village and adjoining provincial park.  It was then on to Québec City.  From there, we camped at Jacques Cartier Park, an hour’s drive north of the city. 

We hit our first salt water at the Saguenay Fjord, crossed the Saint Lawrence on a ferry and camped in the mountains of Bas St. Laurent.  From there it was up the coast with stops at a series of campgrounds on a route hugging the edge of the Gaspé Peninsula. 

Along the way, we photographed lighthouses, ate fresh seafood, took a tour of world’s largest vertical-axis wind turbine electrical generator, visited a visitor information center whose walls were made from 27,927 aluminum beer cans and hiked to Land’s End at Cap Gaspé — the very tip of the peninsula. 

We passed through countless small villages filled with colorful homes, most of which bore attractive front-yard flower gardens.  Ideal for guys with weak bladders, each town sported a “Halte Municipalité, which was a small, in-town roadside pulloff complete with picnic tables, flush-toilet restrooms and endless views of the ocean.  Unlike small-town America where houses are often surrounded by weeds, abandoned cars and discarded junk, nearly all the homes here were tidy and well kept.  Our journey was a visual feast.

A week ago, we were looking forward to the day when we would finally exit the province of Québec.  A few hours ago, we crossed the bridge and entered New Brunswick.  The first thing we saw was a street plastered with endless signs for the same chain stores, motels and restaurants we have back home. 

I’m already missing Québec.

Boarding the ferry at Saint-Simeon, we watched the guy pulling the trailer ahead of us lose both of his rear stabilizer jacks on the sloping boarding platform.  His were totally ripped off – completely severed from the frame.  We boarded without a problem.  Our turn came later.

We were heading for a commercial RV park south of Miramichi, New Brunswick.  I had the address programmed into the Garmin, and Garmie flawlessly got us on the correct, narrow but paved farm road to the park.

“You will arrive in 200 metres,” she assured us as we blissfully drove right past the not-too-well-marked entrance to the park.

“Isn’t that where we’re spending the night?” my intrepid copilot-navigator calmly asked as we sailed by.

“Oh shucks!” (or something like that), I screamed as I realized my error.

We now had two choices.  We could try to back up the length of a football field to the entrance or we could go forward to a pullout and turn around.

I first tried the backup option but backing up a 17-foot, single-axle trailer with a mind of its own down a narrow road is not an easy task.  With no traffic and a bit of time, I suppose we could have done it.  After a few yards of watching the rear of the trailer weave back and forth like a dog at a fire hydrant factory, I opted for the second option.  We shifted into first and started heading up the road.

Pullouts on narrow farm roads are not commonly found in Canada, and this road lived up to the expectation.  Finally, a kilometer or two up ahead we came to a farmhouse with a wide driveway and a large area of bordering grass.

Rather than pull into the drive and make a wide turn through the farmer’s front lawn, I decided to do a simple Y-turn turnaround.  I’d back up, turning the trailer at a 90-degree angle so we’d be perpendicular to the road.  Then I’d stop, turn sharply and take off in the opposite direction.  The procedure worked perfectly, but I failed to take note of the slope of the ground I was backing into.

Reversing our path, we were soon back at the campground.  We checked in, found our site and began setting up.  After leveling the trailer, I started dropping the stabilizers.  The first three corners went down perfectly.  I then got to the fourth.

I found the jack bent back against the frame.  Impaled on its base was a divot of grass that would have made Arnold Palmer proud.  A swift kick straightened the jack, but the threaded screw-rod inside was bent causing the jack to oscillate violently as I tried to lower it.  I got it down, but with another 40+ days of camping ahead, it needed to be replaced.

Fortunately, there was a major RV dealer just a few kilometres up the road, and for a mere $80+ I was able to buy a replacement.  Two hours and one beer later, I had the new one bolted on and ready go.

Garmie, by the way, has now been placed on probation.