our moving castle: July 2014

West is Best

We had been calling British Columbia the promised land well before we left, and this was proven to us within 15 hours of arriving. As we approached the rockies leaving Alberta, we saw road trippers and van-dwellers alike pulled over, desperately fixing flats, so close yet so far, weather beaten hitch-hikers walking toward Banff as if Woodstock. I don't know if we were expecting in true Ontario fashion for a path to be blown through the Rockies, but I personally was not anticipating the freaky drive between Banff and Golden, where we stopped for the night.

Picture this: Mindblowing drop-offs metres away from the road, which is narrow and winding with hair-pin turns while transports honk at you to go past the speed limit, avalanche nets supporting rocks on one side while big-horned sheep grin at you on the opposite side where they are standing on an impossibly steep cliff as if daring you to join them and terribly steep hills with run-off roads and break check stations- all with not the best breaks. But we made it and had a celebretory rum and coke in Golden, staring at the snowy peaks and green river. We arrived in Golden around 7 pm. In the morning by 10am, before Shawn even awoke, we had a job. I texted a number I'd found on kijiji for pickers on a fruit and vegetable farm in Spences Bridge, a few hours from where we were staying. They told us to come on down. What we didn't know was it was the HOTTEST PLACE IN CANADA, the only desert; complete with rattle snakes and black widows, and temperatures rising to as high as 46 degrees in the dry, nosebleed inducing heat of the prime summer, which we signed up to work in the unforgiving fields in.

Enough with the dramatics though. We marvelled at the fact that less than four days before we had been wearing jackets watching Canada day fireworks in the small town of Wawa. Why not go from 10 degrees to 50? We had free camping with hookups, could make our own hours, and come tomato season, would have a small fortune, enough to allow us to travel further and enjoy more. We are here likely until the end of July, and, now that we can afford a few surf lessons, hello Tofino?

I think at this point I said "these are the coors light mountains". This one's for you Dad!

Setting up Camp

Death by weeding

Well earned brews.

Toughen up these soft city hands!!

Grasshoppers, a few generations before Locust due to this being a former alfalfa farm :/ You have to make friends with them.

campsite 2.0

home for now

Flatlanders

A large portion of my novel has to do with the prairies and I was hoping to draw inspiration from this place I had never been. I was right to assume one thing regarding one of the themes being insanity, that the flatness could drive some people insane. Shawn felt uneasy and I was bored, though the poker straight driving was a welcome change from Ontario roads. Among the constantly running trains, the crop dusters and strange birds flying by grain elevators, there is a stillness and beauty uninterrupted by countless visual distractions which make up our depth perception, no small forests or lakes, no distant mountains, only earth uninterrupted, the almost constant sun, the slight curve of the horizon. Far from the visual overload on the first leg of our journey which left us in a constant state of excitement, this leg, the road showed us the beauty in subtlety, the diversity in sameness.

St Lawrence to Superior

As much as we have dreampt and spoke of the west for years, and many fellow Canadians do, of its bounty and beauty, its rocky to rolling mountains and clear blue waters, I now hold Quebec and Ontario to almost equal esteem (due to the fact we have not yet seen all of the west we hope to). We had always thought of our home province as slightly landlocked, farm-ridden, and anglo dominated. How diverse it actually is when one moves past the tried routes, the worn highways. What of the rolling arctic-looking mountains of the St. Lawrence, to the stunted arctic shrubbery of Northern Ontario! The vast stretches of farmland to the dense, sweet smelling forests and glassy lakes; the unique pockets of diverse cultures that span these two huge provinces! What of the amazing micro-climate of Manitoulin and harsh cool shores of lake Superior, the ever growing aboriginal populations and centuries old Ojibwa pictographs of Agawa? It is surely a case of the grass is always greener, and what better way to spend Canada day than driving through these endless areas spanning a third of the massive country.