Current Travel Plans

The mad road trip is pretty much over.  I’m going to be spending quite some time collecting my notes and photos before I can post the backlog.  It’s fun

Anyway, I’m in Montreal, hanging out in Marc’s spacious bachelor pad.  I’m torturing him with my guitar playing and he’s somehow putting up with it.

Some updates to the travel plan.  I bought some air tickets yesterday and was able to reach some key contacts in Sudbury.  It appears that things will work out something like this:

• Today->July 6: Hang out in Montrealish
• July 7, Leave for Sudbury, crash at the Ray household for a while
• July 14ish, return to Toronto
• July 23, fly to Glasgow
• July 24, hang out in Glasgow until very, very late.  Sleep in the airport.
• July 25, fly from Glasgow to Dusseldorf
• July 26-28, hang out in Dusseldorf
• July 29?, head to Wacken with Alex

I’m going to try to crash for a bit with my relatives outside of Montreal, so the timeline might get thwarted a bit, but not tooo much.

Finally Online

After a couple weeks of ripping through the U.S. we’re finally online.  Now I can start all the back-posts

West Chester and the Amish

May 17

Dan’s a bit of a culinary genius.  He bought, prepared and fried scrapple. I have to find the Cosby explanation of scrapple. Somebody must have posted it to Youtube.

We thought we’d check out the local site.  Valley Forge and some of the Amish stuff in the area.

We got to Valley Forge alright.  I figured it would be an opportunity for exercise.  Walking about in the sun and relaxing to well air conditioned American patriotism.  Alas, we parked the car in the shade and I tried to get Melodie to get up with me towards the visitor center.  She was pooped.

As I’m sure the one person who’s reading this blog knows, I’ve been lax at updates.  Up to and including today, connectivity has been unreasonably spotty.   Today I decided that since Melodie was pooped and I wasn’t driving, it would be an ideal time to write up much of our travels.  I got a couple days done, no way to post them of course, but it needs to be written anway.

So Melodie was still pooped.  I decided that having a rest on her shoulder didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I thought we only slept for 15 minutes, but hey, we arrived at 10:30, and I’m still here writing at 2pm, so I think it was longer.

Meh.  I got out, checked out some of the Valley Forge stuff.  We took some nice photos of the site, and headed to Amish country.  Not enough exercise, but it was a good sleep.

We did the usual tourist stuff of gawking politely at the locals, reading little community papers and taking a photo of the sign of the town of Intercourse.

We lost track of the time and arrived back to Peter and Dan a bit late, but I was impressed again with Dan’s cooking.  I think I learned that when visiting, we need to be sure that we let our hosts know exactly how long we intend to stay.  Peter and Dan were undert the impiression that we were staying the weekend.  I reiterate my guilt about mooching, and I would have soooo much loved to stay another day, but our schedule was surprisingly tight.  We wanted to be out of New Orleans before the Saturday night of the Memorial Day weekend.

I felt a little better when Peter confirmed that he liked Uzzo.  The bottle I brought over for him from Greece was not in vain.  Uzzo kicks butt.

Virginia to West Chester

May 16

Okay, when I said that leaving point lookout was the latest yet, I didn’t expect to beat that record.  We did have good reason though.

We had to make a quick check of the email, to be able to find Peter and Dan’s place.  We printed some new maps, Chuck was very kind to give us a road atlas of the U.S.  Our existing late 1960s era maps from my father were not all that helpful.  We studied our routes, drank some coffee, overslept, and repacked.

We were able to get some laundry done in Chuckand Debby’s machine, so we were resupplied with clean clothes, and refilled our cooler with a freezer pack and bottles of ice water. (The cooler is important for the long-term travel.  We needed to improve our sandwich situation to keep out of restaurants.  It lets us control our food, eat healthier and burn less money.)

We still got lost, but nowhere near as bad.  This time we were certain to have their phone number, and the maps helped us get quickly back on course.  We were even able to call Peter to let him and Dan know to expect us to be later than expected.

We might just get good at this.  This whole car-trip thing.

Four hours on the road, a few stops along the way, a bit of getting lost and we arrived around 7pm.  Only slightly unreasonably bad time.  Peter and Dan keep earlier hours.  Dan was awesome, served us a late dinner and we hung about talking about the trip and Bret (who called to find out if we made it…).

We’re very thankful, and feel a bit guilty about accepting the Dan and Peter’s hospitality.  I feel like I’m travelling the country mooching.  Which… in all fairness, I guess is what I’m doing, but my motives are kinda pure.  I want to see everyone.  I have to learn not to feel bad about this kind of thing.   I know I would do the same, and I need to remind myself that friends *like* to help one another when they can.

This trip is great.

A Day in Virginia

Chuck showed us his and Debbie’s babies and all toys today.  Well, that is to say, their horses, the baby horses and their tractors.  We spent the better part of the day geeking out.  Chuck tried to convince me to give Linux on the Desktop another shake.

In the evening, Chuck managed to get a mutual friend of ours, Dan, out to meet us at a local burger/wing joint.  I somehow always think Dan’s on the West coast.  I’m glad he could make it.  It officially raised the event to the status of MiniLBW.

As an aside, if you see any Tuppers’ out and about the countryside, it has apparently been discontinued.  Chuck had this beverage mercilessly cease production on him without warning.

Tomorrow is the parade for Nokesville, alas, we have a timeline to keep.  The next evening, we need to be in West Chester, and we can’t be too late getting there, so we were going to miss the 30 minutes of parading cows, ducks and horses.

I really loved the little horses and the barns.  It makes you rethink what life is about.  Chuck and Debby have done some pretty inspiring stuff, I was really glad we dropped by.  If I wind up living in Toronto again, I’m going to have to make a point to get down into the U.S. more frequently.  It’s far, but not *that* far.

May 14 - Maryland to Virginia

May 14

OMG this was a late departure.  We dragged our butts around the campsite for ages, we moved so slowly that I got sunburn.  I think we left around 1ish?

We got most of the way to where we thought Chuck and Debbie might be, on our way, we thought we’d be able to find a better map.  These don’t seem to be as common as they used to be.  I think maybe the proliferation of GPSes might be changing the availability of old school navigational aids.

Calling Mary around 5pm, she was able to pull up some maps on Google and give us some very good directions.  My chicken scratchings allowed us to find out where our Google maps print out lined up with our map of the Eastern U.S..  Mary laughed at us.

The amount of construction in Maryland and Virginia in the past 10 years is staggering.  Everything is new.  I dont’ see little old wooden towns, they’re all red-brick boxopolouses with thermopane glass and parking lots out front.

Everything looked the same… and the roads weren’t marked all that well.  Somehow we got lost in Dulles Town.  Yes, “Dulles Town”.  We were getting hungry and frustrated so we just gave up and went to Burger King.

The compass is a fantastic tool if you’re lost in the car.  This however is not good if you’re lost with the car.  Steppping out of the engine’s magnetic field, we figured out something of the right way to go, changed course and made it into Nokesville, and Chuck and Debbie’s little part of the world.

It was about 9pm, long after sunset, when we pulled into the dirt road leading to their house.

Walking to the unidentified house…  A car appeared on the road.  Actually four cars appeared on the road.  It turned out to be Debbie’s Sister, followed by her husband, chuck and Debbie.  The five cars on the one little road were the most traffic it may have ever seen.

Chuck and Debbie were gold.  They had a great little guest room where we crashed after a couple beers and a lot of catching up.

New York to the Swampy Island

May 13

In the wee hours of the morning, Sarah and Brian disappeared.  They needed to catch a flight to California.  We’re very grateful to them putting us up.  Without their help, we’d simply never have dropped by on New York at all.

Our day started with worrying about the Tuesday rule for street parking.  Apparently, New York sweeps the streets.   We didn’t have a chance to eat and I hope we got the garbage out.  Sitting in my car at 8:30am, waiting for the street sweeper to appear, I was observed by a meter maid.  I started the engine and she turned away.  When it comes to cars, the city is weird.

I moved the car to a fire hydrant and waited for Melodie to get all the bags down.  This is when I fired up the radio.  There’s a lot of Spanish radio in New York.  I didn’t recall it from 17 years or so ago when I last visited my relatives.  Signs for Mexican restaraunts were also all over.  Spanish is growing very strong.

Melodie appeared at our designated fire hydrant, we put on the 4-way flashers, packed up the car, and we fled into the New York morning.  I figured it was so early and we needed food, so driving randomly through Queens, trying to get lost was a good idea.

Wendies served a good breakfast.  Well, a filling breakfast.  We tried to find some kind of Internet connection using 802.11a/b, but for the life of us, the world of free networking seems to not extend to the New York and Maryland Interstates.  This was not the first attempt, and Brian’s earlier efforts to get us on his network were beginning to lead me to believe that 802.11g was the minimumm these days.

Leaving Wendy’s, I realized that we didn’t really have any plans…  I *should* have gotten my relatives together for this, but I didn’t notice this missing day in our schedule, so we drove over a few more toll bridges, and leisurely onto Virginia, in the direction of Chuck and Debby’s.

A Visitor Center on the highway led us to some maps.  There was a nice state park which seemed appropriate.  We darted Eastward, through California, Hollywood and Scotland MD.  Point Lookout.  It was a very pretty state park.  I was able to inflate the mattress this time, mostly by mouth.

The campsites were little islands of land among pools of water.  With a great effort, we lit a sad litle fire, pulled out the guitar and realized that we didn’t know how to play anything other than Johnny Cash’s rendition of Hurt… so that went back into its case before we went off to bed.

All that said, the stars and crickets were a wonderful contrast from the street sweepers

May 12 - The Day in New York

May 12

In the morning Brian had to move his car, he returned with coffee and sandwiches from the local Deli to lure us from bed.  He commented that “the character of the city might be described by how everyone sat in their cars until 10am…”  waiting for their parking spots to become legal again.

Brian led us through Jackson Heights, into Queens, where we grabbed a couple daypasses, and disappeared into the mystery of Manhattan.

We got off around 5th Ave, seeking Central Park.  We weren’t sure exactly what we wanted to see, but we wanted to try to stay off the beaten track of Broadway, museums and other… honestly… dull stuff.  We spent a good half hour trudging through NYC in the wind and rain, our leather jackets and umbrellas to keep us warm.

By the time we reached the outskirts of the park, we were chilled to the bone.  We went one street back from the park, to try to find something which the locals might frequent… we found a little old cafe decorated in 1970s tiles and woodwork, where we ordered a coffee, hot chocolate and Melodie got a genuine slice of New York cheesecake.

We attacked High Park from the south, observing the reddish brown squrrels, giant rocks, big fields, Belvedere castle, people jogging.  It was a really pretty park.  Nothing like Toronto’s High Park, but not because it is worse and not because it is better, just different.  I don’t want to review Central Park, if you want to see it, you know where it is.  We were there, did stuff and had a good time.  Not too much more to say.

After a long exploration of high park, we grew hungry, beat a path over to the subway, zipped down to Washington Park, we found some student eats, but no crazy hippies and live music.  Our cell phone out of power (stupid Motorola phone), we popped aboard the purple line and made it back soon enough before dinner to hear Sarah converse with a taco delivery guy in Spanish about how to get buzzed in.

It might not sound like a lot for a city like New York, but it demystified the town a lot for me.  What I didn’t see, and how it differed from Toronto was the most shocking part.  In the brief glimpse, it was a friendlier, cleaner city.  Such a contrast from the 1980’s protrayals that it gives me a little hope that strong leadership in Toronto could turn the city into something much greater than it is.

The Wagonwheel Campground to New York

May 11

In the morning, the campsite was slowly revealed to us. At 5am or so, Melodie had some difficulty finding the washroom… it turned out was because there wasn’t one. The main building burned in a fire, and the spare was crippled when all the pipes burst early in the winter.

Lessons learned… when you get off a highway and the campsite is 12 miles away from the road, get back on the highway.

The temperature dropped overnight to 35 Farenheit. I think that’s a few degrees above zero. The ground under the uninflated air mattress sapped the warmth our bodies, it was a cold, cold night. I was expecting Melodie to say “Get me the hell out of here!”, but she didn’t peep. A morbid thought crossed my mind, but no, she hadn’t froze, she was still breathing.

With no coffee, no breakfast, no shower and no washroom, we should have just run from the site, but we felt pity, paid them $18 of their $22 fee, and dragging, we made a noonish departure for New York. A shower is pretty critical. I was annoyed that we’d be arriving at Sarah and Brian’s in New York smelling of sleep and travel.

Things began to perk up when we found a gas station with 24 oz coffees and some taquito things. A trucker who we met in line extolled the virtues of his Bird’s Eye chilli and Maple-beans slow cooker recipie. Turns out he was from Edmonton. Darned Canadians.

Anyway, we dove down some random New Jersey highway into New York. Took a photo or two, paid tolls, tolls and more tolls, drove over Manhattan, paid another toll, hit a big fast highway over the city, overshot our exit, drove aimlessly through Queens at night, gave Sarah a call, Brian came down and helped us unload. It seems that there’s no parking in New York, but no permits either, so if you can park, you can park until you’re required to move. As we were unloading the car, somebody pulled out from a space across the street. The sign only required the car to be moved on Tuesdays. Being Sunday, this was fantastic.

Sarah and Brian’s air mattress worked, and their apartment didn’t get anywhere nearly as cold, we were only gone for less than two days, but sleeping on their floor was like sleeping on a cloud.

The First Day

May 10

Today was the first day of travel. The idea was to get up at 5am, be packed by 7am hit the road for about 8 hours, tack in a few breaks, and wind up in Connetticut for the late evening.

We woke bright and early at 9am. By the time Melodie and I were able to empty out the remains of my apartment dwelling life, get everything packed, discover we had too much, repack, still had too much and repack one last time, it was 1pm.

There isn’t a whole lot more to say about the trip… we went to the last Timmies, hit the Niagra parkway and scattered Melodie’s jar of flax seeds (what else would you do with a jar of flax seeds?).

Customs was not as bad as I thought. They asked if we were Canadian, where we were going, grilled me for a geography lesson of the planned trip, asked me if they had interstates in Mexico, then sent us on our way.

Aside from being in Buffalo 6 hours late, we were doing okay. We filled the tank off the credit card, experienced a Buffalo Walmart and headed to a big mall for a t-Mobile SIM chip.

We only drove for about 4 hours that day, winding up somewhere in upstate New York, dodging deer for a shady campsite where an eager 8 year old girl pointed us to our camping pad. Too tired to inflate the mattress, much less cook, I pitched the tent, loaded up the sleeping stuff and we crashed.

It wasn’t a very productive first day, but it was fun.