29 posts tagged “travel”
Which countries have you visited? Which countries are on your list to visit?
Have visited: United States, Mexico, The Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece (only Corfu), Portugal, Thailand, China (only Hong Kong), Taiwan (not on purpose, plane had to land there during a typhoon)
Want to visit: more of China, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland, The UK (mainly Wales), Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc.), more of Greece, Egypt, Russia, Costa Rica
Also, I haven't seen near enough of Canada. I want to go up north to the Yukon sometime. And I want to go on a road trip to Quebec and The Maritimes someday.
I haven't been on VOX much lately because I've been away and not spending much time online. Now the holiday's almost over and in a couple of hours I'll print my online boarding pass for tomorrow's flight out west. I'll spend a couple of days in Vancouver before returning home by bus and ferry to Vancouver Island.
I keep thinking that I have lots of great pictures to post here but then I remember I have to buy a new computer first! It might be awhile before I'm fully operational computer-wise. First, on the new computer, I have to recover and update my financial records and make sure all the investments and bills that need attention get handled. Then I have to see how much better my favourite games run on a bigger faster PC with an up-to-date high-end graphics card and new LCD monitor (I think I'll get a 22-inch widescreen). Third priority is recovering my photography catalog and downloading the new images off my camera. After that, the eBay stuff.
September going to be a busy month.
Day 18 - August 2. Thunder Bay to The Soo.
All the posts about my 2007 Road Trip solo adventure can be found here.
With Kincardine just two days of driving away I was excitedly anticipating getting "home" even though I haven't lived there since the 1970s. It suddenly seemed important to contact everybody. My cell phone service provider provides no service in Thunder Bay and I resorted to the motel's land lines. It irked me to spend additional money on long distance phone calls when I had lots of cash pre-loaded onto my cell phone account just for making long distance calls.
Left Thunder Bay on the morning of August 2 with 5053 km on my car's trip odometer.
There are tantalizing glimpses of Lake Superior. But the scenery is mainly rocks and trees and trees and rocks and more trees. And microwave transmission towers. Also road construction. And patronizing Ministry of Transport signs.
In Sault Ste. Marie ("The Soo") I stayed at the Super 8 Motel ($119.70). I guess I should have expected it from just looking at the map, but The Soo surprised me with its American-style restaurant chains and busy tourist motels interspersed with strip malls and abandoned boarded-up stores along Great Northern Road. I had expected something a little more laid back and rustic given that I was in Northern Ontario a long way away from any large city. I had a ok/average supper at the busy and packed-with-tourists North 82 Steak & Beverage Co restaurant, a short walk from the motel.
But I was in The Soo only overnight on the east-bound leg of my trip and didn't have time to see anything except the motel strip on Great Northern Road, one of the major arteries leading to and from the International Bridge linking Canada with the USA.
In September, six weeks later on the west-bound leg of my trip, my experience of The Soo was completely different, as if I was in some other city. I'll tell that story in some future post.
In The Soo my cell phone worked again and I caught up on my voicemail messages and then my brother and I exchanged several text messages as he passed along information about the Chi-Cheemaun Ferry schedule and how long it takes to drive to the ferry terminal. I decided to get up extra early to make sure I made it in time for the 1:30pm sailing. Getting stuck on the wrong side of a Great Lake on the day I wanted to arrive in Kincardine was not something I wanted to chance.
We had a quite a lot of snow fall over the last three days and when the weather's like this I'm always tempted to take pictures.
I find snow scenes difficult. The lack of colour often results in dull monochromatic photographs. Even though the fresh white snow makes everything seem quite bright to my eye the snow-laden overcast sky actually reduces the amount of light considerably and I end up with underexposed images. The snow has a blue-ish cast which throws off my camera's white balance although I have to say my new Canon Rebel handles this better than my point-and-shoot Sony. Plus I'm still learning my new camera so I'm not as adept at manipulating its settings as I was with the old camera.
These shots are of one of my favourite subjects, the beech tree in our front yard. For an interesting contrast, I've also included some images from last fall taken while this tree's leaves were changing colour. I've been thinking about doing a year-round or four-seasons study of this tree but it's unlikely that I'll make much progress on that project since we're planning to move away as soon as we can find a suitable house and property. Maybe there will be some good trees to photograph in our new neighbourhood.
Our first on-site house prospecting trip is planned for next week. This house hunt is taking much longer than we want but now that we've finally found a real estate agent (the third one we've tried out) who's actually actively doing something for us we're ready to make the trip over to the Island to look at a few places.
Thinking about moving is almost as potent a trigger for my map obsession as thinking about travelling. This morning, thinking about travelling somewhere to look at places to move to had me desperate to get my hands on some new maps. I've played with Google Earth a lot lately but today I had to have something more. I searched the web for online topographic maps of southern Vancouver Island, didn't find anything, and was considering driving through the snow and slippery slush to the Around The World Maps store in New Westminster when I came across Backroad Map Books. I bought a new map book and can hardly wait for it to be delivered. Oh happy day!
Day 17 - August 1. Winnipeg to Thunder Bay.
All the posts about my 2007 Road Trip solo adventure can be found here.
I took only three pictures on August 1st, all at the 90 Degrees West Tourism Info Centre/Rest Stop near Thunder Bay. My mind was on reaching the town where I grew up and where my parents still live, Kincardine Ontario. While the rocks and trees of Northern Ontario are almost as interesting as the mountains of BC and badlands of Alberta I was just not into photography at the time.
I left my friends' place at about 10am with 4350 km on the odometer and after short stops for gasoline, ice and coffee wound my way through Winnipeg east to the Trans-Canada. Stopped for lunch at 1pm in Kenora, east of the Manitoba/Ontario border. 4559 km.
Road Signs
One way you can tell you've passed from one province into another are the road signs. BC has signs pointing to parks and scenic views and picnic spots. Alberta's signs concentrate on place names and distances. Saskatchewan doesn't really have much in the way of signs at all. Manitoba's signs are mainly about watching out for the jumping deer.
Ontario's road signs instruct you on proper behaviour. Many of them are the electronic signs with changeable messages. I should have written down what all the signs actually said since I'm forgetting the details now. Drivers sure get nagged at in Northern Ontario.
Buckle Up, Arrive Alive! This is pretty much the first sign you see after you cross from Manitoba into Ontario. I suppose Ontario's Ministry of Transportation has a poor opinion of people's conformance with seatbelt laws in the rest of Canada.
Slow down! Then, further along after the slow down sign, another large sign has several lines detailing the escalating fines for various speeding ranges over the limit. As far as I could tell speed limits are pretty much ignored by Ontario drivers who seem to randomly drive anything from 40 km/hr under to 40 km/hr over the speed limit. I decided to stay just below the lowest range eligible for a fine. As a result, when road and weather conditions permitted, I exceeded the speed limit through most of Northern Ontario but I never qualified for a speeding fine. Makes a lot of sense, eh?
Fatigue Kills! Pull over and have a rest! This, despite the fact there's never a rest stop and no room on the side of the highway to pull over for several miles on either side of these signs.
Construction Ahead, Slow Down! On Hwy 17 in Northern Ontario, there's construction ahead, construction behind, construction on the left and construction on the right. It seems like almost the entire highway from the Manitoba border to where I turned south at Espanola is under construction. And the parts that don't have construction going on still have signs warning about construction.
Moose Crossing. I was on a constant lookout for moose but I never saw a single one. Disappointed, I was. I think there are more moose warning signs in Ontario than there are moose.
And then there are the signs with variations on the Drink and Drive and Die theme.
Northern Ontario, where you can't see the trees and rocks for the Ministry of Transport's preachy signs.
Hwy 1?
In Northern Ontario the Trans-Canada is called Hwy 17 instead of Hwy 1. I wonder why?
Thunder Bay
In Thunder Bay I planned to stay at the HI hostel which, in the summer, is in the Sibley Hall residence at Confederation College. I had not been able to reach them by phone from Winnipeg so I thought I would just drive there and see what's what. When I got there, the doors were locked, there's no buzzer to get in and I couldn't see anyone around. There was a number on a notice taped to the door but my cell phone doesn't work in Thunder Bay. After standing around for a few minutes hoping that someone would show up I gave up and got back into my car. I spent the night at the Thunder Bay Travelodge ($88.79).
Thunder Bay did look like an interesting place and I thought that if I came through Northern Ontario on my return to BC, I would spend more time here. In fact, I did. If I ever get anound to writing posts about my return journey and my stay in Thunder Bay, I will write more about the place. It was definitely worth the visit.
Days 13-16 - July 28-31. Winnipeg.
All the posts about my 2007 Road Trip solo adventure can be found here.
On July 28 I left the Swift Current Travelodge and drove the Trans-Canada east to Winnipeg making it to my destination by about 8pm. This was my longest day on the road so far, ten hours including short stops for food and gas. By the time I struggled upright out of my car at my hosts' home in Winnipeg I had pretty much lost all of my thrill for the "open road".
I have very few photographs to show and nothing really exciting happened to write about but I'll mention a few things about the day's driving and my stay in Winnipeg anyway.
But It's Not Flat!
I thought all of Saskatchewan would be completely flat, so flat that you can see forever to where the Earth curves down at the horizon. You know, like in all of those pictures you see of the flat prairie - fields of wheat or canola stetching away far away until they meet the clouds, the razor straight edge of the horizon interrupted by a single barn or grain elevator. In fact, Saskatchewan is not flat. It's full of hollows and low rolling hills and small ponds of water packed with ducks and little streams and curvy landscapes. I should have taken pictures...
Bad Roads
Saskatchewan's segment of the Trans-Canada was by far the worst maintained, the roughest, and the most difficult to drive section of highway that I enountered on my entire road trip. And that includes all the itty-bitty little paved roads I took through BC's mountain ranges, the inescapable construction everywhere on Northern Ontario's highways, and Manitoba's highways too, despite my Winnipeg hosts' insistence that anything in Manitoba is worse than anything anywhere else.
Credit Card Troubles
During the day, one of my credit cards was refused twice at two separate gas stations. Got glared at quite severely by the attendant at one of the stations although he did brighten up when I produced my other credit card. I had neglected to tell either of my credit card issuers about all the long distance travelling I was doing over the summer and I suppose buying gas twice a day triggered some fraud detection software algorithm somewhere. A phone call from Winnipeg to the 1-800 number on the back of the card the next day fixed everything up again. But the fact that it took more than 3700 kilometers of gas fill-ups makes me wonder just how effective those fraud-catching programs are. The issuer of my backup card continued to happily fulfil my every spending whim thoughout my entire 10-week, 5-province trek.
Road Kill
East of Brandon I crested a hill and then had to quickly change lanes to avoid a dead white-tail deer sprawled across the highway. About three hundred metres further on a minivan was pulled over to the right, its hood bent up and the front end completely smashed. Major damage. I wondered how they made it that far after hitting the deer. Two small children and their parents were standing in the ditch beside the minivan, the kids obviously upset. I slowed down to see if they needed help but there are already a couple of other vehicles stopped and people milling around so I kept on going.
A Few Days in One Spot
Spending a few days in one place was a welcome break even though the weather in Winnipeg was beastly hot. I stayed with friends in their air conditioned house and we went for walks, shopped in McNally's (a fabulous bookstore), had hotdogs and ice cream at Skinners World Famous Hotdogs, toured a few tourist spots, drank a few beers, and generally had a good visit.
Missing My PC
I also had the opportunity to satisfy techno-geek urges by playing around with their Apple computer. I've had more than six years to figure out my digital camera. My iPod is too simple a device to provide techie entertainment that strays much beyond playing the music and looking at the pictures I had loaded on it. And it had been several days since I had finished exhaustedly exploring every single menu option and technical feature available on my new cell phone. I was craving a gadget fix. Of course, if the Apple Mac had not sufficed I could have exhumed The Big Guy's handheld GPS out of the depths of my trunk so things weren't really too desperate yet.
Get Out The Maps
On the 31st I felt restless and found myself studying maps again. It was time to go. So, the next morning I said good bye to my friends and promised to stop in if I passed through Winnipeg on my return journey. After stops for a Starbucks Americano, a bag of ice and a gasoline fillup, I was eastward bound for Northern Ontario.
Grammar Nit-Pick
Just in case you're as anal-retentive as I am and have noticed that I sometimes write these travel posts in present tense, sometimes in a past tense, and occasionally I even switch tenses within a single post, don't worry, you're not alone, it's driving me crazy too. I'm trying to write in present tense but sometimes the stuff I'm writing about just doesn't lend itself to present tense writing and it's no use trying to force the words to be something they don't want to be.
Day 12 - July 27. Drumheller.
Looks like I might be churning out just one or two episodes a month on my solo 2007 Road Trip adventure from the west coast of BC to Ontario and back. Previous posts are here.
But I have been too busy to post!
Photography course. House hunting. Christmas shopping. Gift wrapping. House cleaning. Sorting through a huge 30-year accumulation of papers, books, finished and almost-finished and never-started craft projects, clothes gone out of style in the 1980s, more books, job-hunting papers, coffee mugs, travel souvenirs, computer bits and pieces, eBay inventory, shipping supplies, VHS recordings of old TV shows, a drawer packed full of plastic bags (intended for reuse), outdated computer games and other obsolete software, yet more books, unlabeled CDs, and weird collections of things that I was momentarily obsessed with at some point in time. And that's just my stuff. You should see The Big Guy's stuff!
Anyway, back to the Road Trip.
July 27th is my second day in Drumheller, "Heart of the Canadian Badlands" and "Where The Dinosaurs Roamed". I wake up early, too excited about my plans to visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology to sleep much past sunrise.
I arrive at the museum a few seconds after it opens and immediately sign up for the 90 minute Dinosite Tour. "Prospect for fossils! Investigate real dinosaur remains!"
It's hot. Hot and sunny. Blazing, blistering, fiery sunny and hot. But, as they say in the Canadian prairies, it's a dry heat.
The person who sells me my Dinosite Tour ticket points out the guidelines for walking in the Badlands in the height of summer. Hat, sunscreen, proper footwear, water, bug spray, etc., etc. I key in on the "age 4 & up" criteria and decide it can't be that much of a hardship. When I join the tour group outside, our guide is reiterating the guidelines. Hat, sunscreen, proper footwear, blah, blah, blah. I have about five minutes before the tour starts so I zoom back to my car in the parking lot to empty out and repack a backpack with the requisite Dinosite Tour hat, sunscreen, water, etc. It's strange to think that just a few days ago I was standing behind my car shivering in the freezing rain at the foot of the Athabasca Glacier changing into warmer, dryer, bulkier clothes. Yet, here I am today, sweating in the dry heat, spraying sunscreen on the tops of my bare shoulders and the parts of my feet that are not protected from the searing sun by my sandals and bandaids. Weird.
The Dinosite tour is loads of fun! We learn how the badlands were formed and why there are dinosaur fossils here. Our guide explains how palaeontologists know where to look for dinosaur fossils and we search for fossils ourselves. I find a rock with the imprint of wood millions of years old. Our guide shows us a partially excavated Hadrosaur.
Back at the museum I have lunch and walk through the entire museum. Looking back, I think I must have been overwhelmed because I take only one picture inside the museum, this Tyrannosaurus rex. I highly recommend a visit to Drumheller and the museum for anyone who's the least bit interested in fossils, dinosaurs or geology.
By 4:00 pm I'm tired and my feet hurt. It's been a fun day but now I have to leave because I have no place to stay in Drumheller and unless I backtrack to Red Deer or Calgary, I have a lot of driving to do before I can sleep.
After a quick stop at Drumheller's grocery store for ice and on-the-road snacks, I drive south and pass the sign for the Last Chance Saloon one last time. I take 56 to the Trans-Canada and aim east for Saskatchewan. Supper and gasoline in Medicine Hat. It's 10 pm, just after dark, and my car's trip odometer reads 3752 km when I pull in to the Swift Current Travelodge ($82.43). Sleep.
Day 11 - July 26. Drumheller.
It's been awhile since I've written about my solo 2007 Road Trip adventure from the west coast of BC to Ontario and back. To find the previous posts click here.
Calgary. Before we head out for breakfast my brother-in-law convinces me to reserve a room in Drumheller ahead of time instead of looking for one after I get there. After some quick searching around on the Internet and a couple of phone calls I book myself the last available room in the Drumheller Travelodge.
I join the mad rush of truck and car traffic going north on Hwy 2 out of Calgary and wonder if Albertans are aware just how suicidal their freeway driving is. After taking the Hwy 9 exit east I'm able to turn up the music and relax. Pretty soon the traffic peters out to local farmers in pickup trucks meandering along the highway with their eyes on the rolling fields.
Road construction slows me down. There's hardly any traffic but megabucks are being spent chewing through the prairie landscape to widen, level and straighten a highway that appears to exist solely to link up farms and a few tiny towns. Alberta obviously has plenty of money.
I get curious about a sign declaring a viewpoint at Horseshoe Canyon and take the turn-off. As far as I can tell from the highway, there's nothing but rolling prairie for as far as I can see. I put a hat on to ward off the hot mid-day sun and join a couple of other visiters at the edge of the parking lot. What a surprise! The land sheers off suddenly, dropping down to a distant river. Almost vertical cliffs, strongly striped with layer upon layer of rock and sandstone, form the walls of the canyon. A narrow river winds around more steep walls on isolated ridges and hills inside the canyon itself. So. This is The Badlands.
It's mid-day, the sun is much too high and I have a bad angle for taking good landscape pictures but I try anyway. A picture much better than any of mine is here.
The sign at the edge of the parking lot says:
Horseshoe Canyon, where the prairie landscape suddenly drops away, exposing millions of years of history before you.
68 million years ago the Rocky Mountains were beginning to rise and the shallow Bearspaw Sea lay to the east. Large rivers wound their way across the land, threading through ancient forests of cypress and dawn redwood. Along their journey, these rivers deposited sediment. Sands were left in the channels and fine silts and clays were dropped along the floodplains and in calm backwaters. Today, these layers of light-coloured sandstone and darker siltstone lie before you. In some areas of the valley they are separated by seams of coal remnants of once vast swamps.
Horseshoe Canyon and the Red Deer River Valley were carved out much later, 12 to 15 thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age. As the ice retreated, glacial meltwater was trapped in large lakes that emptied in torrents through shallow channels, eroding deep into the sedimentary layers laid down many millions of years before.
Leaving the canyon to continue on to Drumheller I remember to note down the mileage on my car's trip odometer. It's 2922 km.
My room at the motel isn't ready yet so I get back into my car and look at the local tourist map that I picked up earlier at the beer store. I plan to spend tomorrow at the Tyrrell Museum but there are lots of other interesting things within a short driving distance that I can go see today.
Hwy 10 south takes me past a sign for the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne. I briefly debate going there for a look but drive on by instead. "Shanghai Noon", a Jackie Chan movie, was filmed at the Last Chance Saloon. I end up driving past the Wayne turn-off a few times during my stay in Drumheller but never actually take that turn. I'm still curious about the place.
I watch for signs for The Hoodoos expecting another turn-off but suddenly, there they are, right beside the highway. It's too bad that they're so easily accessible. They have obviously suffered from the hands and feet of inumerable sightseerers. Signs ask people to stay on the marked trails, but there are hardly any recognizable marks and trails wind around everywhere. I do my best to be a responsible eco-tourist and resist touching the crumbling sandstone.
After The Hoodoos, I turn back northwest, pass The Last Chance Saloon sign again, drive through Drumheller and take 838, aka The North Dinosaur Trail. My plan is to follow the "trail" as it parallels the Red Deer River, cross the river at the ferry and then drive down the otherside of the river on 837, aka the South Dinosaur Trail, back to Drumheller.
I stop at Horse Thief Canyon for more fabulous views of the badlands and then catch the Bleriot Ferry. This is another tiny cable ferry with room for maybe six vehicles. Signs instruct you to ring the bell for service. After I cross I park the car so that I can take pictures of the ferry and see a small group with large inflatables just starting their float down the river. It's a hot sunny day and seeing them in the river gives me a sudden yearning for a cold drink and some cool water to soak my feet in.
Next stop is the Orkney Viewpoint with a magnificent panorama of the Red Deer River Valley.
The Drumheller Travelodge seems dated and just a little shabby for the price ($131.99), especially when compared to Gary and Sam's palatial digs in Calgary but the air conditioning works and my room is clean, comfortable and private. I put my beer in the fridge, close the curtains against the blinding glare of the setting sun, turn on the TV and read my newspapers and a book.
Dinner is a plate of Chinese-style stirfry. The restaurant is a typical example of those small-town restaurants with mismatched chairs and a menu that ranges from eggs and endless coffee to burgers and fries to take-out Chinese. All the locals eat there but you never see any tourists. Walking back to my car, I see a couple (they're dressed like city people in shorts and light-coloured t-shirts) hunkered over a PC in the front window of a corner store, obviously searching motel listings. I silently thank my brother-in-law for convincing me to phone ahead.
Day 10 - July 25. Odometer reading: 2490 km.
More high speed driving on Highway 2 south from Edmonton gets me to Calgary in just a few hours. As I pass the sign for the Drumheller exit, I try to imagine what the dinosaur bone beds look like. If all goes as planned, I'll find out tomorrow.
I haven't been in Calgary for several years and the city seems dramatically changed. It's surrounded in all directions by miles and miles of new subdivisions filled with houses all looking almost identical to me, each with its small patch of green landscaped lawn, driveway, two-car garage and bland beige or tan or taupe colour scheme.
In Calgary, I stay with The Big Guy's brother Gary and his wife Sam. They live in the north-west sector of Calgary and have a view of downtown Calgary from their beautifully landscaped backyard.
Sam is recovering from a broken hip and is trying to decide whether to go back to work or to retire early. She's an energetic sort of person, always busy and on the go, and now that she's back on her feet and getting around with a cane, the broken hip doesn't seem to have slowed her down much. I wonder what she'll do with the extra time she'll have when she retires and is 100% mobile again.
We have dinner at the Outback Steakhouse and I treat myself to fine Alberta beef prime rib.
Days 8 and 9 - July 23-24. Edmonton.
It's finally time to leave the mountains and move on east. Leaving Jasper I spot more elk grazing by the highway. The elk (Wapiti) remind me a lot of dairy cows. They seem perfectly tame and docile, oblivious to the traffic and the camera-toting tourists just meters away. I feel guilty taking pictures, doing my small part to habituate them to people, making them more vulnerable. At least I don't get out of my car.
I'm a little disappointed that I haven't seen any of the other large animals that Jasper is famous for such as bears, wolves, moose, deer, bighorn sheep and mountain goats. It's yet another reason to come back someday.
As I leave the elk and pull back onto the highway, my car's trip odometer clicks over to 2114 kilometers.
Approaching the eastern edge of Jasper National Park, I find myself disconcerted at the behaviour of the Alberta drivers speeding and recklessly passing on the highway in the park. After several days of leisurely driving on small mountain highways in BC and then in the national parks it takes me an hour or two to rehabituate myself to non-park freeway driving.
My first stop in Edmonton is the West Edmonton Mall. I need to find a shoe repair shop to get the strap on my handbag stitched up. The shoe repair guy says it will take about 30 minutes and urges me to go do some shopping but my feet are sore and I just sit on the nearest bench, tired.
I spend two nights in Edmonton with Brian and Mary Lou. Brian is an old friend of mine from when we both went to Western and after that when we worked for Digital Equipment. We go for a walk in their neighbourhood which borders on a beautiful green belt overlooking the North Saskatchewan River. And we have a grand time eating good food, sampling fine liquors and reacquainting ourselves with each other. Brian and Mary Lou are great hosts, I even have a chance to wash my clothes.
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