Canada Trip Diary 2009

Tuesday, July 28th:

Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 11:59pm, but I started my vacation with this day to pack and clean up around the house. There are few things more discouraging than returning tired from a long trip to find the house torn up from whirlwind packing. I also took the occasion to get rid of some pests in our absence: I set plates of boric acid powder around with bits of bread for bait, and threw a couple of bug foggers into the crawlspace right before we left, all to keep the earwigs at bay while we were gone.

We were all cleaned up and ready to go by 8:30pm, and we were bored, so I decided we could just as well be bored at the airport. We drove down, parked in the long-term parking, took the shuttle bus to the terminal, and found out that we weren’t going to be able to use the automated check-in, because two of us were ticketed under the same name. (Airline computers don’t register middle initials, you know.) But the Delta counters were free and clear, so we had a leisurely check-in with a live human being, and then a leisurely walk through security. Not many flights take off at that time of night, and there were none after ours for the next six hours.

I only fly every few years, so there are always changes to security procedures whenever I go to the airport. Salt Lake International has one of those newfangled bio-scanners that whips around and analyzes all of your bodily functions (“This person has a full bladder! He’s obviously a terrorist!”). And then…

Well, I said we were bored at home. We got all through check-in and security by 9:30pm, so the kids were now bored in a new and different place. But the sun had mostly gone down, so there was little to see out the airport windows, and most of the shops had closed, so the kids read and colored and poked each other for the next couple of hours until we finally boarded.

Wednesday, July 29th:

It was a red-eye flight, so sleep was theoretically intended. However, the seats aboard a 757 are so designed that an adult-sized passenger can’t possibly rest his head or neck in a sleepworthy position. At about 2am, tired but upright, I gave up and made use of the entertainment center on the back of the seat in front of me. It was the first time I’d flown with one of those; ain’t modern technology wunnerful? I had listened to the Best of Enya when trying futilely to sleep; now I switched on the TV and watched Comedy Central and Discovery for a while. (Want raunchy commercials to entertain you between bits of programming? Cable TV in the wee small hours, baby!) Sariah to one side of me had gone to sleep, also listening to Enya. I looked to Alex, trying unsuccessfully to sleep in a pretzel position: Metallica. Yes, I have a child old enough to listen to Metallica. He thinks of it as classic rock.

Right about sunup, we approached JFK, and a heavy bank of cloud. I kept waiting for us to get beneath the cloud to catch at least a glimpse of New York City… waiting… waiting… waiting… oh hey, runway! The clouds went clear to ground level, and were so thick we could see significant fog between our window and the tip of the wing. I was raised on the East Coast and am okay with standard levels of humidity, but the air in JFK was supersaturated. Even the carpets felt soggy. I know because I napped on the floor while we waited for our delayed commuter flight to Syracuse. When we got on our little Comair commuter plane, there was so much water vapor in the air that it was visible as ominous steam from the air vents. The little air conditioning nozzles above the seats actually had drips of condensation on them.

Perversely, the seats on the little Canadair to Syracuse were much more accommodating to sleep than on the 757, but there was only enough time for a short nap. The cloud cover did clear before Syracuse, though, so the kids were able to see their first real aerial view of the trip.

My mom and dad met us at Syracuse to drive us a few hours across the border to Kingston, Ontario. They have two small cars, so we split up into the boys and the girls for the drive. Alex and Jason promptly fell asleep, but we woke them up to see the Thousand Islands as we crossed the border. And then we were in Canada! Land of bilingual road signs and high sales taxes!

I hadn’t been home to my parents’ house in fourteen years; Alex was the only one who had ever been there, and he was an infant at the time. The maple tree that had been an adolescent now filled the front yard. All of my siblings have left, and their bedrooms have mostly been remodeled to new purposes. I had only lived in Kingston full-time for two years, so I didn’t know what had been changed and what I simply didn’t remember. A voyage of discovery, then.

We strolled to the bank to change some money, then spent most of the rest of the day in low-key visiting around the home. The shore of Lake Ontario was only three blocks away, so we strolled down in the evening to sample the breeze and throw stones.

Thursday, July 30th:

2009-1 Our main activity for the day was to take the ferry boat over to Wolfe Island, which lies just off Kingston. On the way we sampled the historic downtown, which is old and crusty and yet alive. Michele took dozens of pictures of old, classy buildings. We spent a couple of hours at the home of one of my mother’s friends on Wolfe Island. She has a pool, and an outhouse; on Wolfe Island, unless you’re one of the few who can sink a well in land that is mostly solid granite, you have to have your water trucked in, and this friend had decided when she moved in that she would rather have a pool than a flush toilet. Her decision, I suppose.

2009-2 And then — shopping! Not for huge things, though; I took the kids to the dollar store to sample the Canadian candy. There’s been a lot of encroachment by American brands since my childhood, but there are still some uniquely Canadian offerings. Most of them — Smarties, Mr. Big, Wunderbar, Caramilk — are closely akin to something we have in America; there are only so many ways to arrange nougat and caramel and crisps and chocolate, after all. But one all the children appreciated on exposure has no American equivalent: Crunchie bars. Hard sponge toffee, covered with chocolate. Absolutely delicious.

Michele and I planned to get to bed early, as we had a long day planned for Friday. But we were still just awake when my sister Liz arrived just after 10pm. Liz lives in St. Catherine, about four hours away; she moved away from Utah last year, where she had been the kids’ favorite aunt. (In fact, the last time she had seen me was when I was in the hospital after my stroke, which occurred inconveniently during the week she was moving.) We visited ever so briefly, with the promise of a few minutes more in the morning.

Friday, July 31st:

And it was a morning that started early. My alarm went off at 5am — which is normal time during the workweek back in Utah, although I didn’t try to keep track of what time my body thought it was two time zones distant, because that way lies madness — because Michele and I were leaving the children with my parents and taking a seventeen-hour trek to Prince Edward Island to see my grandmother and my Aunt Cathy. So Liz was up with us for a few minutes while we ate some cereal, and then we were off.

My parents had loaned us their GPS unit, nicknamed “Mandy,” for the trip, warning us of some odd habits she had. In other words, Mandy was quite insane. She kept directing us wrong as we tried to find the most direct route through Montreal — not that I blame her entirely, as there is no direct route through Montreal. Ah, Montreal, I hate everything about you. Another “endearing” quirk to Mandy: she refuses to acknowledge that the Trans-Canada Highway down the western edge of New Brunswick exists. Instead, she was firm in her belief that we were simply cruising over hill and dale. Maybe she thought we were in a plane.

The trip seemed shorter than it was, really. A lot of that probably had to do with the company. There were no children creating chaos in the back seat; Michele and I talked, listened to music, and napped (she more than I, as I was driving). She read me several chapters of A Barn in New England, a memoir of renovation that I had picked up for her last year. Home renovations are always better to hear about than to undertake.

Plus, the trip was actually shorter than advertised. We only stopped to fill up the tank and use the plumbing, so it was just after 10pm that we arrived at Grandmama’s house. They obviously weren’t expecting us so early; when we rang the bell, Grandmama’s voice sang out, “Do NOT tell me you’re here already!” But she quickly got over being caught in her nightgown and curlers.

My grandparents had lived in an old house in Murray River (built in 1894) since before I was born. It was as much home to me as my own home. But a few years ago, they sold it (with much weeping and wailing from the grandchildren) because neither of them could really manage the tall stairs several times a day, especially Grandad. Their new home was in Montague, the nearest small town (Murray River is correctly termed a village), about a mile from the hospital which they were visiting more frequently. All of the main living area was on a single level, but the basement also held a second bathroom, the laundry, two bedrooms (one of which Cathy used as her home office), and oodles of storage space. I was fully prepared to hate this imposter home, or at best to tolerate it grudgingly and resignedly. It was with something close to guilt, then, that I realized that I absolutely loved it. All of their stuff was there, all of the furniture and artwork and artifacts that had defined the space for me. And Grandmama and Cathy were there, along with all of Grandad’s things; they hadn’t made much headway of cleaning up his possessions in the months since he died, and were in no especial hurry to do so. I slid into this house almost as easily as if it had been the one I’d known since infancy. It was, in a word I find myself using more frequently these days, “charming.”

Saturday, August 1st:

2009-3 We told them we would be up by 7 or 8am, but we didn’t figure on the effect that a windowless bedroom in the basement would have; we finally rolled out of bed sometime after 9am. Cathy took us over to Murray River, to see the old house. It had been bought by a family friend in New England, who had planned to use it as a family vacation retreat; he had had it remodeled in ways that stayed true to the structure, but made sense for its new use. But the economic downturn had been hard on him, so now the whole property was on the market. Cathy had a key that she used to check in on it occasionally, so we went in and saw the modifications. I had looked forward to the tour with some trepidation, fearing it would be a desecration of my memories, but the new house had so instantly ingrained itself as a good and worthy successor that I didn’t mind. It was now a different flavor of “charming” than it had been, but had not lost anything.

2009-4 Grandad used to operate a wooden toy shop and gift shop on the lower half of the property, a small original barn which he had expanded when his woodworking grew into retailing. The Toy Factory had been remodeled into two storage buildings and possible unfinished cabins, and when I saw that the old chicken coop (unused for such in my memory) had also been partially remodeled, suddenly the gears started turning: three cabins. One for a large family unit, one for a smaller family, one for a couple. Grandmama and Cathy had already started working on me to move back to the Island, and here was a vision of one way. Of course, the three buildings had no running water, so there would have to be an additional well, and plenty of plumbing, and possibly another septic system, even though there really wasn’t room for it on the property… I couldn’t keep the gears from turning in my head, no matter how I tried.

Cathy went back home, and Michele and I tooled around Murray River and Montague, shopping for souvenirs and other stuff. I had taken Michele to the Island three times before, and she had fallen in love with the green rolling hills and red earth and relaxed villages, so she was no help in getting the gears in my head to stop.

Eventually, we made it back to the new house, where I helped Cathy assemble an arbor in the back yard, between fresh-planted saplings. Ah, humidity; it was only 80 degrees, which is twenty cooler than it had been the week before we left Utah, but on the Island all your sweat stays on your skin without evaporating, you stay hot, your body makes more sweat to cool you, it still doesn’t work, and you end up very hot and very wet.

And then – lobster! Grandmama had about a dozen frozen whole lobster in the freezer that she thawed out and served along with pan-friend scallops. (And I think there may have been salads and stuff. I didn’t pay attention.)

And after dinner, the reason that I had chosen this particular weekend to center the Canada trip around: my twenty-year high school anniversary. Or rather, that twenty-year anniversary of the class I would have been if I hadn’t moved to Ontario after the tenth grade. I attended grades one through nine at Belfast Consolidated School, which is a “feeder” for Montague High; so even missing out the last two years of high school I would feel more connection with these people than any at the reunion for Frontenac Secondary School in Kingston, especially because my two best friends at that school didn’t graduate the same year I did. (Plus, no one from Frontenac got a hold of me for either the ten-year or twenty-year, even though my parents still live at the same address. Screw you, Frontenac! I’m going to Montague!)

2009-5 One of the reunion organizers was an old Belfast classmate who had gotten in touch with me via Facebook to let me know about it, so I knew there would be at least one person I recognized. But I was adrift with so many others whom I would only have known from my year at Montague. Part of the problem was that I didn’t get a yearbook for my tenth-grade year, so I couldn’t cram. (Yeah, yeah. Stupid of me. At the time, I just thought, “Tenth grade, why bother?” I didn’t realize I would be moving that summer.) There were, I think, nine or ten people from Belfast, interspersed with about four times as many people I didn’t know. I spent a lot of time standing with Michele, feeling awkward. Hey, just like old times at Belfast! (Special thank-yous to Elaine and her husband for making the effort to draw us in.)

Some people recognized me right off and said I hadn’t changed; some stared at me and had to be goaded with my name before a glimmer of recognition hit. (I repeat, nine years in the same class.) And one person from Montague saw me and said, “Nathan Shumate, Miss Cheverie’s french class homeroom in tenth grade.” And I didn’t recognize her at all. Even by the time we left and I had talked to her again, she still rang no bells. Pam, I’m sorry!

The reunion was held at the Montague Curling Club, which provided a bar. There was also a band, Muddy Buddy, that started playing about an hour and a half into the reunion, just when almost everyone had finally gotten there. They were a good band, and played music that teenagers of a certain age would recognize, especially Canadian teenagers – “Summer of ‘69,” “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” “Patio Lanterns” – but they were just too much band for the space they had. They could have done an acoustic set with no amps and filled the space; as it was, as soon as they started playing, all conversation was impossible without your cupped ear at the other person’s lips.

That was okay for a lot of people, though, especially those who were disappointed with the strength or price of the drinks offered at the bar. They quickly adjourned to the parking lot where impromptu tailgate parties formed around whoever had some vodka in their car. (Fun fact I learned that night: Vodka is made on the Island, from homegrown P.E.I. potatoes.) I was a little disappointed. These people were at least thirty-eight years old, they were property developers, investment advisors, schoolteachers… and “getting sloshed” was still their idea of fun, even while they made fun of how each other had acted at the ten-year reunion. One girl, regaling me with a story of how someone repeatedly upchucked a decade before, said, “I don’t drink. I have three or four drinks, and that’s all.” And I just stood there thinking, “Your definition of ‘I don’t drink’ is one I don’t recognize. Because I don’t drink, which means I don’t drink. Which means, drinking is something that I don’t do.”

It kind of cooled our ardor to move to the Island when I realized that the culture there is still the same as it was. Maybe the younger generations, with more to entertain them these days – satellite TV and the internet – aren’t still in the mindset of “getting drunk because there’s nothing else to do” that was there twenty years ago. But they probably are. For all my fond memories of the Island, I was forcibly reminded that I had always been an outsider there, and that would continue for me and my children if we moved there.

We left fairly early, before the people intent on getting drunk had accomplished their goals, because there’s no worse company for sober people than drunk people.

Sunday, August 2nd:

A leisurely morning. I spent some time going through Grandad’s books. Several years ago, at a full family reunion on the Island, Grandmama and Grandad had had all of the grandchildren go through and pick three specific things for their inheritance. One of mine was Grandad’s collection of archeological books. After he became a Latter-day Saint, he developed quite an interest in Book of Mormon geography, especially the “limited Tehuantepec” model, and so had a number of general-purpose histories of Mexico and Central America, as well as specifically Mormon-themed volumes. I pulled out the stack I was really interested in, then culled it, and culled it again until I could bring home a manageable number.

After that, church. There’s a very small LDS branch in Montague; a good turn-out at their tiny chapel is thirty souls. But not only were Michele and I there, another family had visitors, and yet another family that used to live locally had come back for a family reunion. There were at least forty people there, and a vibrant congregation they were. Only a few of them knew me from the old days (there were several locals off on visits of their own), but being the grandson of Al and Jean Shumate means that I’m always welcome there.

After church, dinner – which I was making for Grandmama and Cathy, not the other way around. I introduced them to chicken-fried steak with country gravy, a new and novel experience for them. Cathy said she hadn’t seen Grandmama eat so much in a long time. I cheated and used a gravy mix which I brought with me instead of making the gravy from scratch, but I also brought my own meat tenderizer, which has to count for something.

2009-6 Later that afternoon, we visited Grandad’s gravesite, still absent a headstone; there was just a tiny plaque and a labelmaker-produced name. He was a man who lived a long and full life; you can read my whole personal eulogy for him here. I’ve always been proud to be his grandson, and especially proud to bear his name as one of mine.

Some more visiting, and then bed. Another long drive ahead of us on the morrow.

Monday, August 3rd:

Up at 5am again, though our pace was a little more relaxed, as the trip back to Kingston would gain us back the hour we lost coming to the Island. We packed up Mom and Dad’s car with our luggage, the books, an antique doll and antique child-sized rocking chair that Grandmama had given Michele, Grandad’s coin collection and display case for my father, and various and sundry. The day we had driven to the Island it had been overcast all the way from Ontario, then sunny for Saturday and Sunday; now it was cloudy again, with spritzes of rain. We left with many hugs and promises to be back.

2009-7 I took us on a detour to see our first house on P.E.I., the earliest one I remember. For a structure over 150 years old, it’s doing very well. Then off to the other end of the Island for the Confederation Bridge. Our souvenir findings for the kids had been thin – we had especially wanted more “dirt shirts,” dyed salmon color in the rich red mud of the Island, because they had all outgrown the ones we bought last time we were there. Fortunately, a little collection of touristy business has grown up around the Island side of the bridge, and one had opened a little early at 7:45am, just in time for us to get there. And then at 8:15am, we left the Island, paying $42.50 for the privilege of doing so. (Crossing the bridge the other way is free.)

And the looong drive again, with Mandy once more demonstrating her insanity. And we had a small jolt to our plans not far into Quebec: When I stopped to fill up, my credit card was rejected. It didn’t take much to figure out what had happened: We haven’t used this account for months, so when it suddenly sprang into activity in Eastern Canada, the issuing bank got suspicious and suspended it until we got in contact with them. Which was fine, but my cell phone didn’t work outside of the U.S., and the other card I had with me as a backup didn’t have a lot of space on it – I wasn’t sure how much – so we only bought gas for the rest of our trip and ate just the (considerable) snack food we had with us, instead of following my original plan to stop for poutine as many time as possible through Quebec.

Ah, poutine. French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. It’s the only thing that makes Quebec tolerable, really. Aside from the traffic clusterfarg that is Montreal (how I hate you and everything you stand for), I generally hold the Quebecois in derision. Somehow, the losers of the Seven Years War have turned their defeat into an effective victory, holding the rest of Canada hostage to their victim mentality in a manner that has won the admiration of every other special interest minority in the world looking for concessions from the local majority. Traffic signs in the rest of Canada have to be bilingual, whereas in Quebec an exterior sign can only be in French, and any interior signs in a place of business which use English must also display French in larger type. Somehow, we anglophones manage to muddle through in Quebec; I think the Quebecois could somehow survive if the other nine provinces and three territories limited their signage to English alone. But then, Quebec isn’t just a province; according to Wikipedia, the Canadian House of Commons passed a symbolic motion in 2006, recognizing the “Quebecois as a nation within a united Canada.” Yeah, maybe if you give them another inch, then they’ll stop trying to take the yard.

Anyway. Drove all day, arrived back at my parents’ house just after 10pm.

Tuesday, August 4th:

This is the day on which I discovered that Canada did not want to take my money. Michele called the credit card company and ironed that out, so I went out to the dollar store to get more Crunchie bars, among other things. There I discovered that the dollar store doesn’t take credit cards; the closest thing is a non-Visa “Interac” debit card. Having exhausted my Canadian currency, I left empty-handed.

That’s understandable, really, but the next thing was not. Later on, Michele and I went to the supermarket nearest my parents’ house to stock up on travel snacks, plus some things to eat that evening. Over forty dollars’ worth of merchandise, and when I got to the check-out I discovered that they only took Mastercard.

What?? What kind of BizarroWorld exists north of the border? Down here, Mastercard is the RC Cola to Visa’s Coke. If any kind of card is going to be accepted, it’s Visa, though 95% of businesses which take Visa also take Mastercard as a package deal. How had I stumbled onto a topsy-turvy society in which Mastercard was accepted to the exclusion of Visa? I don’t even have a Mastercard! Again, we left empty-handed.

That meant that, before I went out to another supermarket (which turned out not to have half of stuff that was in my basket in the first one) or to Harvey’s for a triple order of poutine to go with dinner, I had to call ahead to confirm that, yes, they accept Visa.

Wednesday, August 5th:

Goodbye, Canada! We got up and packed up for the return trip, with a side expedition to a drugstore for Gravol, an effective anti-nausea medicine that they don’t have in the States. Oddly, this was our only trip to Canada on which multiple members of the family didn’t need Gravol.

2009-8 Back across the border, flashing our newfangled passport cards at the crossing, then down to Syracuse, and then west to the Palmyra area, which is near and dear to Mormons: This is where Joseph Smith lived when he first saw the Father and the Son when he was fourteen, and where later the angel Moroni visited him and told him of the existence of golden plates in a nearby hill. We went to the visitors center at the Hill Cumorah and walked the footpath up and over it, then went over to tour the reproduction log home and restored frame home the Smith family had lived in through that time frame. And then, a quiet contemplative walk through the Sacred Grove. There weren’t many tourists around – the Hill Cumorah Pageant had been done for two weeks, which is the high point of the LDS tourist season – and the children were actually respectful as we walked through, thinking on the things that had happened there.

Then back to Syracuse, a supper at a Chinese buffet, and an early bedtime at the local Motel 6.

Thursday, August 6th:

A 6am flight time means a 5am arrival time at the airport, which means a 4am alarm. We made it onto our tiny Embraer commuter plane from Syracuse to Chicago (three seats to each row), then through Chicago to our massive 777 to Denver (eleven seats per row), with little trouble but no time to stop and eat. My kids, though, were old hands at airports and traveling and stuff. We had time to scarf down some pizza slices before our small Canadair flew from Denver to Salt Lake.

Now, remember the antique child-sized rocking chair I mentioned way back when? We had agonized how to get it home, and finally bought a U-Haul box and packed the chair carefully, using our clothing as padding. The ticket agents said nothing when we checked the box as luggage, helpfully putting “fragile” stickers on it at our request.

In other words, no one mentioned that the box would be given the 900-lb gorilla treatment and the antique chair broken. When the barely-holding-together box came out the baggage carousel – the chair coming separate, having been completely unpacked in transit – Michele went to complain and was told by an unsympathetic attendant that the box was “obviously” unsuitable.

Oh, really, jackass? If it was supposed to be “obviously” unsuitable to us, the customers, why wasn’t it “obviously” unsuitable to the ticket agents who accepted it as luggage without a qualm at the departure point? Is it too much to ask that the supposed professionals actually know more than the people they’re fleecing for their service?

Which is why I will never again fly with United Airlines. Ever. I don’t care if their ticket turns out the cheapest; I don’t care if they’re the only airline which services a destination. I will pay more and land farther away if it means withholding my money from United. They’ve lost a customer for life. Is that “obvious”enough?

Aside from that black stain at the end of the trip, it was a good and fulfilling vacation. We exulted in the dry Utah air, drove home (where we did not exult in our dry Utah lawn), and had well-deserved naps.