Tag: Me and Mine

Last of August

The air took a change today which, if we were still in the Maritimes, would have come after the first hurricane of the season had passed through, up from the Caribbean. Cool and dry. The downtown Kingston market is full of tomato and basil.  Found a locally grown watermelon to eat.  The corn is the best I have ever tasted this year so packed and juicy the cobs are bendy. Only one seller tried to pass cow corn off as sweet.  

Everyone is going on end of summer weekends or a week off camping to get one last kick at the can before the fall comes. Even though we are a month from autumn and maybe months from the first frost, having your oldest kid going into kindergarten puts you back into the cycle of holidays when the schools tell you you will have holidays. Pencil cases. Corduroys.

Fitba

All his kids recovering from the blackout of 2003 blackouts.  Only grandkids 1500 km to his west.  Behind my mother’s voice on the phone, Dad can be heard shouting out his only real concern: “Who are they playing?”

Stenhousemuir, as it turns out, where they, the mighty Greenock Morton, won 2-0 away from home. Arsenal won, too, over an outclassed Everton – despite Arsenal being down a player after the reappearance of Sol Campbell’s boot’s desire to practice proctology. Sol is the best defender in England but has had a bad run of involuntary arse kicking lately. Caught the game on Rogers Sports Net. Oddly, here in Canada we can get more soccer than most anywhere: four live or nearish English league on two channels, German live, French live, Argentine, Spanish, Brazilian and Dutch on tape delay. I may spend another $2.99 a month this winter to get TeleLatino to pick up the Italian league.

Not just a slave to the tube, the August When Saturday Comes showed up yesterday and I am working through a small stack of fitba books from amazon.co.uk. One, Out of His Skin, is about John Barnes – one of my favorite players from the days of TSN’s Soccer Saturday – and the crap he had to put up with from his own Liverpool fans for having the gall to be both black and good at soccer. Even just 15 years after he entered the top level of the English game, it is amazing to this that this was the case watching the diversity of players on Arsenal. The implicit racism of the game is now seen more in the lily white composition of the fans in the stands. If you get ESPN Classics Canada, you can see Barnes play on certain Friday evenings in a few of the late 80’s early 90’s English FA Cup Finals they show from time to time. He taught me everything I know about crossing from the outside – everything I know…not what I can do.

Back

Back. Nice to see the typo twins chimed in over the weekend. I don’t know why I don’t care too much about spelling but I don’t I think it was all the teachers who made so much about it but didn’t seem to have anything to say with their perfect grammer. Couldn’t have been. That being said, I am sure it is on my “permanent record” so I should start feeling bad any day now.

Tales of the road? Not really many:

  • Vermont’s unoffical state bird is apparently the Crow – gotta love that. The law says the hermit thrush. Who picks a hermit as an emblem?
  • The nicest vista on a highway is the view at the top of the hill on I-83 just west of Barre heading for Montpellier, Vt. – layer upon layer of Green Mountain each one a little more faded than its next nearest neighbour.
  • Tim’s is a welcome site whether in South Portland, Maine or Cornwall, Ontario.
  • I had the best raw oysters ever from the Portland Public Market – each one was about a ten-chew half-cup of living sea animal. Dandy with a Shipyard ale.
  • Burlington’s Church Street is kinda losing it having an Old Navy and a Borders and losing its own independent bookstore – was it Hickson & B****? Heidi will know. That being said, Borders has a heck of a music section. Everyone I know under 30 will think me a fool for buying 145 US bucks worth of art on 1990’s media.
  • The Gulf of Maine at 60F is better swimming at Higgin’s Beach than 70F water farther north or south.

Use mapquest.com

The road back was pretty much off the highway again so I can’t say we broke any speed records. Interesting how the Thousand Islands here seem more than anything a continuum of the Lake Champlain and even New Hampshire’s busy lakes region. Best drive back twisty road – New Hampshire’s 25A west to the beautiful little village of Orford on the Connecticut River, shown here.

The Road Taken

New Hampshire has redeemed itself. For years bad thinks happen everytime I am driving through New Hampshire – people giving me the finger, getting lost out of Dover because the “Live Free or Die” folk don’t like spending on road signs. I only drive through New Hampshire – like New Brunswick. Last evening at 7:00 pm, we blew a tire on highway 4 at the westerly Durham exit and New Hampsire came through big time.

I can change a tire. I cannot change a tire when the tire jack and lugnut wrench was left in PEI in a house I have since sold. We started to walk into town down the highway on ramp. First, a guy about 19 in a pick up driving the other way goes down the ramp into Durham, goes around and up our ramp to meet us as we are walking down. He drives us into town calling on his cell phone to all the VW owners he knew. We make about 5 stops with no luck. 25 minutes minimum.   He leaves us with a happy wave at the cop shop where we call for help (being after hours). This guy has just done this one a Friday eveing coming home from work at the Portsmouth Jiffy lube. Someone raised that kid right.  Didn’t get the name but thanks.

Next, the cops call Smitty’s Towing and in 15 minutes we are back at our car where for 30 bucks on my VISA, the nephew of the owner – about 23 – replaces the tire with our doughnut in about 47 seconds. Tells us all about the town as we are driving back, how the University of NH sucks up property taxes, how they came second in NCAA hockey last year, tells us about being a tow operator in Durham (picked up two DWIs Thursday night) and gives us directions on to Portland via back roads to stay under 50 mph. Again, someone raised this kid right.  Again, didn’t get the name but thanks.

The trip was made by this.  Less than one hour delay.  Before that the highlights were the drive on NY highway 3 through to Saranac Lake; the 10 mile drive up and over the Green Mountains east of Middlesbury where you can pretend you are in a car ad pumping second and third gears through hairpins at a 12% ascent and decent; seeing Middlesbury College founded in 1800 sitting in a landscape of rolling farms with the lake to the west and the mountains to the east.  Also ate beef jerky for the first time.  Ate a whole bunch and then worried for an hour whether a entire pot roast was rehydrating in my gut.   Buy a VW, by the way. Whole drive was less than 30 bucks Canadian for the gas. My car is a ’93. And make sure the jack and lugnut wrench are in the back.

Route: Kingston to Cape Vincent to Watertown to Saranac Lake to Lake Placid (avoid) to Westport to Champlain Bridge to Middlesbury to Concord to Dover to Gorham to South Portland: left house at 7:35 am, got to Ross’s at 10:20 pm.   Off to the tire shop today.

Directions Needed

riding the purple boomerang

Go south, south-east, east, north-east, north-east

I need help. We are going from Kingston, Ontario to Portland, Maine Friday and there are a few things to deal with once we ford the mighty St. Lawrence, crossing on the somewhat less mighty St. Vincent ferry: Adirondack Park, Lake Champlain, Green Mountains, White Mountains. Map Quest sends us within spitting distance of Connecticut on the Mass Turnpike. Is the smart way to go? Is it better to make Lake Placid, nip south of Lake Champlain and find I-89 and cross from southern New Hampshire to Portland.

It is all in a good cause as I am going to pretend to run the Beach to Beacon race in South Portland. The website says:

The elite races for both the men and women are shaping up to be as competitive as ever. Can James Koskei of Kenya overcome a top-heavy field and repeat? Can Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba reclaim her crown after last year’s third place finish?

I note I am not mentioned. As I am not going to run but may take a leisurely stroll, I fully expect my view of nylon covered Kenyan bums to be scant and fleeting. Maybe we’ll meet up with them at Gritty’s after for a couple of pitchers.

The Zoo

There are a few words, like “pie”, that evoke the pure pleasure of being a kid. If it weren’t for the pictures we have seen of bears in 5 x 5 x 5 cages somewhere in the world, “zoo” would be one of them. The Metro Toronto Zoo does its part to give those three letters a good polish and shine, however, as we saw on our trip there yesterday…ummm…except for the apparent but unsigned fear of any medium of exchange other than cash, a short-lived irritation made worse by the concurrent efficiency lecture given by the booth teens.

Sitting in one of Toronto’s surprising urban ravine forests, this zoo gives you a feeling that for the most part it is not a menagerie but a biological refuge and place of study. While the obligatory lions are not actually endangered as it turns out and, really, have Canadian become so isolated from reality that you need a beaver in its own mimicry of Algonquin Park 4 km north of the 401 in Scarborough, when you hear that certain species, like an Asian bison, simply do not exist in the wild anywhere anymore, the job a good zoo can do makes sense. Walking through a room of Malaysian plants sustaining a colony of native butterflies indifferent to your presence is pretty neat. Standing in a circular crowd of a couple hundred quiet gawkers watching three oragutans lope over a set of ropes and bars bigger than a basketball court is neat, then not neat, then neat again: you know they are very endangered, the Indonesian rainforest is being destroyed and you can see they can choose to come and go from the open area where you watch them…but those hands and expressions. Some doors on the inside of the cage have locks and keys to keep them challenged. Other doors and locks, of course, have that other purpose.

So...why don't they write folk songs about the 401?The trip is a little over two hours one-way. The nearest 150 km of the 401 to Kingston go through some of the nicest rolling pastoral countryside in Ontario – in some valleys you could be approaching Burlington, Vt, from the east. The eastern 3/4’s of Northumberland County still lacks the burbs which now reach to Bowmanville, 100 km east of the zoo, which itself sits in the east of the City. But when it hits, it sure is like the ugly stick got there first. Hit the gas on the way out heading home and look forward to Cobourg where you can loosen the grip on the steering wheel.

Dead Ducks

Duck soup, duck pie, duck jelly, duck wine....

One of the neat things about this picture from the 1930’s of my grandfather-in-law Stuart Penny and his brother Rae at the end of a day’s hunting at Honey Harbour, Ontario is that I have two of the decoys they used, one with buckshot in its butt.

Tag – You’re It!

…and I am going to quit playing for a while. 11 days off. Drove for 4 of them. 3300 km or so. Other 7 full of cleaning out the house which appears to have sold pending closing. Some thoughts from between Kingston and PEI, the length of the St.Lawrence:

  • The two best looking parts of Canada on the drive are both in Quebec: the Kamouraska areas between Riviere-du-Loup and Pocatiere on Highway 20 (huge granite mounds in the river and on the land, between which the river and the road flow respectively); and the waterfront road at the foot of the cliffs at Levis across from Quebec City (active working river, old rail bed used by hundreds as we watched for biking and roller blading, Chateau Frontenac in front of almost as many layers of mountains in the dusk as Montpellier, Vermont);

  • Old car tapes are a minefield of emotions. Bought before my CD buying days began around 1993, I was brought back to a rawer time. Garnett Rogers is pretty damn good. Damn song about a damn pigeon makes me cry every time I hear it;

  • Worst service in the world: The Kentucky Fried on the west 401 at Cornwall. Stood with wife and children at a till for five minutes as teen staff walked two feet past us setting up a fan for themselves to be told when we said we were leaving becuse the service was so bad, that the sign at the other end of the counter said “cash”. As there were five tills each with other families waiting, the meaning of this message eluded us. Please shun this establishment on your travels;

  • Cars are amazing. For about 75 to 80 bucks (Canadian) you can go 1500 kilometres either in one day (my trip to PEI) or over three (the return);

  • Best diners: the Irving Big Stop at Salisbury NB on the Trans-Canada (good diner food including a very respectable Ruben and 2 buck, 12 oz., large tomato juice), the Normandin at Levis (a favorite for over a decade – draft beer is a moslons ex and the waiting staff help you do the whole thing in our respectly poor english and french) – maple beans (aka “the bomb” in a couple of respects) with your breakfast; and

  • Best hotel in the Maritimes – the Sheraton at Fredericton. Great waterfront location in what looks like a park. Staff are capable and relaxed. Room service is fast and the wine celler is respectable. In 1999, they had no rooms left in the class we had ordered and we got the Royal Suite. Literally the rooms the Queen gets when in NB. We could have played basketball in the livingroom. The dinner table sat 12. We paid the same as the basic room we booked. Somnewhere we have a photo of our daughter, then 11 months having a pee on the floor. Although in the the same room, she was too far to run to in time but the camera was not. You have to think way ahead if you want to embarrass the hell out of someone at their wedding reception.

  • NPR – 90.1 Calais Maine; 106.1 Presque Isle, Maine, 106.5 Fort Kent Maine, 104.7(?) Vermont Public Radio St. Albans, 89.5 North Country Public Radio, Northern New York State.

Well, that is it for now. Thanks for stopping by during a slow posting week and a half.