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It was good to see Pat and Clara.  A sentiment I don’t think will ever change.  They let me into their home, allowed me to purchase a salad I didn’t touch, permitted me to sleep in, and let me take their picture.  After finishing my Diet Sun Drop I left for home but before going, changed my cell phone plan to remove the temporary “+ Canada” features I had enabled before leaving thinking I’d otherwise forget to turn it off and be charged for its use.  On the way back, I received two text messages from America’s hat saying how nice it was to see me during my time in Canada.  Two text messages costing a mere $4.00.

Add a calendar reminder next time, Terry.

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Montreal is a crazy town to me, somehow perpetuated by the ideological differential between French and English Canada.   For instance, on the way home from Bianca’s last night there were six CRT TV sets out on the curb on our walk home.  Today wasn’t a garbage pick-up day nor was there some sort of special TV collection in progress, just six sets soaking up sidewalk and this didn’t seem odd until I pointed it out.

Adam and I stayed in Richard’s basement and Adam was roused by the Kallos’s dog, Lucy.

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Lucy ready to attack

Lucy is a friendly dog, and upon being licked awake a second time Adam yelled “WHY ARE YOU STILL LOVING ME”.  Breakfast was a mishmash of eggs, Pacheco’s chorizo, smoothie, and bacon and most of us did our fair share to make sure everything was eaten.

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How a Sausage Should be Enjoyed

 

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A Crowded Kitchen

We met up with Brian and Andrei at a Metro stop and Bianca departed to attend to some things.  Andrei and Alan were both more talkative than during our first meeting and hearing what there were up to was pleasant.  We returned to Alan’s before getting lunch.

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Outside Alan's

I had assumed that poutine was the specialty of Montreal when in reality it is more of a provincial food.  The local delicacy is smoked meats, and this we had in spades:

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Smoked Montreal Meats

Maybe Philadelphia has spoiled me, but I found it unremarkable.  The smoke flavor was weak and the flavor of the meat itself was buried under mustard.  I finished mine, and the rest of Brian’s, and the rest of Bianca’s (maybe it was good), and we again returned to Alan’s.

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Intersection by Night

Time passed to the perennial favorite of Super Smash Bros where my utter gracelessness with a control over keyboard + mouse rendered me useless.  As sun set, we decided to climb Mount Royal.

Alan’s apartment was about a 1/2 mile from the foot of the “mountain” and I moved slowly taking photos.  There were a dozen searchlights pointed at the clouds illuminating the overcast night and for what reason none in the party was sure.  After crossing McGill university we set up the unlit roads toward the peak and I was very glad I had a continuous LED light that I use as fill flash for video with me as we otherwise had no form of illumination.  The climb to the first of two observation levels was long enough that the group separated into two groups, Richard and myself and then everyone else.  I hadn’t before realized that thinner than me didn’t mean fitter than me and I was happy at the pace I kept.

The view of Montreal from the main belvedere provided a “hey, do you remember that?”

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Montreal from Above

The weird antennae of light to the right is what remains from the 1976 Montreal Olympiad.

At the top of Mount Royale is an illuminated LED cross which we decided to see if we could reach.  There was much fencing but we found a break in it and started going up.  The top-most point wasn’t occupied by the cross but by an antenna station that was reachable via a fenced road or the network of foot paths and switchbacks we took.  Having gone so far for nothing, we celebrated the discovery of a puddle.

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We walked a ridiculous amount to the top of Montreal. When we got there, nothing of interest was present so we assumed the mountain protected this puddle.

Oh yeah, then there was the cross.

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Top of the Mountain

We stood near the fence and talked about how TF2 had changed over the past three years, a juxtaposition I found novel.

On the way down, rain began to pour and after about 12 miles of walking today we wanted to eat again.  We walked towards Frite Alors! against a deluge where again the different parts of Montreal came to light.  St. Catherine’s Street is probably the main artery and had dapper but dully dressed Anglophones on one side of the street walking with their umbrellas and much more daring Francophones on the other side darting through the rain without so much as coats in many cases.  I was fine with the combination of water, running, and cocktail dresses.

Poutine is the closest I’ve found to soul food when traveling, combining salt, fat, starch, and warm in a serving environment where one only requires a fork.  Ours were served in bowls although a trough may have been more appropriate.  I will miss it.

We dropped off Alan, and then unwound the evening at Richard’s watching Community.  Since I enjoyed the show, it should be cancelled soon.

Thank you for having me, Montreal.  It was fun.

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Richard, Andrei, Bianca, Adam

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I’ve commented before on Canada’s signage, but by far my favorite are the penalty signs for going 50 KPH over the speed limit.  They include notes like “10 year loss of license”, “$15,000 fine”, “1 year in prison”, which all seem reasonable but I think one could capture a more visceral fear with ones that say “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and your name is Peaches”, “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and you’ll learn what a black bear in estrus can do”, and “Go 50 KPH over the speed limit and you will be hit by a cruise missile”.

Ambiguous signs combined with a few other strange map moments lead me to drive straight to work and where I arrived at 9 AM as I had told someone that I’d have something done by 10 AM and I had no intention of failing.  I hadn’t shaved, I was wearing day old clothing and my eyes were a spot red but I got the task done after which I triumphantly reported to my boss:

Me: I had a rough weekend and only came in to take care of a quick thing for a requester, do you mind if I leave now?
Him: Can you take care of just one thing before you go?
Me: Sure.
Him: Could you test fluid infiltration on these three different pouches, with two different challenge fluids at these 5 different conditions?
Me: That’s 90 pouches if you assume 3 per condition and that would take… many hours.
Him: I’d get started, then.

Lesson Learned: Old Boss – Analog, could match task to ability to do them.  New Boss – Digital, you are either present and working, or not.

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Driving to Saskatoon was fast and clear cruising at 110-120 KPH under a cloudless sky.  I stopped for fuel in Alberta, the most oil rich province and topped up with gas at a mere 0.835 a liter.  I noticed along the way that a lot of the intersecting roads were unpaved and proof came in the dust and grime cemented on the other cars at the gas station which was thick enough that I couldn’t read their license plates.  The road was lined with what I’ll simply call farmland despite being largely filled with grass heads of cattle that seemed distributed by hot air balloon.  Saskatoon itself was unremarkable and the clustered housing reminded me of a thousand other such ones I’d driven through, by, or in as part of my loop of the Anglo sphere of influence in the West.

I arrived at my host’s house shortly before dinner and was greeted by a well prepared spread that would have made Good Housekeeping proud.  Devin/Devmon’s parents and I talked for probably about two and half hours about the quirks and machinations of both American and Canadian politics with us each asking simple but tricky questions that only kids normally ask when exposed to a new magisteria of creation.  Mine being “so, what’s up with Quebec” and my host’s being “So, what’s New Jersey”.  I wonder if the latter was spawned by the caliber or content of American cultural export or more of a realization that the state as an administrative district is rather distinct from the state as a cultural one.

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Devon, in the pose that marks both his and mine generations

Devon and I played some quality TF2 where I resumed a more bombastic persona that I hope didn’t unwind to comity I had with my hosts.  I can sometimes yell inappropriate things.

I left a bit before midnight and the last light of day was still lingering which returned before 4 AM as I shot towards the US.  My plan was to stay overnight in the US as Canada doesn’t seem to have the $40 hotel room that Motel 6 has led me to expect.  I crossed the border and again had my vehicle searched although this time half-heartedly and I searched my again-functioning GPS for a motel.  I found one… 120 miles aways in Minot, North Dakota. Grr….

As I drove across North Dakota seeing the opalescent dawn blow color across the dimpled and hill-spotted terrain, I had my first moment where I silenced my inner photo taker.  The landscape was beautiful, and under almost any other circumstances, I’d have stopped for easily a half hour soaking up the land and its secrets but this was overpowered by my brain’s demand for sleep.

I stumbled into a Days Inn nearly dozing off at the front desk and I requested a room for the day.  The desk attendant obliged my request for a room I could occupy until about 3 PM and another war began in my head between the part that demanded sleep and the part that was outraged by a $100 fee for the night.  The cheap part won and I drove to a KOA, set up my tent in a blur, and slammed $22 into the overnight registration box and went to bed.

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My first trial of the day was the operation of a foreign shower setup.  The water was the appropriate temperature and the flow was fine, but I couldn’t actually get the water to come out of the shower head.  I thought I had torsioned everything to just before it would break but the “on” mechanism was to turn the tap nozzle down and clockwise, mechanism I had never seen before.  This tap combined with a door that was locked by pulling and rotating the handle a certain way to create the most confusing bathroom I’d ever used which admittedly isn’t a terribly high bar.  I walked out to great the cast assembled on the porch and felt a tinge of jealousy.

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A fine view from one's deck

The construction equipment in the corner is part of a project whereby James is going to add an impressive pond structure to the area in front of the deck.

We had breakfast in Invermere and for the first part of it I watched a dog and a girl of about 6 to 8 run back and forth in front of the shops across the way.  The shops were generic small-townesque versions of what’d normally be a big box store combined with specialty shops with no visible support next to a seasonally closed theater.  This was all down the block from a solar powered public garbage compactor.  We dawdled away the afternoon making the kind of delightful palaver that comes from a clutch of people just familiar enough with what the other people do to ask interesting questions to people just noviced enough to only have tentative answers that bear factual accuracy but rarely the weight of experience.

Following this was dinner at a local restaurant where I had a chance to dive into the world of Canadian condiments.  Canadian Heinz ketchup is flavored with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup and seems to have more salt in it.  The rest of the table politely continued conversation as I tried successively larger blobs of the stuff on knife until I had enough to grasp the mouth feel a determine what I thought of the level of sweetness.  The next condiment to go under lingual microscope was HP sauce, a brown beef sauce that crowds out A1 and Worcestershire sauce.  While being slightly thicker than A1 it lacked both the body that comes from tomato puree as the main ingredient and a general lack of spiciness.  HP is probably the one best described as steak sauce whereas I’d call A1 more of a steak dressing.  The final cultural difference came over tipping when I insisted that 20% was standard in America and my imperial clout worked better after I reminded the table that we did insist the server return with condoms, handcuffs, and whipped cream of which he provided one.

That evening we went to a local bird sanctuary which was nicer looking than many of the national parks I visited.

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Reflective water is reflective

While walking around the water’s edge Morgan found a stump he’d though go great in the hardscape that Beers was making.  He decided to carry it back to the car and while trying to fit the unruly stump into his hatchback a police truck rushed by, stopped, and hastily reversed back to where we were.  There were two cars present and I, as the odd American out, made my way to the vehicle that didn’t have someone shoving a stolen stump into it.

Policeman: Hey you!
Several of us: Yes?
Policeman: …Did you see a brown truck drive by?
Us: *Universal sigh of relief* No.
Morgan: Wait!  Yes.
Policeman: Thank you! *zooms off*

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The stump that launched a thousand sweat beads.

Throughout the day, I’d been trying to get Beers picture.  Victory came I had my 70-200 f/2.8 lens on my camera shooting across a ravine to get the sun on the trees.  I dropped the camera slightly, got his picture at a reasonable distance, and recorded in slow motion his visage go from “it’s nice out here” to “he got me”.

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GG, Mr. Weir

The evening ended watching the ruby-throated hummingbirds feed.  I did a rare thing and set my camera to full manual and was rewarded for my rapid knob-spinning.

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Gotcha

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The drive from Surrey to Invermere was long, clocking in at about 10 hours, but it gave me a chance to soak in at least a portion of Canada.  The differences were small but pervasive such as getting used to KPH and dollars per liter as standard vehicle notions.  But there were more:

  • Bridges said “slippery when frosty” instead of “bridge may be icy”
  • The little guy that indicated there was a hiking trail was hiking to the left rather than the right
  • The Trans Canada highway goes straight through small towns resulting in a sudden speed drop to 50 KPH.  The US has the courtesy to build these people byways.  There are also several cases where the road is one lane each way despite being one of their national engineering achievements
  • Full-service gas stations are manned by the slow old instead of the spry old
  • Signs advertise attractions that aren’t even on the current road or one of its crossroads
  • McDonalds has muffins but no cookies
  • NOBODY OFFERS FREE PUBLIC WIFI

Finally, Canada has an exit sign for everything.  In the US there are four: You can eat here, you can fuel here, you can sleep here, you can poop here.  Canada has:you can sleep, poop, fuel, eat, tent camp, trailer camp, dispose of waste, see history, get an associates degree, get a bachelors degree, alpine ski, crosscountry ski, hike, walk, launch a boat, see animals, see a scenic view, talk to a park ranger, receive information on the area, fish, boat, water ski, visit the First Nations, undertake engineering or science (I shit you not), have your car repaired, and purchase poutine (doesn’t exist but should).

On my way, I stopped to get Steven Harper Funbucks aka Canadian dollars and the person at the RBC asked me how I liked Canada so far.  I told her it was fine and she said to let her know if I had any problems.  Good to know someone on the inside.

I met James Weir/Beers in Invermere at the Tim Hortons, a stop he said I wasn’t allowed to make until we’d met.  Their donuts were a notch below Dunkin’ Donuts and their coffee was identical to what I get from Wawa but it served as a fine meeting place.  I met the rest of his cohort consisting of a lawyer that was boarding with Morgan Blakely/Plato’s mother as an apprentice lawyer as well as Morgan and we moved to his residence for the evening.  My initial fears of them shaking me down for my lunch money was again unmet.

We played a bit of TF2 and I was rewarded with the following gem:

Look at the flag next to my name: I'M IN CANADA!

I shot this picture of the group from the side with the aid of a flash and Beers then realized that the game was on.  He didn’t want his picture taken and as the next day unwound there would be a deadly game of cat and also cat.

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Back to Front: Plato, Scott, and James/Beers

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Somehow a pair of shorts had fallen from my car and gotten soaked by the Washington rain.  I rigged together an impromptu air drying consisting of my car.

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By the time I got to Mount Rainier they were quite dry, just like the park itself.  Mount Rainier is shaped in almost every way by the movement of glaciers and the river basins were hugely disproportionate to the actual flow at the time which can change by orders of magnitude as the glaciers on Rainier advance and retreat.  Even more rock is scored out as chunks break off and migrate down.

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Make way for glacier

The peek itself was white and photogenic.

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Mt. Rainier

Besides the mountain, climbing the mountain, or looking at what was falling off of the mountain, there wasn’t much to the park besides a crazy number of bodies of water formed with melt water.  Here again I learned that man is a herding species as whenever I turned out to take a picture, two or three other cars would follow.  This time I decided to try to take advantage of this at a glacial lake with spectacular blue ice that was only visible at a distance between trees.  Glacial ice forms when snow compresses into ice which creates a very blue ice.  It’s impressively hard and dense with a slightly deformed crystal lattice.  This was my shot with a 200mm lens from a snow bank over a fir stand.  I doubt the German man wearing sandals got a good shot with his camera phone.

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I was lazy and forgot to white balance, everything should be a spot cooler.

I left Rainier on my way to Tacoma, Washington to visit Ben Fatula.  Ben is a chef in the Armed Forces looking to move into the private sector and eventually open a restaurant after a car accident which left him with chronic back pain.  We had some Thai food, a type of cuisine that I find underwhelming and obsessed with peanuts but seeing him was nice.

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Ben

Then, it was off to Canada…

I spruced up my car in anticipation of crossing the Canadian border and tried to remove extraneous crap from the immediate view of the crossing officer.  I get to the front of the line:

Guard: Where are you coming from?
Me: Pennsylvania.
Guard: How long do you plan on being in Canada?
Me: Three days.
Guard: What are the contents of your cargo?
Me: Mostly camping equipment.
Guard: Who is your current employer?
Me: None.
Guard: So you’ve driven from PA to Vancouver for three days, have no job and are mostly carrying camping equipment?
Me: Yes, sir.
Guard: Please pull to the side.

The only way I could raise more red flags was if I said I was a travelling oregano salesman or if my last name were Hussein.

I pulled over, had my phone and passport taken and looked on as every item was removed from my car.   The only other people waiting were what appeared to be a drunk British woman and a collection of Asian women.  After a bit they waved me back over and gave me my keys back pronouncing my car clean.  Then I saw that in the process of inspecting my car the ding in my front door that prevented it from opening was turned into a full blown dent. Boo.

The signage in Canada was bewildering.  The first thing I noticed was that the posted speed limit conversion was a bit off: 20 MPH is not 30 KPH, it’s 32.18…  Canada takes us for chumps.  Also, the yield and one way signs had no words on them but all the others were is both English and French.  Fuel was also not always listed with the obligatory 9/10ths cent extra, and in Surrey I saw gas at 1.133 dollars a liter or about 4.32 a gallon.  Eak.

My host that night was Tom Weir/Tweir.  His cat is adorable:

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Smudge the cat.

Tweir was tired and I was tired resulting in the last three hours of the day ending in rambling about team operation.  To bed.