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I wrote my last 2000 despatches back in sunny Los Angeles. We’d spent the last four weeks driving through Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and New England. Having flown back from Toronto we were lying low for a few hours before catching the flight back home. ~ Ian
We’ve driven about 9,000 kms, and the Buick looked a little travel-stained by the time we returned it to the bowels of Toronto airport this morning. We never became true friends. In four weeks we never managed to start it without it beeping at us, nor to climb out of it without have to fiddle with the automatic locks. Worst of all, despite Jeff’s claim that you couldn’t sell a car in America without cup-holders, it didn’t have any.
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Last time I wrote we were just heading into Canada. We landed in Edmonton, which is a fairly northerly city, capital of Alberta. Heather had forgotten how flat the world can be. The city is not that old, but it’s certainly flat, and it had a kind of “bull-dozed” look to it. It was still early spring and I suppose there hadn’t been time for the green lushness to develop that we saw elsewhere.
We just had time to change before our first presentation to photographers. I got the impression that the evening was a disappointment to Darlene and Chris because one (one!) of the 20 people there didn’t buy a QBY starter kit on the spot.
On our last night Chris cooked us huge Alberta steaks on the grill. They were delicious, and massive — enormous ribs that wouldn’t have looked out of place as Germanic weapons in Gladiator, which we saw a couple of days ago on its Memorial Day release — great stuff, action lovers. We washed Chris’s steaks down with some of his home-made port.
Darlene drove us to Banff — plenty of snow still, and handsome red-roofed groupings of farm-house, barn and silo on the prairie. Banff is simply spectacular, and has a beautiful hotel, one of a series built by Canadian Pacific Rail in the style of European castles. If you can imagine Tranz Rail building French chateaux for its customers in Auckland, Taihape and Wellington you get the picture. Nevertheless Heather has no wish to take the cross-Canada train again. Nor the Trans-Siberian Express. Once was enough.
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Then we flew to Toronto, which was an emotional time for Heather. In fact she’d been reluctant to return to Canada, afraid it would disappoint or disturb her memories of the country. And her memory was exceptional, although not helped by the fact that the places where they’d lived, Port Credit (a village on the shore of Lake Ontario) and Brampton (a town slightly inland that used to be surrounded by market garden roses) were now both part of the Toronto sprawl. But we found and photographed every house where she and Jim and their Mum and Dad had lived, not to mention the places Angus and Rita and their lot had, plus the odd school etc.
Once again our memories revolve around food. We bought fabulous bratwurst and sauerkraut hot dogs from a cart next to a lakeside bridge in Port Credit, chatting to the vendor while we ate. And Peameal Bacon sandwiches at the St Lawrence Market, which the Sharpe family used to visit regularly back in the day. Again, delicious. It was a Proustian moment that reduced Heather to tears. Madelaines and France, Peameal Bacon and Canada, Old World and New.
While I think of it, I f you want good bacon in North America, specify Canadian. Why Americans prefer their own — streaky bacon grilled to resemble thin wooden planks — I don’t know.
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With Heather’s memories safe and secure we drove north, planning to then head east across country through the Algonquin National Park towards Quebec. And I must say Heather let us down for once. Ontario is the province of a thousand lakes (I’d testify to several thousand, actually) and she’d spent her summer holidays up where we were headed, west of Lake Simcoe. She reckoned we’d find lots of place to stay, but we ended up in a rather grim motel, run by a helpful Kenyan man, in a place called Orillia.
When we stopped next day for gas in Huntsville we learned that Canadians are sensitive and proud. The attendant was a very friendly young man, and we started one of those conversations where you say you’re a New Zealander, and they say, yes, we knew an Australian once…
After clarifying the difference I said something like — Well, at least none of us are Americans, ha ha — said good-bye and walked out to the car with my coffee to go.
Heather appeared a few minutes later, red in the face and shouting at the top of her lungs that the town was full of red-necks and we were leaving right now. Personally, I thought that if the town was full of red-necks, and she was going to say so quite so loudly, then we certainly should leave before some lumber-jack took to us with his axe.
It appears that the gas station guy thought I’d said that he was American and — getting redder by the second — insisted on letting Heather know that he was nothing of the sort and I’d better watch myself.
We drove on through the Algonquin — beautiful forest, rivers, lakes etc — and continued across the border into Quebec.
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A few people know that I’ve decided not to like the French until they decide to like me, which I accept may take a while. And you might think that, given how easy it had proved to upset an Ontarian, I’d need to tread lightly in Quebec — but I really liked it there.
The Québecois are like teenagers. Take smoking, for example. It’s on the retreat everywhere in North America except Quebec, but there they seem to take the attitude that if the surgeon general says it’ll kill you, it must be good. So everyone smokes, everywhere. In fact they still blow sexy puffs at each other in restaurants.
They’ve also forced every other province to become bi-lingual — but in Quebec it’s almost impossible to find a sign in English.
You have to like people so determined to be contrary, or so determined to stick up for the home team, take your pick.
The other thing in their favour is that the metropolitan French like to go there to enjoy their scenery and cheap food, and to laugh at their accents and treat them like yokels. The Québecois comfort themselves in the knowledge that the Parisians sneer at the rest of the French, and with the suspicion that somewhere in Paris is a snooty old couple who sneer at the Parisians.
What’s not in favour of the Québecois is that just when you’ve decided that fast food couldn’t get any worse you come across poutine — french fries topped with cheese curds and gravy.
We stayed at an old Auberge called La Grande Maison in Baie-St-Paul, centre of a UNESCO-favoured area 80kms east of Quebec City on the St Lawrence. It was loaded to the eye-balls with charm. Everywhere you looked there was frou-frou. The dining room was a work of art in drapery. The breakfast room’s walls were adorned with dried vines entwined with dried flowers. Even the towels on our bed were formed each day into sculptures, from which more dried buds tumbled when you disturbed them. But we were there for five days, and so there was plenty of time to find out what it was really like. I can say with authority that beneath all that frou-frou is more frou. Plus heaps of tobacco smoke of course, and some very nice people. They also cooked a full breakfast.
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This was the start of a running joke. We noticed that everywhere we looked there were Tremblays. Every third or fourth business was a Tremblay. Marcel Tremblay panel beater, Roger Tremblay mechanique, Pierre Tremblay hair dresser. Did they not like knitting and playing cards during the long Winter evenings? Was the original Tremblay a sailor or a salesman with a wife in any port? Is making out against a wall now officially a knee-tremblay? Even back in Toronto — pouf! two Tremblay tour buses outside our hotel. Across the border — boom! — a Trombley crossing, believe it or not.
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Heather’s family had also lived in Stanbridge East, near the Quebec border with Vermont, and that’s where we drove next. Again Heather’s memory was impeccable. We went to an old general store that she recognised by the old Robin Hood flour sign on the frontage. Her Mum used to shop there. The sign’s been there for decades, said the proprietor. The town never changes. Population 600 and that doesn’t change either. Every year a girl gets pregnant, every year a young man leaves town.
She found their house on Chemin Tannerie too, smaller than she remembered. It must have been lonely for her mother, isolated in this little town while her father worked elsewhere. And snowed-in all winter, this being Canada.
We bought a dozen cans of French Canadian Maple Syrup, the local delicacy, while we were there — direct from the producer. The (bi-lingual) cans had pictures of snow on them, with men tapping the trees.
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It was a long day’s driving by the time we got to Montreal, my favourite. Even the laundromat was entertaining. A newspaper article on the wall talked about what people leave in their pockets (first prize went to a cocaine stash — expensive laundry) and what you could learn from people’s laundry (French women spend three times more on their underwear). Heather quietly folded my underpants and stole away.
We went to Schwartz’s, a long-standing Jewish diner with a charming pile of smoked beef rumps in the window. At lunch time People queue happily for the smoked meats and pickles. We waited in line with a cheerful retired Bank Manager now working for the Boy Scouts and his companion, a gourmet popcorn salesman from Indiana trying to sell him a promotional line. We “had what they had”, which was pretty good — hot smoked meats with mustard on rye bread and a Black Cherry pop! — and settled into a cheerful conversation that suddenly turned into a lecture, when the Bank Manager decided he would put the American to rights about how “they” were always throwing their weight around.
We felt this was a bit on the nose, but we kept our mouths shut, you’ll be pleased to know, because Lonely Planet had given us the following advice:
— Don’t mention gun control (the nice guy you’re talking to probably has one
under the pillow).
— Don’t mention abortion (who needs to be fire-bombed or protested to death?).
— Don’t question their obsession with Old Glory, and
— Don’t blame them for their government’s foreign policy in your neck of the woods. Which seems fair.
Anyway, Schwartz’s was fun, even if we wouldn’t choose it if we died and went to heaven — which the newspaper reviewer claimed he would.
Places like this, and the diners and doughnut joints, generally had a great sense of community about them, even if on this Saturday morning they looked like a community of men trying to get out of the house.
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We then drove into the States via Niagara Falls — did a Chevy Chase and admired the Falls from the car park while we ate ice cream — and set out across up-state New York for New England.
No, that’s not fair to Niagara Falls. We saw them twice, once from the viewing platform, and they were definitely spectacular. We did see the Maid of the Mist, but there was no way Heather was prepared to take the boat trip. And we weren’t on our honeymoon, or getting married, and we weren’t tourists — we were Road Warriors. So we drove on — across upstate New York like I said.