… has now appeared in the back of Casey (in case you are wondering, Casey is the name of the PT Cruiser – with a registration number of BBKC 458 it could hardly have been anything else now, could it?) and the big red box is full.

For having been to a Lowe’s yesterday afternoon and the huge Home Depot and Walmart that were right on the US-Canadian border at Covington (they must have heard me coming), I now have

• 100 drywall pattresses (cost $22 the lot)
• 25 wall-mounted pattresses
• 20 white sockets – the standard colour
• 10 ivory sockets
• 10 red sockets (regular readers of these pages know that I’m heavily into colour-coding for different usages)
• all of the fascia plates (they say that they are unbreakable – obviously they haven’t had me in there for a while)
• about 50 3-pin plugs
• a few extension leads and all kinds of other exciting American electrical stuff
• one partridge
• one pear tree

The reason for this of course is that when I do 12-volt DC electrical circuits running off solar panels and wind turbines in Europe I need to use plugs and sockets and the like that cannot be mistaken for anything else and which can handle high amperages.

There are no American fittings in Europe so no-one will mistake them, and as American current is 110 volts instead of 230 volts and so more susceptible to voltage drop, they use thicker cable to compensate – and the thicker cable will handle higher amperages.

So now I have a full stock on hand and I shall be shipping that back to Europe in due course and so when I get back I can get on with what I’m supposed to be doing – ie earning money to compensate for what I’m spending over here.

You’ve no idea how rampant inflation has been over here since I last visited. Petrol in the States for example costs $2.80 a gallon in most places, and as there are only 16 fluid ounces in an American pint instead of 20 in a European pint, an American gallon is just about 3.65 litres. And $2.80 a gallon is a far cry from 2005 when I was paying $1.45 and an even farther cry from 2001 when I was paying $1.10.

Cheapest motel I’ve found so far has been $45 – last night, stranded in the wilderness miles from civilisation I paid a whopping $69, and that motel was nothing to write home about at all. It just happened to be the first one that I came across after looking for half an hour.

Gone are the days from 2002 when I paid $25 per night and in 2005 when I was stopping in a respectable chain of modern motels at $33 per night.

With millions of Americans out of work and rampant inflation such as I am noticing, no wonder there are thousands of people being turned out onto the streets. The States is nothing like the Shoppers’ Paradise it used to be.

But in Walmart I also bit the bullet and bought a new digital dictaphone. The Olympus that Rhys recommended wasn’t carried and they had a whole selection of different ones. not one of which did everything that I needed.

In the end I bought a Sony at $39 which does not have a direct connection to a computer (which is strange and disappointing – I’ll have to rig up a cable through the headphone and mike sockets and see what I can do about getting some speech recognition software) but it does have a “pause” facility (which puts the “record” on standby for an hour), 2gb of memory, a unidirectional microphone facility as well as the more normal omnidirectional mike – so if you switch it into unidirectional, it just picks up whatever is going directly into the mike and none of the background noise, a noise reduction facility that cuts out high-frequency interference.

All in all considering that there wasn’t much choice, I’m well-impressed with it and it’s doing the business.

Many years ago, driving through Canada, I saw what I was convinced was a Sprite Musketeer caravan althougb I didn’t stop to photograph it and I rather wish that I had.

But here on the side of the road in northern New York State about 8 miles from the Canadian border I come across a very sad Sprite Musketeer caravan that originally came from a company down in Oswego down the road according to the sticker on the chassis.

So there we are. They were definitely imported officially into North America.

A few miles further on, I’m caught in a police road block. There’s a prison not too far from here and one of the convicts, by the name of McCann, has made a bid for freedom.

The police have a quick glance inside Casey to see if he’s hiding under the seat or in the boot, but once they have satisfied themselves that he’s not in here, I can carry on with what I was doing.

I’m now in Canada, approaching the suburbs of Montreal, and this looks interesting.

It’s the old ALCO railway works, apparently, now transformed into Exporail, a railway mseum and it’s chock-full of railway engines and other relics. I’ve no time to look at it today, but this will be high on my list for the return journey.

I’m on the southern shore of the St Lawrence River here and there across on the far shore is the city on Montreal.

I’m staying over here because there’s much less traffic and much less congestion. I don’t have the time to be caught up in the traffic today. Every hour that I waste on the road at the moment brings the snows of Labrador that much closer.

I can still stop and take photos though if I’m quick. This is a huge ethanol plant on the edge of Montreal and the steam that’s pumping up from there is really impressive. It gives you an idea of the heat that the plant is generating.

Ethanol is becoming much more important as a renewable energy source and is slowly being added to petrol in an attempt to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that we consume. There will be more and more of these plants sprining up in the future.

But never mind new technology for the moment – here’s a bit of old technology to be going on with. On the outskirts of Sorel-Tracy I encounter a nuclear power station.

It’s something that has taken me completely by surprise because Canada, and Quebec in particular, must be up there amongst the top three countries in the world for producing hydro-electric power and so I would have thought that a nuclear power station, particularly one situated in between two major urban centres, would have been the last thing that they needed.

But then Sorel-Tracy has a huge mineral-refining plant and so it must need all of the power. It must need all of the minerals too and there are some big ships in the docks being unloaded, as well as one or two awaiting their turn outside.

But I’ve found an impressive motel here – $60 Canadian it has to be said, but it has all mod cons including a microwave so tea has cost me less than $2 – a couple of tins from the supermarket next door.

If I’m spending all this money on motels I’m going to have to economise on the eating – no restaurants for me – and I can see me buying a $30 microwave for where a motel doesn’t have one if these prices keep up.

Of course, many of you know that the eastern part of Quebec, from roughly the centre of Montreal, is French-speaking and here in my shower room the taps are marked with C and F.
“Chaud and Froid” I hear you say.
“Rubbish” I retort. “It’s cold and freezing“.