Tag Archives: Rhys Sage

Friday 14th September 2018 – WELL, WHAT A NIGHT!

*************** THE IMAGES ***************

There are over 3,000 of them and due to the deficiencies of the equipment they all need a greater or lesser amount of post-work. And so you won’t get to see them for a while.

You’ll need to wait til I return home and get into my studio and start to go through them. And it will be a long wait. But I’ll keep you informed after I return.
***************

I was off on my travels yet again, and on a couple of occasions too. Up in the High Arctic with a couple of my fellow-passengers. And I wish that I could recall what was going on in there because it was certainly exciting and also very important. I remember thinking that I need to be able to recall this when I awake

But fat chance of that!

Up on the deck there were a few icebergs floating around. Flat top and sheer sides, just as they had calved off from the glacier. The ones with more extravagant shapes have been at sea for quite a while and have had the time to erode, either by sun, rain or wave action.

And while I was admiring everything, I suddenly realised that I had yet to take my medication. So I went back down to do it.

Back up here, I was just in time to see the light as the sun came up behind the mainland of Greenland. Nothing special unfortunately – we can thank the low cloud for that.

My bad night had caught up with me yet again. We had two lectures this morning – one of the Power of Observation which was really nothing more than an egocentric (of which there are more than enough on this trip) photo exhibition, followed by a talk on tectonic plate theory and the Movement of Continents. And I fell off to sleep on a couple of occasions.

But by now we had entered the Tasiussaq Fjord. This is our destination for today. Our rather timid captain managed to find his way in up to a certain point, despite how narrow it was, and we all enjoyed the manoeuvring.

I went for my lunch and ended up chatting to three people whom I didn’t know. And they didn’t stick around very long either. I have this affect on people, don’t I?

They ran out of zodiacs to take us ashore. There was an extreme hiking party out and also a kayaking group. That latter sounded exciting but it’s been 50 years since I was last in a kayak and that was on a canal. Sea-kayaking at my time of life with my (lack of) recent experience is maybe not the way forward.

We had to wait until the first load came back and meantime, I fell asleep. And I could feel myself rising out of my body and floating upwards, and it’s been years since I’ve last had an out-of-body experience.

However we were soon off and into a really impressive fjord. It’s been a long time since I’ve ever seen anything so beautiful.

On shore, we had a little climb up to the raised beach, and then it was something of a hike across the isthmus to the other side of the headland.

Over there, there was a Thule village of sod houses – some from about 600 or 700 years ago, one reasonably modern-ish Inuit sod-house and a couple of indeterminate age in-between.

The archaeologist with our party delighted us all by recounting a lovely little story about how she went on an exploration of a village of sod huts, going from one to another to examine them, and walked into one to find that it was still occupied! And the occupant offered her a mug of tea.

There were several caches for keeping meat – one cache for each kind of meat apparently including moose, and we also discovered what might have been some kayak stands or may even have been umiak stands.

Inuit and Thule houses, and even Dorset houses depend upon flat land and a sea view. And this sea view here couldn’t be better. There was even a little beach at the foot of it, but not the kind of place where you would be in your bikini or your cozzy.

There was an alternative way back, around on the far side of the lake so Strawberry Moose and I came back that way.

I’d forgotten to say that he was with me, and indeed he had had some really good photo opportunities. At least he had a good time.

And so did I. I bet that it was the first time that Everyone Is Everybody Else has ever been played in Tasiussaq Fjord. And the timing was perfection itself.

We managed the trip back to the ship without encountering a storm today, and I came up to my room to have a shower and a clothes-washing session. And at the de-briefing, I fell asleep yet again.

It’s been a long day.

For the evening meal I was once more at the Naughty Table and we all disgraced ourselves thoroughly, much to the chagrin of a woman who had come along quite by accident. And here I am, not fit to be seen out without a keeper and even I can’t keep up with the rest of them.

We have a very early start tomorrow so the little music concert that we had with Sherman Downey didn’t last too long, and Strawberry Moose was unlucky in that he didn’t get a dance. Mind you, no-one else did. it was one of those evenings.

Back down to the cabin to put His Nibs away, only to find that for some reason or another I’d managed to lose my room key. I was also ambushed by our Entertainments Manager about my ETA for when we cross back over into Canada, whenever that might be. It’s lucky that Rhys printed out a copy for me last year. I was able to brandish that.

A few days ago, Ashley, one of the Inuit girls on board, told us all an Inuit legend about a woman who could change herself into a fox in order to taunt her lover. Of course, Liege And Lief, and in particular, Crazy Man Michael sprung immediately to mind so I invited her to listen to it. And she enjoyed it tremendously.

Now, I have work to do in order to catch up with stuff that’s dragging. And I’m in a rush because it needs to be done fairly quickly for, as I said just now, we have a very early start tomorrow.

I’ll have to get a wiggle on.

And in other news, I’ve now gone well over the 1,000 photos for this voyage. I did that the other day and forgot to mention it.

Thursday 30th August 2018 – I WISH …

… that banks would stop employing cashiers who wear low-cut tee-shirts. When this one today leant over the counter to give me my US dollars in a fashion so that we could count them together, I was totally distracted and I have no idea how much she gave me.

It’s definitely bad for my health, all of this.

Last night was slightly better. I slept all the way through until the racket from the fridge and the air-conditioning awoke me at about 04:00. But I soon went back to sleep until the alarms went off.

Breakfast for some reason didn’t start to be served until 08:00 so I had plenty of time to attack the notes from yesterday, and I’d even finished by the time that they opened the dining room, which is always encouraging.

Afterwards, I had a shower and washed my clothes from yesterday. I’ll be washing myself away at this rate if it keeps on like this.

A little later, I went out into town, stopping off for a bottle of water and to explore the shopping mall just down the road.

And why is shopping in North America so boring? Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops, you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Down the road at the foot of the hill by the Parc Viger is this beautiful building.

Dating from the early years of the 20th Century, it was formerly the Montreal Technical School but today it’s the BANQ – the Bibiliothèque and Archives National de Québec.

I’ve taken shelter there from the rain once a few years ago, but I’ve never actually visited it. However, it is my destination for this morning.

While you admire one of the most beautiful interiors that I have ever seen, let me tell you my story.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that a few years ago I wrote a pile of stuff about the Chemin du Roy, the road that was built by Pierre Robineau de Bécancour and Jean Eustache Lanouiller in he early 18th Century to link Montréal and Québec

I wrote at the time that I would one day have to visit the National Archives to find the original maps of the route, because much has been lost in the subsequent 300 years.

So here I am.

But I’m in for a massive disappointment.

There are indeed record of the route, that’s for sure. But they are held at the archives site in Québec, not Montreal. So I need to go there instead.

And where are the BANQ archives in Québec? Why, on the campus at the University of Laval of course.

Ring any bells?

But all is not lost. It wasn’t a total waste of time.

I’ve been wondering for years about the track arrangements at the Gare Viger – how the platforms were actually laid out in relation to the buildings, and here I struck gold.

On the wall was an exhibition of the area, and one of the exhibits was a map of the area 100 years or so ago which showed everything that I wanted to know.

The station was subsequently modernised and extended, and this meant that the track layout needed to be changed.

And while I wasn’t able to see a plan of how the station layout was configured afterwards, there was a handy aerial photograph hanging on the wall that showed at least some of the train sheds.

So I might not be any the wiser, but I’m certainly better-informed.

The Gare Viger dates from the turn of the 20th Century. But before this, there was an earlier Canadian Pacific railway station in the eastern side of the city – the Gare Dalhousie.

It was from here that the first trans-continental train set out in 1886 (and we’ve all noticed that, once again, the Maritime Provinces have been totally ignored by the official Canadian History. According to them, there’s nothing except eskimoes and indians east of Montreal and they don’t count for anything)

After the opening of the Gare Viger it became a freight depot and then an industrial warehouse. However it’s recently undergone a programme of renovation and they have done a good job here.

It’s now a circus school, and seeing as it was formerly a Canadian Pacific building, that is quite appropriate. Clowns should feel right at home here.

Down on the docks Oakglen is still there, as we might expect, but we have another bulk carrier down at the far end.

She’s the Gullwing, a Maltese bulk-carrier of 39000 tonnes and was built in 2011, although you might not think it.

She’s come in from Quebec after an exhausting tour around the Pacific, and were I going to visit my friend Rhys I would hop aboard because according to the port authorities her next stop is Charleston in South Carolina.

Also in the far end of the harbour was a huge MSC container ship.

No chance of reading its name from here unfortunately but according to the port records, there’s an MSC Alyssa in port and she seems to fit the bill.

She’s of 61500 tonnes and has arrived from Liverpool. And were I to want to go back to Leuven for my next hospital appointment I would immediately leap aboard, because her next port of call is Antwerp.

The brats still aren’t back at school yet in Montreal, and so the children’s entertainment is in full swing.

I was impressed by the pirate ships, and even more impressed by the fact that the kids were being allowed to swing on ropes and slide down zip wires and all of that.

Can you imagine that in the stupid nanny-state UK where the ridiculous Health and Safety rules are such that you even need a fire safety certificate to wave a flag at a football match.

But I haven’t come here to waste my time.

I had it on good authority that there was a cruise ship in town ready to do a voyage down the St Lawrence and the Eastern seaboard of the USA, and so I went for a look.

And here we have the Seabourn Quest, all 32,500 tonnes of her and built as recently as 2011, which is quite modern for a cruise ship. We’ve seen some thoroughly ancient and disreputable ones in our time.

Unfortunately the quay was heavily guarded so if Strawberry Moose and I want to nip aboard, we’d have to buy some tickets.

The little tender alongside her is the Juno Marie.

She’s officially described as a tanker, and being small like this, her task is very likely to be to fuel up the larger ships in the docks as they arrive so that they are ready to set sail as quickly as possible.

There are a few of these little tankers in port and we’ve seen at least one of them before.

When I was here last October I’d finally managed to make it to the real centre of the city where it all was happening back in the 17th Century but I didn’t have time to go far.

One of the places that I hadn’t seen was the old Ursuline convent, or what remains of it.

This organisation of the “Grey Nuns” was founded here in Montreal in 1737 by Marguerite d’Youville and they ended up over time with quite an impressive range of buildings here.

Their claim to fame is that they were the first female religious organisation to undertake the full range of social and charitable aims.

There had been many people engaged in these tasks before, and we’ve talked in the past about people like Marguerite Bourgeoys.

But they just had their little niche of interest, not the whole range.

There was a large hospital on the site too, as well as a very large and impressive church, if the old drawings are anything to go by.

But as the city expanded northwards and eastwards away from the river, and as the port of Montreal expanded along the banks, it was deemed necessary to make a new road network connecting the two.

And so the Ursulines had to go, and so did some of their buildings.

Luckily, not all was demolished. There are still some remains of the impressive buildings that are now classed as Historical Monuments.

And if you look very carefully in the roadway, you’ll see lines of granite setts – there are a couple in the photo here.

When they were doing some roadworks a while ago they came across the foundations of the old walls that had been demolished. They have marked them out on the road with the granite setts so that you can see the extent of the former buildings

As I was making my way round to the Place d’Youville I noticed this building in the distance.

Whilst the building itself is impressive, the exciting thing about it is that over the door is carved the legend “Grand Trunk”.

This was one of the earliest of the main-line railway companies that was involved in the “railway wars” in Canada at the end of the 19th Century.

This was their magnificent Head Office in the Rue McGill, built 1899-1902.

Unfortunately it didn’t last long. The Grand Trunk was one of the biggest losers in the Railway War and it was coming back from a very unsuccessful fund-raising trip in Europe in 1912 that its president, Charles Hays, was drowned on the Titanic.

The company quickly went bankrupt and was taken over by the Government, forming part of the Canadian National rail network.

Montreal these days is basically a very large island, but back in the 16th Century it was several small ones.

The original settlement was on a small island bounded by the St Lawrence River and the Riviere St Pierre.

That latter river was eventually built over, and today, it’s the Place d’Youville, named for our friend Marguerite.

When we were here in October last year, you will remember seeing the excavations that were taking place just here.

This was the site of the city’s first indoor covered market which later became the Parliament Building for the country.

However the building was destroyed in 1849 in the riots that followed the passing of an Act emancipating the rebels of the 1830s and was never rebuilt. The Government of Canada moved elsewhere, much to the chagrin of the Québecois.

A fire station was erected here in 1903 – 54 years too late to save the Parliament building unfortunately.

Today the fire brigade has moved elsewhere and the building is now a museum. I would have liked to have gone for a look around but I was rather pushed for time.

I still have quite a lot to do today and it’s late.

While I was standing by the side of the road taking photographs, I was interrupted by a street washer.

Mind you, he didn’t let me interrupt him, and carried on with whatever he was doing.

As a result, not only did I have a complimentary shoe-wash I had a complimentary ankle wash too and that certainly different. And it wasn’t just me either. Several other passers-by were in the same boat.

Further interruptions were the order of the day too.

While I was a-wandering a little further on (which is rather better than walking by St Paul’s), I heard the familiar wail of a diesel locomotive siren in the distance so I legged it rather rapidly down the street.

Not rapidly enough, as it happens. I was defeated by the pair of locomotives, 4707 and his friend, disappearing into the distance down towards the dock.

And when I return home and have access to myJane’s Train Recognition Guide I’ll tell you all about them.

Instead, I went back to the Place d’Youville and to photograph the stele. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that last year when I was here it was all fenced off and it was impossible to take a proper photo.

So having done that, Bane of Britain wandered away from the site, without actually going over there to read the plaque to discover what it says.

I really don’t know why you lot pay me, honestly I don’t.

You DO pay me, don’t you? All you need to do is to click on one of the links at the side and make your next order from Amazon that way. I receive a small commission on your orders, but it costs you nothing at all.

I’m not sure at all what was going on here.

There I was, standing on the edge of the kerb and three or four fire engines pulled up, one after the other. Their blue and red flashing lights blazing away.

They performed some kind of danse macabre in the street and I’ve no idea why. There was nothing like any emergency that I could see in the vicinity and they didn’t seem to be in too much hurry.

I turned my attention to the building that I had come here to see – the old Customs House.

Ideally situated at the exit to the harbour, nothing could come into port without paying the appropriate duty to the Government and this was where they did it.

The Customs people aren’t there now- they’ve moved on down the road into a new modern building that is 10timesasbig, even though trade in the port has declined.

By now, my stomach was thinking that my throat had been cut and I needed to organise some food.

Not round here though as I still had some important things to do.

So onto the Metro at Victoria-OACI and off to Namur (the Metro station, not the town in Belgium) and the big Walmart there. But leaving the metro station was really difficult. The way that the doors are positioned there was a howling gale every time someone opened one of them and it was something of a struggle to pass through.

It all seems to have changed there. New buildings and the like and I couldn’t at first get my bearings. But there’s a Subway at the bottom end of the shopping complex so I installed myself there.

The restaurant next door had a free wifi service so I was able to patch in there and pick up the news.

It was a long hike to Walmart from there – longer than I remember it being – and it was something of a disappointment when I arrived. It seems to me that there are fewer and fewer items on the shelves these days and the place is looking rather untidy.

There weren’t all that many customers there either and I’ve no idea why.

There wasn’t as much choice as I was hoping but I managed eventually to kit myself out with the remainder of the articles that I need. Whether it’s all suitable I really don’t know, but I can’t do any better than this.

But here’s a shop that I hadn’t seen before, even though the staff tell me that they have been here for four years.

It’s called the Bulk Barn and it’s very reminiscent of the old “Weigh and Save” shops that we had in the UK in the late 70s and 80s.

And I’ll make a note of this place because they had everything in there that I could possibly use, including dehydrated vegetables for travelling purposes.

I’ll have to check to see if there are any of these places anywhere else on my route around Canada in the future.

By now it was rush hour and time for me to be heading off.

I was lucky that I was on the train because had I been in a car I would probably still be there now judging by the amount of traffic on the Boulevard Decarie.

Total gridlock and that’s the kind of thing that makes me glad that I don’t live in a city these days. How would I cope with all of this.

Back at my hotel I organised my suitcase yet again to take into account my recent purchases. This suitcase is becoming rather uncomfortably full.

There was some work that needed to be done, so I caught up with that, and then decided to go out for tea.

I walked the entire length of the rue St Catherine Est from my hotel almost all the way down to the bridge and I was not alone.

Apparently the students from McGill University are having their induction week this week and it’s party, party, party. Hordes of them freaking out all over the place.

It made me feel quite old to watch them. These days they don’t look anything like 18 year-olds at all and that’s all very confusing.

But the big surprise for me was the pizza place that was advertising vegan pizzas – yes, vegan pizzas! I’ve never ever seen vegan pizzas advertised in a mainstream pizza place before so I went in to give the place some support.

And delicious it was too.

That was me organised (such as I can be) for the day. I retreated to my hotel and decided to have an early night. I need it too after all of this.

Thursday 7th December 2017 – WE HAVE …

… a new visitor in the harbour today.

Thrashing her way into harbour today came Normandy Trader. She’s not a sister ship to Shetland Trader and Islay Trader but she is in fact a converted landing craft of the type that we have seen on several occasions in different places around the world.

She’s not by any means new to Granville – in fact she works a shuttle to here from Jersey on a regular basis just like Grima, and so I’m surprised that I’ve never seen here here before.

But here you can see her smashing her way through the storm into the harbour. It really is wicked outside and the spray is flying everywhere as the waves crash into the concrete sea walls.

The wind has turned round and is now blowing from the north-west, and that’s right into the harbour mouth. No wonder that Normandy Trader is making heavy weather of it. Landing craft aren’t designed for conditions like this, especially with a gross tonnage of just 73 tonnes. She was being tossed around like a cork out there.

Last night was a reasonable night for me. Although it took me a while to go off to sleep, I was well away. I somehow missed the first alarm, although I must have responded as the phone was in my hand when I awoke, not under the pillow where it usually is.

But anyway, the second alarm of Billy Cotton and his “Wakey waaaaaaa ….KEYYYYYY” took me completely by surprise.

After breakfast and a little rest, I had a shower and then braved the wind and rain up to LIDL.

Had I still been living on the farm, I would have bought quite a bit of stuff from their special offers this week. But with having changed my lifestyle considerably, there’s nothing that I really need.

But had I been Rhys, I would have been spending my money there. He’s trying to organise some interior lighting for his bus, and they had the rows of 12-volt LED striplights that I like so much. 212 lumens, which is the equivalent of about 18 watts of incandescent power, but drawing 0.1 watt. And you can link them together to give you a running strip light.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I bought a pile back down on the farm and use them as work lights over the work benches. And they are great.

I walked back here in the rain and was almost trampled to death in the rush of a pile of little kids descending from a school bus. And back here, I had a coffee and a … errr … relax.

After lunch I braved the wind and gales and went for a walk around the headland. And I was the only person out there. And that’s no surprise given the weather.

Tonight I went out for my other walk around the walls – and I’ve done 105% of my day’s target according to the fitbit.

The wind has changed further round now and so I stood for hours on the headland watching the waves down below crash over the sea wall and onto the promenade. It’s an amazing spectacle, the power of nature out there.

Rosemary rang up and we put the world to rights for an hour, and I booked my trip to Leuven for next week too. I’ll be staying at the flathotel at the back of the prison.

Tea was steaeed vegetables and vegan sausages in vegan cheese sauce – and delicious it was too.

So seeing that I have no plans for tomorrow, I’m going to have a nice quiet day of relaxing and organising myself for Leuven

Wednesday 4th October 2017 – SO HAVING …

… forgotten to take a photo of my comfortable motel this morning, we can move on quickly.

I was up and about quite early as usual and cracking on with some stuff that I needed to do. But not so “cracking on” as I might otherwise have been, because I’m starting to feel the aches and pains.

And a good go under the shower didn’t do much to revive me either. I think that the late night last night, and the whole total of the journey is starting to catch up with me now.

Breakfast was quite quiet (and I remembered at the second attempt to take in my soya milk) although the couple from Virginia did their best to liven things up.
“How far is it to Canada?” they asked.
“About three and a half hours” replied our Hero. I’m even beginning to think and talk like a North American now!

I tip the rest of the fuel in the petrol cans into Strider (the cans are empty now) and set off on the road. I head due north – I want to cut out Bangor (another bottleneck) before rejoining Interstate 95.

But my best-laid plans go all awry when I misread “Hartland” for “Howland”. Howland is on the I-95 north of Bangor but Hartland is south of it. So here I am, with the I-95 at my feet and still a long way to go. But never mind – in for a penny, in for a pound.

Surprisingly, there’s no traffic on the Interstate and even Bangor seems deserted. I’ve never known it like this before. I hardly notice the city as I drive my way around.

But I’m fighting off the fatigue. It’s all catching up on me now but only a couple of hours before I can stop.

Island Falls has a population of 837, and every one of them came out to see what I was doing while I was stopped to eat my butty on the car park at the side of the town hall. One of “those” places, isn’t it?

But I was soon on my way back to Houlton where I did some shopping – Rachel had sent me a list of things to buy for her.

At the Border Crossing I had that miserable girl again but at least she didn’t make my life difficult. And the printed-out Visa (thanks, Rhys) avoided the complications that we had on our initial entry to Canada almost 7 weeks ago.

Everyone was pleased to see that I had made it safely back (I must owe them money or something) but right now, I’m going to lie down for an hour or so before tea.

A little lie-down will do me the world of good. See you in an hour.

Monday 25th September 2017 – SO HERE WE ALL ARE …

… not sitting in a rainbow, but sitting on a rest area on Interstate 20 – in Georgia. Strider, Strawberry Moose and I.

This morning, although the alarm goes off at 05:00 when I’m here, I was up and about and packing at 04:30. The old body clock is working well.

Rhys works as a bus driver for the local education authority and has to be in work at 05:30, which means leaving here at 05:00. And that was when I had planned to be on the road

Sure enough, at 04:55 a hand reached into the bus and deposited a nice, hot cup of coffee. That disappeared smartly into my thermal mug, and at 05:00 we were off.

Rhys went one way, and I went the other, heading south on Interstate 20. And when have you ever seen me on the road this early?

I’m glad that I had seen Rhys. We had studied together at University and I had been best man at his wedding. As I said a few days ago, this may well be my last visit to North America and I wanted to see him while I was here.

I had also wanted to come here, seeing as it’s just 50 miles away from Rhys’s place. And for two reasons too –

I’d never been to Georgia before, so it’s one more place to cross off my list
At 33.4735° N, it’s the farthest south that I have ever been, beating Arizona 2002 by about 20 miles. It’s little things like that which amuse me

We arrived here about an hour before it was light enough to take photos, and that gave me an opportunity to try to bring some kind of order into chaos. As we know, Neitzsche said “out of chaos comes order”, but he had never met me.

And I’m glad that I did too, because I had a major stroke of luck.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned that I had lost Strider’s new licence tags.

In New Brunswick you buy the annual licence tags and stick them on the number plate. As I would be away when Strider’s needed renewing, I had bought them well in advance and “put them somewhere safe” so that I would know where they would be.

That’s famous last words, isn’t it? Once I’d put them in a safe place, that was the last that I had seen of them and I was afraid that they had gone for good.

However, moving the passenger seat, there they were, down the side. And then I remembered – I’d “tidied” the passenger seat in a hurry when I’d picked up Hannah in Antigonish. And they must have fallen down the side.

So Strider now has his licence tags properly installed, and I can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Once I’d done the photography bit, I retraced my steps all the way back up Interstate 20, back through Lexington and Columbia and back to Interstate 95 just north of Charleston.

That’s the Road that will take me all the way back to Houlton in Maine, just across the border from where Rachel and Darren live and where Strider stays when he’s not on the road.

But I’m not going back straight away. It’s nearly 1900 kilometres and I’m in no fit condition to drive that kind of distance. Three consecutive days of over 750 kms per day last week plus an 05:00 start this morning have finished me off.

I’m really in no fit state to go anywhere right now and it’s pointless trying to do it. It will all end in tears.

But just down the road is Myrtle Beach. It’s a huge holiday resort, just like Blackpool, and the best way to describe it is to say that it’s like Miami Beach on Welfare.

It’s cheap, and tacky, but a small 2-room apartment with wi-fi, free parking, cooking facilities and a sea view of sorts, just 20 yards from the beach, is costing me just $39 per night. It’s the ideal place for me to hole up for three nights while I gather my strength for the trip back to Canada.

Three nights at the seaside, I said, didn’t I? So having had all of that heatwave for the last few days, it’s now overcast and trying to rain.

There’s a big grocery store on the edge of town so I stock up, and then head to the Polynesian Beach and Golf Resort.

Here’s a photo of the place – taken at night because, quite frankly, it looks much better in the dark.

But don’t misunderstand me at all. What I have here for facilities at $39 per night (and there are rooms at $29 per night if that’s too expensive) with a beach 20 yards away you wouldn’t get anywhere else in the world.

We’ve been paying $140 per night in some places, and $150 per night to live in a caravan and we haven’t had facilities as good as this. I’m on the economy plan, remember, and this is a good deal.

First thing that I do when I arrive, after checking in, is to crash out. And an hour later, the sun is trying its best to come out and it’s quite warm too, so I have a wander down to the beach to eat my butties.

Back here again, and crash out again. And I’m gone for … errr … several hours. These last few days have been too much for me.

That means that I miss my tea, and instead, go for a little walk around the area.

As I said earlier, it looks so much better in the dark

But I also said that if your budget is rather limited, you won’t find anywhere else better than this to go for a self-contained break.

One thing about Americans is that they are (mostly) restrained, and there’s a security guard on the premises.

My nocturnal perambulations took me briefly onto the beach. It’s a fine powdery sand so it’s difficult to walk upon in shoes.

It’s been claimed to be the best beach on the Eastern Seaboard, but while it’s good, I’ve seen much better than this – but in places that don’t have any tourist infrastructure so they aren’ easy to visit on a trip like this.

This will do me for a few days.

And talking of nocturnal rambles, I didn’t tell you of the two that happened today.

While I was asleep in Rhys’s bus, TOTGA – The One That Got Away – came to visit me. She brought with her one of her children and, surprise, it wasn’t the one with whom she’s mostly associated. What was even more surprising was that when I checked my social media page later, there she was in a photo with the child that she had brought with her, and that’s somethign exceptional.
And later, when I was having a crash, I was underneath a car changing a steering joint or a wheel bearing or something. Someone was helping me and I was giving them instructions like one would do to a child. I suddenly became aware of this and apologised, to which my father, who was watching, said “that’s why I like to do these jobs myself”.

Sunday 24th September 2017 – THE ONE GOOD THING …

… about staying with other people – apart from the convivial company of course – are the facilities on offer.

It’s true that I had been awake for some little while but when the door of the bus opened and a hot mug of coffee found its way in towards my sleeping bag, I knew that I was in some place that resembled a home.

Once I’d heaved myself out of my stinking, but extremely comfortable pit, Rhys gave me the guided tour of his little kingdom here. And apart from stepping on several colonies of fire ants, I managed to avoid the more dangerous critturs such as the Black Widow spiders and the snakes.

We ended up having a chat with Terry on the internet too. He’s after some new batteries for his power drill, and they are sold in the USA under the “Rigid” brand name.

That’s stocked in Home Depot and there’s a big one between Lexington and Columbia, so we decided to go for a drive.

No luck though – most of the shelving in the power tools section was empty. But there will be other Home Depots.

For lunch, Rhys took me to a Mexican place that was absolutely crowded, and then we went off to look at the local flea market just down the road.

The things that were on offer here were, quite frankly, amazing. No firearms that I saw, but how about this to take with you on your travels?

And sold along with socks and fidget spinners. The mind boggles.

Next stop was the “old town” museum here in Lexington.

This was a rich southern cotton-growing region 160 years ago before the Civil War and there were many traditional properties still standing until comparatively recently.

As the towns and highways have expanded over the old cotton fields, many of the old buildings have found themselves in the way of “progress”

Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t bother Americans in the slightest, especially as they have some kind of connection with slavery.

But even Americans can appreciate the value of some of the stuff that was endangered, such as this beautiful and complete cotton gin complete with all working parts.

Consequently, many old buildings were dismantled and removed to this site at the back of the town, which is now a museum.

The buildings were reassembled here and people are able to visit them.

But the reassembly has not actually been done in the best traditions of contemporary workmanship. Someone here has gone berserk with a nail gun and I’m sure that nail guns were not around in the USA in the ante-bellum period.

At least they could have used nails of the correct size.

There is a park on the edge of the town by a small dam. And during a storm a couple of years ago, the dam badly damaged and burst.

And so Rhys took me out to see it, and to see some of the damage that had been caused and which had still not been repaired.

There was a lake just there to the right, as you can tell by the pavilion on stilts, but the contents of the lake have disappeared

Later on, we went to a restaurant for tea – one that was famous for its salad bar. And they were right too, because it was well-worth the visit.

But here we had a most bizarre – but sadly all-too-common – dialogue.

Our hero – “I’m a vegan, so I’ll just have a baked potato with my salad”
Waitress – “what would you like with it? Bacon, cheese or cream cheese?”

Yes, staff training in Ruby Tuesday’s leaves something to be desired.

I fuelled up Strider on the way back as I have an early start in the morning – and I went straight to bed when we arrived back.

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.

Saturday 23rd September – I DUNNO …

… what I must have put in my tea last night because I ended up going to bed quite early and I didn’t feel a thing whatever until the alarm went off at 05:00. I can’t even say if I had been on a nocturnal ramble or not.

A few things that needed doing on my laptop took up some of my attention, and that was followed by a shower and breakfast. The microwave oven here in the room means that the big bag of porridge is certainly doing the business.

Having tidied up, packed Strider, checked out, helped myself to the free coffee on offer and all of that, I was on the road by 09:15. And that was a good decision too.

For the first 90 minutes the road was comparatively easy – which makes a great change from yesterday. But it dramatically changed once we arrived at the first major town, of which the name I forget.

Eventually, the matter explained itself.

I’d noticed that many of these vehicles on the road were flying violet flags of some description

And there by the side of the highway in this town was some kind of sports stadium with hordes of people hanging around, all dressed in this violet colour.

It looked as if there was going to be a gridiron match of some description and I’d hit the supporters’ rush hour.

Once that was dealt with, I carried on at a fair pace until we hit Roanoke. And the whole Highway between the edge of Roanoke and Salem was nose-to-tail for miles.

And in the heat, it was unbearable. But I waited until Strider’s fuel gauge dropped right down and then stopped in Salem for fuel.

And hats off to Strider yet again because despite the speed on the Highway when we could, and despite the traffic jams when we couldn’t, he’s done a new record of 567 kms on a tank, and the orange light hadn’t even come one.

We had quite a performance at the petrol station. Credit card issues (“insert your card, and tap in your ZIP code” – which of course I don’t have) so the girl (who was born in Leicester as it happens) had to do everything manually.

That was Strider organised, and for me, a coffee and, seeing as how hot it was, a big mug of that iced Slush stuff. That will cool me down while I’m driving.

By now we were on Interstate 77 and this seemed to be a lot quieter than Interstate 81.

And so on we went, sometimes bowling along, sometimes crawling. At least if gave me an opportunity to admire the scenery, which is even more stunning around here than it was back on Interstate 81.

I wish that I had had the time to stop and photograph more of it.

I kept on driving until I crossed into North Carolina and here was a rest area with “suitable conveniences”.

This was as good a place as any to stop. And the bread that I bought a few days ago – I seemed to have let it go on for far too long because it was only just edible. And the bagels that I bought – they are beyond saving too.

But if you want to know what in my opinion is so bad about the USA then we saw it here. The janitor in the washrooms, cleaning and tidying up, looked to be well into his 80s and barely able to walk. And yet here he was, having to carry on working for a living.

This wouldn’t be allowed to happen in a civilised country, that’s for sure.

We also had a brief 30-second rainstorm, and that freshened everywhere up.

We were making good time along Interstate 77 too – at least, until we were within spitting distance of Charlotte.

Here, the road signs proudly announced “Roadworks next 28 miles” – and they weren’t wrong either. The congestion was appalling around here and some driver in a VW convertible received a full blast of Strider’s horn.

From Charlotte onwards I77 was quite busy and progress was rather restrained – although we kept moving.

A funny thing happened on the edge of Columbia. The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav pulled me off the Interstate, sent me through a housing estate and then back onto the Interstate at the junction BEHIND where I had just come off.

And as I approached Rhys’s house, she sent me through someone’s back garden, much to the bewilderment of the occupier.

It was nice to see Rhys again, after 12 years. He’s living on the edge of town in a house in the woods in a very rural setting. We had a coffee and a long chat, and then went off into Columbia for a meal.

He’d found a really good vegan restaurant that did a lovely vegan burger with fried sweet potato, and that went down really well.

Rhys is in the process of converting a redundant school bus into a mobile home. Work is quite advanced and this is where my bed is going to be for the night.

And I have to say that I’ve earned it too. Strider is on 500 kms on the trip meter so that means that we have driven somewhere between 700 and 750 kilometres – and according to the The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav, we had a driving time of 7 hours and 54 minutes.

One thing is for sure – I shan’t be moving for a week.

Thursday 21st September 2017 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish might recognise this bridge, because we’ve seen it before.

Back in 2010 in fact when we were on our way to Montreal and then Labrador.

It’s called the Thousand Islands Bridge, because there are a whole load of islands, maybe even a thousand, in the St Lawrence River just around here.

Back then, we saw the bridge from the Great Satan side of the river and you may well be surprised to learn that today, I am once more on the Great Satan side.

And it took all of my self control and restraint to do it too.

This morning I was up some time after the alarm went off and had a few things to do – such as a shower and to have breakfast, and to catch up on yesterday’s paperwork.

By 08:00 I was on my way, exactly as planned – something that surprised even me. I was decanted straight into the morning rush hour, but then that was only to be expected. While it is always a disappointment to be held up like this, I had made due allowance.

Once I’d cleared the rush-hour traffic, which took 50 minutes to clear 10 kilometres, I was able to bowl along quite rapidly.

Flying down Highway 40 I went past several villages that I had previously not noticed.

So which one of these is your favourite village? St Zotique? St Polycarpe? Or St Telesphore? They don’t half have some weird names for some of the villages in Quebec.

But there again, Quebec is a very strange place, as you might already have discovered.

It’s about 350 kilometres from where I was staying to Kingston in Ontario.

And despite having stopped for fuel and a coffee, and taking a little detour around the old canal on the edge of town I was in Kingston for just after 12:00.

That was well in advance of my appointment and so I was able to go for a little walk around the town – and make a decision that it’s one of those places that I will have to come back to visit when I have more time.

And here is Sandra, making the acquaintance of Strawberry Moose.

And while that was going on, let me tell you a story.

My Great Grandfather was a soldier who served in the Wiltshire Regiment in India and South Africa and fought in the Boer War. But some time in the early years of the 20th Century he and his family emigrated to Canada and lived in Montreal.

He enlisted in World War I despite being well over age, and presumably died of wounds because his body is in the Military Cemetery at Mount Royal under a military headstone, despite not dying until the early 1920s.

His wife hated Canada, the cold, and all of that and so as soon as her husband was buried, she was on the next boat back to London.

They had several kids and the youngest kids, one of whom was my grandmother, returned to the UK with their mother.

A couple of the older children were by this time married and they remained behind with their own families. And when I was looking into the military history of my great grandfather I came across Sandra, who is the grand-daughter of one of the older children who remained in Canada.

And so she’s my cousin at several times removed.

As you know, this may well be the last time that I shall be in North America, and I’ve been doing all of the things that I’ve been meaning to do.

Meeting up with Sandra was high on my list, and so here we were, in Kingston, having lunch together and swapping family histories.

After lunch I headed off to Great Satan. And we had the usual border confrontation with a rude, ignorant security guard, who demanded to know what I was laughing at.

They really must trawl the Government Services to find the most unpleasant civil servants, and put them in these immigration booths

However, the guy in the office was quite pleasant and polite, and here I am.

But why am I here? You might well ask.

As I said just now, there are several tasks that I want to perform and several people whom I want to see before I go back to Europe – one person in particular whom I haven’t seen since 2005.

So here I am in the Rodeway Motel on the edge of Syracuse in New York State, conveniently placed on the side of Interstate 81.

From here, Strider, Strawberry Moose and I have about 1,000 miles to go and it’s going to take a couple of days to get there because I’m not able to go as fast as I used to.

It will give him enough time to head for the hills, otherwise he might be getting a surprise visit in two or three days time.

Wednesday 16th August 2017 – WE HAVEN’T FINISHED …

… with our series of calamities yet.

First thing is that the keyboard on the laptop has now seized. I’m not sure how that has happened – it must have been when I closed the lid in a hurry and trapped a pen in between the keys, and this has somehow triggered off the key-lock combination.

Having tried all kinds of combinations that I (and several gallant friends) could remember, it’s still stuck firmly solid.

I discovered this this morning when I went to type of the results of my travels during the night. I was in charge of two young girls – aged about 9 and 5 – and I had to make a sandwich for them. The 9 year-old was straightforward enough but for the younger one it was the tiniest lump of baguette with next-to-nothing on it. It was clear that this wasn’t going to do her much good but I told her to eat it and if it wasn’t enough she could have a bit more. She was quite clear that she needed more than this. Nevertheless, I told her to eat it “and then we’ll see”.

I was awake at 02:30 this morning but no chance of me staying awake, even had I wanted to. I went back to bed and to sleep. 05:00 was much more like it.

I’d put the Canadian mobile phone on charge in something of a forlorn hope last night. USB data cables clearly don’t work so I’d tried the mains charger and it seemed to have done the business.

But here’s the next problem – in that there’s no credit on it apparently even though I had put $100 on it just before leaving. And so that’s never right. Just one more thing sent to try me, I suppose.

And yet another calamity surrounds the hotel. I’ve stayed here before but that was due to having to leave here at about 05:00 long before breakfast would be ready. This time though, there’s no issues about breakfast so I was quite looking forward to it – only to find that the place doesn’t serve breakfast.

The nearest Tim Horton’s is a fair walk away but nevertheless off I trotted for bagels, coffee and orange juice.

While I was there, and having a think – which I occasionally do – WhatsApp came to mind. using the Tim Horton’s wi-fi service, I downloaded it and configured it on my Europe phone.

My European service provider supplies a service for North America at €29 per fortnight and this doesn’t work out to be much more expensive while I’m here than my Canadian phone supplier would be, and the interesting thing is that I can use that in the USA.

All I need now is for Rhys to tell me the final two digits of the phone number that he’s using so that I can check that I have it and add it in.

Off I trotted down the street to reserve my bus for New Brunswick, and much to my surprise and delight, there are evening buses at the times and on the days that I want them. So I’m off on Friday evening at 21:30 to arrive Saturday morning at 09:00. But there’s a wait at Ste-Foy and … err … 2 hours wait at Riviere-du-Loup.

Next stop was the Dollar Store to organise a North American USB transformer for the phone. It takes about a week to fully-charge off the laptop. And it came up trumps with that and some other stuff too.

And outside, we had a strange sight. Loads of nursery-age kids wandering around the streets with guardians and the like. A couple of groups were in multi-pushchairs like the old “knife box” stage buses of the 1870s and I wasn’t quick enough with the camera, but I was for this arrangement that I thought extremely interesting.

At Bell Telephones I found the reason for my difficulties. The contract that I have has been abolished and, not only that, an upgrade to the system has rendered my phone obsolete.

And when I told the people that I wasn’t interested in buying a new phone, they lost interest in me completely. So that’s the end of Bell Telephones, then. I can’t say that I’m sorry.

It did occur to me afterwards that this was the same Bell shop that threw me out a few years ago. Perhaps it’s just an issue with this place and its manager, but I couldn’t care less now.

Not too far away is a computer shop, so I popped in. And popped out again with the cheapest USB keyboard in the place. If this doesn’t work then I’m stuffed (and it clearly does, because that’s how I’m managing to type this).

I’d arranged to see Josée so off I went to her place of work. The street where she works is a strange one – there’s a southern half and a northern half, with a bit missing in the middle.

And so, of course, Brain of Britain walked along a street that passed through the gap in the street so I had gone miles beyond it before I realised. And so I had to retrace my steps.

That had given me an opportunity to see a part of the rue Sherbrooke that I had never seen before. You might all recognise what that it up there, because we’ve stood on that point a few times before.

That’s the belvedere up on Mount Royal where there is that stunning view over the city that we’ve photographed on a few occasions. We’ve not seen it from this angle before though.

And what we have here is the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. We’ve not seen this building before either.

The First Nation totem pole – yes, I can go along with that, but the purpose of the pile of used vehicle tyres totally defeats me. It’s nothing that I would call Fine Art, but then regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I do have issues with this kind of thing.

Here’s a view that we all might recognise, because we’ve seen this before too. And had I known that Josée worked right here I would have been here in a flash without all of this messing about.

This is the park in the rue du Parc with Mount Royal park on the left and the Parc Jeanne Mance on the right; and Josée’s office backs onto the big skyscraper where I came in 2011 to talk to those guys about wind turbines and the like. It’s an uncomfortably small world these days.

And who was Jeanne Mance when she’s at home – if she ever is? She was the first lay (non-religious) nurse of the infant Montreal community and is the symbol of nursing here in the same way that Florence Nightingale is in the UK.

What with all of my prevarications, Josée had gone to lunch when I arrived and remembering that there was a “Subway” around the corner, I went and grabbed myself a butty too.

After lunch I finally met up with Josée. And being aware of my plight, she had brought in a spare mobile phone that she had lying around. Not only that, she knew a place where they would do a decent contract for a couple of months at a price far less than Bell could offer and with far more functions too.

That was well-worth a coffee so off we went for a drink and a chat and to catch up on everything that had happened since we had last seen each other.

With it being such a nice afternoon we set off to walk down to the river.

I was distracted on the way by this notice carved onto the wall of this building just here. Near this spot was where Marguerite Bourgeoys had her school for girls.

We remember her – she was the woman who came out with one of the very earliest groups of colonists to Montreal to look after the welfare of the women and children of the colony.

When we were at Troyes we went to see her birthplace, if you remember.

We didn’t actually make it as far as the river. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and the pedaloes on the little lake looked so inviting. And besides, I don’t have enough exercise as everyone keeps on telling me.

And so we took to the water and had a really good pedal around the lake for half an hour.

There’s quite a strong current in there too so heading upstream was quite a fight. And we ended up being quite out of breath by the time that we finished.

And do I remember this from last year? Or is it new?

Whatever it is, it’s a Big Wheel of course and part of the entertainment that’s provided along the old port of Montreal, although right now it’s not doing very much entertaining because there’s no-one about.

I don’t imagine that the view of the city is up to much though, because we are quite low down here and we are surrounded by tall buildings.

Seeing as by now Josée was exhausted and that I’d paid for the pedalo, she summoned up a taxi to take us to our final port of call – the jazz club in Montreal. There was a live act on and she had booked a table for us.

It has to be said that the live act was, well, not up to the standard that I might have expected given the nature of the venue. Even worse was that despite having ordered a vegan meal, they could offer me … errr … nothing.

I ended up with a salad and that was my lot. And with a bottle of water and the cover charge for the entertainment my bill came to $37!00. I shan’t be going there again, that’s for sure.

We put the world to rights on the way back and I ended up having an early night. My first day in Canada and it was a long one too. I was ready for a good sleep.

Tuesday 18th July 2017 – CRASH! BANG!

No, I’m not doing the washing-up.

There I was at lunchtime sitting on my wall at lunchtime eating my butties and admiring the view (and watching the Grima depart for Jersey with a full load of stuff on board) and thinking to myself “it’s going a bit dark across the bay round by Cancale”.

Back here at about 15:30 the most enormous hurricane sprang up – totally astonishing; I stuck my head out of the window and I could see the wild storm lashing the rocks.

About 5 minutes later it went as black as pitch and I thought “hey up – we’ll get the lot in a minute!” and I hadn’t even finished saying it when there was the most impressive flash of lightning followed by an incredible thunderclap.

And then we had the rain.

Sheets and sheets of it, with the orchestra and light show rumbling on and on.

It all cleared up after about half an hour and we were then back in the sunshine. But that was so impressive. I really enjoyed the show.

What else that was impressive was that I was out like a light last night and slept right though until the alarm went off.

I don’t remember too much abut my little voyage last night though. Except that it was in Luxembourg – or was it Liechtenstein – and a visit to the country’s tax office, only to find that because of the small size of the country there wasn’t enough room for the Government offices there so they were all in the next town in a neighbouring country.

Today, I’ve been pressing on with the blog. And most of the time has been spent on just one particular page. 2300 or so words on there, and it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t even a placeholder there before.

Not only that, I’ve probably done another 9 or 10 too and I’m in April 2011. And I would have done even more had I not … errr … had a little rest.

Won’t be so easy in a bit though because there’s a huge mess of pages to untangle from when I was in the UK. It’s hard to believe that I went from March 2009 to early summer 2011 without setting foot in the Perfidious Albion except for a day trip to pick up the tile cutter.

But then again, apart from a quick day trip for Terry’s slates, I’ve not been there since December 2012. And I can’t say that I miss it any. My future is well and truly here.

And those of you with long memories will remember me moaning a while back about a data cable for my Canadian mobile phone, and Rhys using the medium of the “comments” page to show me on that he had seen?

Well, it arrived in the post today.

So many grateful thanks from me, and you will be receiving a plain brown envelope in the post shortly after I set foot in Montreal.

The comments facility on this blog is a powerful thing. Why don’t you try it some time?

Saturday 17th June 2017 – THIS VACUUM CLEANER …

… that I bought yesterday isn’t half the genoux de l’abeille as they might say around here.

It might be only small, and it might be only cheap but it has the kind of suction for which a Conservative MP would pay good money in a back street massage parlour in Soho.

Yes, I’ve been cleaning and tidying up – well, sort-of_ish anyway. Because I had a brainwave. Self-motivation is not my strongest point, as you all know, and seeing as how Liz is on her own right now, Terry having gone back to The Land That Time Forgot to sort out the health issues of his mother and his daughter, I’ve invited her round for lunch tomorrow.

That means that I shall have to have the place looking at least presentable by the time that she comes round, and that’s not a bad idea at all. And so I made a sort-of start.

If I do another hour or two tomorrow morning it won’t be too bad I suppose. But I do like this vacuum cleaner. In fact, you can say that I’m almost as impressed with it as I am with my galvanised steel dustbin.

The tidying up involved putting away a pile of papers too (and there’s still more to go) and also sorting out my Canadian travel bag. For those of you who are not regular readers of this rubbish, I have a small bag with all of my 120-volt equipment in it – such as an AA – AAA battery charger, a couple of leads for electrical appliances, and all of the ‘phone stuff.

And it’s a good job that I did too because the data/charging cable for the North American phone doesn’t work (I remember that I had this problem last year) and I broke the car charger. And so I am in difficulty here. I shall have to think of a cunning plan.

Another thing that Bane of Britain seems to have done is to mix up the clean clothes that he washed the other day with the dirty clothes that he’s been wearing ever since. And that’s fraught with danger, isn’t it?

We had another struggle to leave the stinking pit this morning, although I was early down at the magasin de presse for my baguette. And with the boss not being there, I ended up with a rather miserable baguette too.

Lunchtime saw me up on the cliff above the harbour with my butties and book. It was another beautiful afternoon. I was up there for quite a while too in the glorious weather, but was eventually burnt out of my position so I came back here instead.

Tea was more of the curry stuff, but I’ve also prepared a tofu marinade. Tofu is pretty tasteless so it needs to be soaked in stuff. Mine was cooked with garlic, onions, pepper and curry powder (I wish that I had remembered to buy some sage and rosemary) and it’ll sit in that until tomorrow evening. I’ll cook a handful of lentils in the slow cooker too tomorrow morning and that will be the filling for the pie that I’m going to make. I’ll be having the oven on for the pizza, and so I can bake the pie at the same time.

I hope that it will be nice.

Ohhh – and Rhys – talking of cunning plans, if you are on your trips around the Dollar Stores, keep your eyes open for a data cable and a car charger for a Samsung T746.

Saturday 8th October 2016 – AND SO AFTER ALL …

… of the shenanigans of last night, the Orleans Express bus from the Gaspé Peninsula turned up bang on time and we were all ready and waiting. It set off on time too, which was nice to know, and I settled down for the long drive to Montreal. Those hot cross buns that I had bought in Woodstock were really nice – I’ll tell you that.

For the first part of the journey I didn’t drop off to sleep at all. Probably far too wound up after the drive up from Florenceville. Instead, I curled up on my seat and carried on reading my book. At Sainte-Foy there were no toilets opened and the one on the bus was occupied so I curled up on my seat again and this time I managed to drift in and out of sleep all the way into Montreal.

At the bus station I had a really good half-hour power nap in the usual little hidey-hole. And then I was ready for anything. Unless you’ve tried it, you’ve no idea just how comfortable you can become when you ride astride the porcelain horse.

“Anything” was the bus station café. A huge cup of coffee and a couple of bagels were just the job for breakfast but I didn’t stay there for long. The internet connection was rubbish and I was keen to see how Rachel was doing (she finally arrived home at 04:30). And so I went to track down the 747 bus to the airport.

It doesn’t stop in the coach station any more. According to my friendly neighbourhood bus driver, they’ve upped the standing fees in the bus station and the STM – Societe de Transports de Montreal – is refusing to pay them. Instead, the bus leaves from down the road outside the Berri-UQAM metro station. There’s no ticket machine in the bus station either now, so you have to go to the machine at the metro station. I bought a 3-day ticket ($18:00) because it’s cheaper than two one-day passed (2x$10:00).And it was pouring down with rain outside. Whatever happened to the Indian Summer we had been having.

I found a comfy bench at the airport, with yet another flaky internet connection. Nevertheless, I was able to catch up with a few things there, despite being interrupted by a vocal local yokel who wanted to discuss Facebook with me. There’s a “Subway” in the airport too and so seeing as I was thirsty I went and had a giant sized root beer and I ordered a sandwich to take away. The Comfort Inn is rather out on a limb and there isn’t anything available to eat in the vicinity.

Having organised all of that, I phoned for my shuttle, and that brought me here to the hotel. It’s fully-booked and so there wasn’t a room available at that moment. Still, there’s a comfy chair, a good internet connection, a power point and a free coffee pot in the foyer. What else do you need when you are waiting for your room?

I didn’t have to wait long for my room, and the first thing that I did was to have a stinking hot shower and to wash my clothes – I’m running out. But it must have been Eskimos … "Inuit" – ed … who had this room before me. The heat was off but the fan was on blowing cold air around and it was about 10°C in here.I whacked the heating up and resolved not to move until the temperature reached 25°C.

I had my butty, chatted to Liz and one or two other people for a while, and spent the rest of the afternoon dozing in and out of sleep. it’s been a hard day so far.

Nevertheless, I made it out for the bus 202. I missed the first one so went back in. But I was out for the next – in fact just in time to step straight onto the bus as it was going past. As you might expect, I ended up at the Cote des Neiges, and here I had a terrible shock. It’s all been gentrified and many of the smaller businesses have been cleared away and replaced with trendy boutiques. It took me a while to track down an assiete falafel, but when I did, it was well worth it because it was one of the best that I have had in North America.

So that was me fixed.

On the way back, Rhys ‘phoned me up and we had a really good chat until the battery on my phone went dead. I spent the next hour or two having a huge melancholy nostalgia fit listening to music. Leaving Canada always makes me feel maudlin.

So now I’m off to bed. My last night in Canada and I’m inconsolable. If my health continues to deteriorate at the rate it seems to be deteriorating, I shan’t ever be back again.

That’s enough to make anyone feel maudlin, never mind me.

Saturday 1st OCTOBER 2016 – I HAD NOTHING …

… like as good a night as I have had on the others that I stayed here. For some reason I couldn’t put the blankets straight on the bed and it was all very uncomfortable. That rather disappointed me. And I was wide-awake by 05:40 too – something that hasn’t happened for a good few days.

But at least I got to see the sunrise for once, and it really was beautiful. Not quite the same as it had been in Greece three years ago, but beautiful nevertheless.That cheered me up for the morning.

I’d been on my travels too. There was some kind of meeting going on – a reward, effectively, for people who had worked for quite a while at a certain company – and this involved staying at a hotel. I’d arrived and been given my key so off I went to find my room – and that took ages to find. Eventually I discovered the room and went in – to find that the bed was all heaped up any old how. And there was a suitcase in there, belonging to someone else. I went back to reception to complain, and it turned out that we were having to share rooms. I wasn’t at all impressed with this and made quite a fuss about it. Eventually the organiser, a young girl, came over to chat with me and I told her precisely what I thought. She added that the place was dirty and totally unfit for what she had planned, and so was intending not to pay them a penny for what we had – or hadn’t – received. Although that didn’t solve my problem.
From here I went as an observer to see something going on in an industrial city. Transport was the big problem here, with a huge Ship Canal that passed by somewhere in the distance and all goods had to be trans-shipped onto railway trains. Some young guy had the idea of building a feeder canal to the city so that barges could sail up the ship canal straight into the city without any unloading at all. So he engaged a firm of contractors who built it, but not how I would have finished it off because he brought it to finish a row or so behind the main street, with buildings in the way. I would have knocked down the buildings and brought the canal basin up to the main street. But then he was given the bill. he was expecting a bill of a couple of million. The bill was in fact 50 million and he started to have a major panic about how was he ever going to pay it off and as yet no freight had actually sailed up his canal.

I was alone again at breakfast but ended up having a really good chat with mine host. But soon enough I was back in my room resting. I’m dismayed at just how easy I’m becoming tired these days, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. At least I’m here.

When lunchtime approached I hit the road, and headed off westwards to Franquelin. That’s a village on the coast halfway towards Baie Comeau. It’s situated at the base of a steep valley and it was where I had my run-in with the farces of law and order the other day.

This isn’t the modern road into the village by the way. The steep drop to the concrete bridge over the river looks fairly modern to me, and the village is canted off to the side alongside the river. This could well therefore be a previous incarnation of Highway 138 from a bygone time.

Looking back in the direction from which the road comes, you can see the road snaking along the side of the river. There is a bridge across the river way in the distance and I was musing to myself that this was the way that the road crossed the river back in the olden days. I was tempted to go for a look but there was a huge hole in the middle of the road where the local council was doing some work.

And another thing that you will notice is that autumn has arrived. The leaves on the trees are turning. It’s the best time of the year to come to Canada, as I have said before.

My landlord and I had discussed old vehicles, and he had told me that here in Franquelin there were a couple of old first-generation snowmobiles. I was half-hoping to see an early Bombarider such as the one that we saw at Goose Bay back in 2010.

I was rather disappointed not to see one of those, but I wasn’t disappointed to see this machine. I’m not sure of the make or model of this machine and it doesn’t appear to be as antique as I was hoping to find, but it’s certainly unusual and quite rare enough these days. I’d have gone over to have a look at it but the gates were all locked up and there were people around.

No such problems with this machine. This was parked up at the side of the town’s workshop in full view.

Anyone of my age will have seen one of these before. In Europe this would be a piste-basher, used on the ski slopes for flattening down the snow and also for transporting goods and supplies about.

It is a Skidozer 302, made apparently by the Bombardier company, and probably dates from the 1970s, not that I would know very much about it, and I would gladly learn more if anyone would care to communicate with me.

Back on the modern main highway and there’s a small pull-in at the side of the road just here, with a couple of tables. This is where I stopped for lunch, with the lovely view along the coast back in the direction that had travelled.

I had company for part of the time – a woman walking her dog came over for a chat, and someone in a nearby house was playing music so loud that it probably vould have been heard in Montreal.

And the bread that I had bought yesterday in Baié-Trinité was totally disgusting.I shan’t be shopping there again.

I drove on towards Baie Comeau and nipped down to Alcoa’s wharf to see if there was anything moored there.

I was in luck, because we did have a ship here. The Federal Nakagawa it is, a bulk carrier of 20,000 tons on her way from Jamaica to Toledo in the USA, on the Great Lakes via half a dozen or so ports along the St Lawrence.

I thought that she might have been the CSL ship that I had encountered on the St Lawrence while I was on the ferry from Matane the other day, but she didn’t arrive here until the 29th, and so she’s ruled out.

usually, in the bay there are half a dozen ships queueing up to unload, but there were none today. But in the main port is the Africaborg, a ship of the Wagenborg Line. She’s not as big as she looks, being of only 12,000 tons and built in 2007. She’s come here from Ulsan in Korea, from where she set sail on 27th August.

Long-term readers of this rubbish will recall that when we were here in 2010 there was also a Wagenborg ship here in the docks but I can’t now remember the name of that ship

Apart from seeing the Africaborg in the docks, I had an interesting walk around the harbour here at Baie Comeau. Winter is approaching and there was something of a rush to remove boats from the water.

I had a very good time watching them try to load up a diesel-powered yacht onto a yacht trailer, and that was very interesting to see. It might be a surprise to you but I’ve never seen this done before so I was quite keen to watch them do it. But while I was watching them, I had an interruption.

My friend Rhys from South Carolina was on the phone. It’s the first time this year that I’ve heard his dulcet tones so I was quite keen to speak to him.

And while Rhys and I were busy chatting about his bus (he’s converting a redundant school bus into a mobile home) and the solar energy system that he’s installing in it, I was busy watching them remove the yacht. It was quite an art to drive (because it was using diesel propulsion) in between the stakes of the trailer and winch itself tightly onto the cradle so that they could pull the boat out of the water with the lorry and park it up for the winter.

And as our conversation rambled on, they pulled the yacht clear of the water and a couple of guys there gave it a thorough inspection.

And then they reversed the trailer back down into the water, slackened off the tethering ropes, re-positioned the yacht so that, presumably, it fitted better on the cradle, re-tightened the tethering ropes and pulled it out of the water again.

This time it passed its inspection and they towed it off around to the hardstanding at the side where, presumably, it will over-winter.

By now, the battery was flat in my telephone and I’d lost contact with Rhys, so I went off on the prowl to the other side of the docks, with a certain aim in my mind.

Baie Comeau is famous for having a small isolated railway network which presumably transports wood and pulp about. It’s not as isolated as people might think though, because there’s a rail ferry over to Matane where it connects with the Canadian National railway network (or such of it that remains after the decimation of the country’s rail network in the 1980s).

There are some railway sidings on the dockside and a couple of old diesel locomotives that move the railway wagons around. This is one of them. It’s SOPOR 4998, a General Motors GP38, one of the very last built and dating from November 1971.

And SOPOR? It’s the Societe Du Port Ferroviaire De Baie-Comeau.

I’ve actually been looking in the past for the dock from where the rail ferries leave, and I managed to track it down today, narrowly avoiding being squidged by a line of cars coming off the car ferry that had arrived a few minutes ago.

I couldn’t go over for a closer inspection because it’s all fenced off. But that’s it just over there, neatly hidden behind the installations for the car ferry. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a ship here, but you can’t have everything

In fact, the port of Baie Comeau is nothing like as busy as it used to be before Highway 138 along the north shore was completed in the 1960s. In those days it was the base for all kinds of goelettes, the boats that used to sail from village to village along the coast transporting supplies, ferrying people about, and returning with the output of the crafts carried on in the various villages.

Nowadays, there’s not even one coastal boat that calls here.

I mentioned wood and pulp just now, didn’t I? Baie Comeau owes its existence, like most of the towns on the North Shore, to forest products and the town was created almost from nothing in the 1930s when they began to exploit the timber in the interior of the region to make newsprint.

It was someone called Colonel Robert McCormick, who was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper in the USA who created the Quebec North Shore Paper Company to exploit the timber resources of the area for wood-pulp for his journals, and this is the modern pulp mill.

I went off to the shops, which are situated a couple of miles outside the town for a reason that seems totally bizarre to me. I arrived just in time to be thrown out of Walmart which, for reasons known only to itself, closes early on Saturdays. The other supermarkets have more realistic opening hours so the Maxi at the other end of the mall was where I did my shopping.

And why is shopping in North America so boring?

Well, when you’ve seen one bunch of shops you’ve seen a mall.

I’ll get my coat.

Heading back to town again, I went to play “hunt the railway line”.

I had visions of it disappearing way into the wilderness where trains would come back laden with lumber, but it seems to peter out here in the middle of the big industrial estate and I’ve no idea why. I went off to see if I could see anything else that might be railway-related, but there was nothing at all. I shall have to make certain enquiries at a later date in this respect. it wasn’t ‘arf disappointing.

But anyway, by now it was going dark and it was teatime. Seeing as how Godbout is so isolated and I’m never likely to be able to find my Sunday night pizza anywhere in the vicinity, I decided that I would have a Saturday night pizza from the restaurant at the traffic lights.

I ate it in the darkness on the way out of town. It was totally overpriced and totally disgusting but beggars can’t be choosers at moments like this. It was after all the only place in town.

Once I’d organised that, I headed off back to my little room in Godbout.

And here’s something else over which we can ponder.

These are the roadworks on the bridge over the river at Godbout and I know that I’ve mentioned them before. But on the way back tonight (I was coming in the opposite direction) we had some really weird goings-on. The lights on my side were on red so I waited, and a red pickup came through from the other direction, turned round and went back down again, even though the lights were against him.

And then we had a lorry coming the other way that had clearly burnt the red light because it was touch-and-go as to whether I would block him in as my light changed to green. He made it through with about a foot and half a second to spare otherwise he would have had to reverse all the way back downhill again.

And serve him right too.

Thursday 8th September 2016 – THAT WASN’T VERY GOOD

Not very long at all after I went to bed last night, I was off into the Land of Nod. But I didn’t stay there too long. About half an hour later I was awake again and that’s how I stayed for most of the night – to such an extent that I actually spent most of the night working on the laptop.

There are probably a few reasons why I had trouble sleeping, but one of them is that I have once more picked up a heavy cold and streaming nose and this is just so uncomfortable for me. It’s really pretty dismal just how easily I can catch this stuff.

Rachel and I had breakfast together and that gave us the opportunity to have a really good chat about this and that. So much so in fact that she ended up being late for work.

As for me, I stayed on here. After all of my exertions these last few days I wasn’t feeling up to all that much, particularly meeting people, and anyway I had had a bad night as you know. I had plenty of stuff to do too.

It took me all morning to catch up with what needed to be done (I wasn’t in much of a rush) and then it was a question of organising lunch. I had some vegan cheese in Strider and so I went down to look for it. I found it, but I also found something else that didn’t make me very happy – namely that a mouse had found its way into my living quarters in the back.

And so that’s tomorrow’s job, isn’t it? Emptying out the rear of Strider and clearing up the mess. I’m not looking forward to that one little bit.

One thing that I didn’t manage to find – and for ages too no matter how hard I looked for it – was the coffee. It wasn’t until late afternoon that I managed to track that down.

But in the meantime, I’d been chatting with Rhys on the phone. He’s passed his school bus driving test in South Carolina today, which is excellent news, and is now off for his Commercial Driving Licence next. So well-done to Rhys.

It goes without saying that I couldn’t keep this up all day. By mid-afternoon I was stark out – and properly out too because when Darren came home from work he popped in to see how I was doing, and I didn’t notice a thing – and that’s not like me at all.

I wasn’t alone either. I had Cujo the Killer Cat to keep me company. She was curled up on the bed right next to me when I awoke – clearly I’m warmer than the windowsill in the living room.

Rachel cooked a lovely tea this evening – a big dish of mixed vegetables soaked in olive oil and done in the microwave for 15 minutes. It was totally delicious. I’ll have to remember this.

I didn’t stay up for long after tea. My bad night was catching me up and so I came down here to my little room and went to bed. This streaming nose is still getting me down in more ways than one.

But i hope that I can have a better night tonight.

Wednesday 4th May 2016 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY EVERYONE

May the fourth be with you.

Well, it’s certainly not with me because I’ve had yet another horrible day. Basically, just transpose everything, including the bad bits of it, onto today and you will have everything that you need to know.

There were however a couple of slight changes. Firstly, I was on my travels again, to the ear specialist for her to look inside my ear with this bubble thing that I have inside. It’s definitely a little water in the middle ear so they are going to give me a spray to hopefully clear it. But it’s sad that I’m not in that section of the hospital on a permanent basis because there are some nurses there who are stunners! Any one of them could soothe my fevered brow.

There’s a doctor who is the spitting image of Harry Potter in that section, but I don’t fancy the idea of him getting out his wand and waving about all over me.

Secondly, I ate a little today. Half a dozen dry biscuits of the sort that I bought in the Netherlands the other week. They slowed everything down, but unfortunately didn’t stop it. But still, I had to try it.

Thirdly, as I type this entry, I’m drinking a freezing cold (and I know that it is because it’s crammed full of ice cubes) lemonade drink. I probably shouldn’t, but the way I look at it, nothing else is staying in so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t try this. But I really had a craving (and no, Rhys, I’m not pregnant).

They are quite worried about me, so it seems. Not eating and drinking goes against their principles and I’ve been coupled up to a perfusion of a glucose-base to try to give me some nutrients and liquids. But, as you might have guessed …

Last night’s travels (because we seem to be back in it again) were quite interesting as they all revolved around transport. At one stage (and I’m not sure when and why) I was running (yes, running!) for a bus and it was one of those ultra-realistic moments that I found hard to understand wasn’t a dream when I awoke. But that must be a good sign if I feel like running, even in the dead of night.
My father put in an appearance too. It was winter and there was snow everywhere and his car had broken down but a friend had fixed it and he was now mobile. He came round to see me for something and we were go go out in my car, which was a blue and white Mark III Zodiac but for some reason it wouldn’t start. “I know a good mechanic” said father, but then we realised that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for this guy was the police mechanic and we were up to stuff that we didn’t want the police to know.
I was also in Canada and a friend and I were working on a car. He told me of the dangers of lying on tools and things underneath cars but he lay down right on my keys, the snap-hook broke and the pointy bit pierced him in the thigh. I piled him (and his daughter and a friend of hers) into my car, a red Mark I Escort, and we had to reverse out of a tight corner of a cul-de-sac. I heard a bang, looked behind me and there was an old 1930s Austin 7 on the pavement. At first I thought that I had reversed into it, but then I saw that a dent that it had, marked in red paint, was a good few inches higher than the protruding bits of my car so I realised that it couldn’t have been me, I had just hit the kerb. And so I drove off but this road took me right through the middle of a street party. I had to slow right down and my passenger got out of the car to speak to people, as he is wont to do. He began to tell everyone what had gone on down at the end of the cul-de-sac and I rather wished that he hadn’t as I was absolutely convinced that it was nothing to do with me.

And the lemonade was delicious. I’ll tell you tomorrow if it was worth it.

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality