Tag Archives: Hannah

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.

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Saturday 12th March 2016 – BLIMEY! WHAT A NIGHT!

I don’t know what it was that they put in all of those injections that they gave me yesterday, but saying that I had a disturbed night last night was something of an understatement. In fact, when the alarm went off, I found that all of the bed clothes were all over the floor. And in trying to get out of bed, I fell right on my nether regions. Clearly, something was going on.

And despite being crashed out in bed long before 20:15, I didn’t need to make a trip down the corridor despite having such a fitful night. Instead, I was off on some of the most astonishing voyages that I have had to date. I’m sure that all of these injections and medicaments that I’m taking are responsible for the greater part of what is going on in my head during the night.

We started off back in Crewe, in West Street yet again but at the town end by the Jet garage. Someone had sent me a panoramic photo of the area and you could see just how bad the area was, with abandoned houses and demolition sites all around, particularly in the area between West Street and Richard Moon Street. It goes to show just what a horrible place Crewe is – something ironically that I had been discussing with Terry and Liz during the evening. I was down at that end of town because I’d had a message from Cecile that contained a file but my telephone wouldn’t open it, so I went down there because she had a flat down there where she lived with her mother. So walking down the street, I came across Cecile and I went in to see them and we had a good chat, not about anything in particular. Cecile had been given some money by her mother, some of which was Belgian money including a 20-franc piece which she had put on one side to make an emergency phone call if necessary if she needed help, which just goes to show how far behind the times Cecile’s mother was because you couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee with that in Belgium these days. But it turned out that Cecile’s mum hadn’t given just a couple of hundred Belgian francs in notes to Cecile, but also a couple of hundred Euros in notes too. I had a brief glance and it looked to me as if there were at least 500 Euros in there. Cecile’s mum had a huge stuffed gorilla which she was cuddling. I made the remark that I should have brought Strawberry Moose around for her to cuddle because he was missing her. Or maybe, they should both come round to my house to see him because Strawberry Moose is missing Cecile’s mother. Cecile’s mother interjected to say “well, give him a big kiss from me” and that sort of thing. At that point, I left the apartment to continue my travels.
These took me to the far north of Alaska or Canada with someone who started out to be Rachel (but it wasn’t her) and we were off driving somewhere and ended up in this town. Where we parked was on some kind of concrete quayside by a river that was running through an open culvert and which was a non-fishing river, and another car pulled up alongside up. In this car was a family consisting of a man and presumably his wife, with a daughter in her early teens and an older son. This “Rachel” girl and I had gone there to do a few shady deals which involved a couple of people belonging to the local ethnic group and these people had now spiked our guns, so we needed to be much more discreet. These native people needed to leave us and travel into the centre of the town, and so chose to travel by canoe down this river, their canoe being was fitted with an outrigger. It was important that this family didn’t see the canoe with its occupants, but the boy saw them. He started to say something about them not having the right to be in there, seeing as how it’s a non-fishing river, but the father tried to reassure him, saying that maybe they were just voyagers, but the boy thought that this was strange. He made the point that dawn was only just breaking and so if they had set out from a neighbouring village, they would have had to have set out in the pitch-darkness and that would have been impossible down the river in the canoe. This led to something of an argument. I ended up going for a walk with the mother of this party and we went for a good stroll around. she told me about the issues that she was having with her son – he was 18 and at college but was bone-idle. We were trying to access the internet but we couldn’t make a connection – all we had was a long length of telephone cable instead of an ethernet connection. Plugging in the telephone cable, we couldn’t make a connection. This was annoying the boy who complained that he needed to access the internet, but I asked him how he expected to access the internet without the correct cable. Despite that, he still carried on complaining. This woman was saying that he really was a spoilt child. At this moment, the girl appeared. There was a little bit of sun and so she went out to sit in it in a short-sleeved tee-shirt and jeans. We had a laugh, and said that we expected her to be in a bikini in a minute or two. The woman and I then set off to walk back to the car, through a crowd of people that were milling around on the pavement. One of them was one of my niece’s daughters. She wasn’t expecting me to be there so as I walked past, I gave her a cheeky wave, causing her to burst out laughing. She started to call me “dad” and say things like “how’s my son?” We had quite a laugh about that. But this woman was still going on about her son. I had half a mind to say that this is what happens when you spoil your son far too much and don’t impose any controls on him. Kids should be taught to fight for what they want, not to be given everything regardless. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
By now, I was back at Montreal airport, employed as a taxi driver, although I was living in Rope Lane in Shavington. We had been having huge discussions about how quickly we should be moving passengers on from there, how to recognise quickly the ones who are looking for a taxi and so on. We needed one full-time driver from 06:00 to 18:00 and another from 18:00 until 06:00, with others coming on for 12-hour shifts at 07:00, 07:30 and every half hour until about 10:00, and then part-timers taking over for short shifts until the very early hours when the airport quietened down. People who are on their own or clearly looking lost, we need to approach them and at least find out their names and find out if they are waiting for anyone, and at least rule them out of our work. It would help to identify our potential customers so much quicker. The daughter of my niece was still with us and this is one thing that we had notice about her – she was waiting for a fare and there were a couple of people loitering around, so we asked her who they were (“I don’t know”) and what they wanted (“I don’t know”). It was these kinds of situations that we needed to avoid. And so the next morning, it was time for work. I was in the airport waiting for a fare and a big man came up, wearing a kind-of cowboy hat rather like the fat bad-tempered man on Carry On Cruising. He wanted to go to the brewery in Montreal so we walked round to where I had parked my car, but it wasn’t there! We tried another two or three places of where I might possible have parked it and it wasn’t there either. I had to go back to the house to find the other driver and get him to take this fare. All of this had made a total nonsense of my ideas about being quickly away from the airport. Now I had to go to look for my car. The other driver had parked his car in the marketplace but I was sure that I had looked in there for mine, but nevertheless I had to go back there and look. All of these fine plans that I had had about improving our business, and I couldn’t even find my own car.
I then went off to a railway station somewhere – a private railway station on one of these council-funded lines. We were waiting for a train and there was chronic under-funding as you might expect with anything involving British Rail and Local Government. The Flying Scotsman was there, not only pulling freight trains but then going off to do some shunting in the absence of any British Rail shunter or any more-suitable locomotive in the yard.

The alarm broke the spell of all of this and I ended up downstairs via the bedroom floor.

I spent most of the morning typing up the notes of last night’s voyages – all … gulp … 1572 words of it. And then after lunch I carried on with merging in the blog notes to the voyage around North America in September 2015. I say “North America” because I’m now in the USA, Burlington, Vermont, to be precise, where I was in early September.

And apart from that, I’ve not done anything at all. Just taken it easy.

And thinking about life and all of that as I reflect on the news that someone so gifted and talented in his life as Keith Emerson was should find something so wrong in his life that he should choose to end it by a gunshot to the head. If that’s not enough to make anyone ban the sale of firearms, I don’t know what is.

Thursday 27th August 2015 – WHAT A STORM!

Totally terrific. Lightning, thunder and the most astonishing rain that fell in just 10 minutes. And the worst thing about that is that I had left Strider’s drivers-side window open and so at least on the way home I washed my underwear.

I had a disturbed night, with something of a record of having to leave my bed – and I blame this half-litre of thirst-quenching drink that I had had with my tea. And I also slept through the alarm clocks too and it was 08:30 when I finally rose from my stinking pit

I’ve said … "and on many occasions too" – ed … that there was an old Canadian Pacific railway line that came up to Centreville from Woodstock and I’ve been following its path in a desultory kind of fashion.

There’s a road near here called Avondale Station Road and I’ve had a wander down there on a couple of occasions looking for the station site without success.

But having tracked down the route using aerial photographs I’m pretty convinced that this is the track bed of the railway, although the station site is well-overgrown – to such en extent that it’s not clear on which side of the road it would have been.

From here I headed off to Woodstock again and ended up having to go on a marathon detour almost to the USA border due to roadworks. And I met my bus from the other night too while I was on my travels around.

I ended up at Walmart looking for clothes and some guy in a wheelchair thought that it was fun to get in my way whenever I was trying to pick something up. Eventually I managed to reach something, and he made a remark like “Why didn’t you ask me to move?”
“Because I used to be married – I’m used to people being difficult”.

But I did have another piece of good luck in Walmart. A small lightweight 1/4 – 3/8 drive socket set at $9:00. This toolkit is building up slowly.

At Tim Horrton’s we were once again surrounded by Miltonists. About 10 staff on duty, one of whom was at the drive-in, another of whom was at the counter, a third was making wraps and as for the rest, “they also serve who stand and wait”.

After my coffee I went round to see Zoe’s shop and for a chat to see how she was doing. She could be doing better of course, but it’s hard to tell a 21 year-old about your 40-odd years of sometimes-bitter experience. They would much rather make their own mistakes. And then round to Sharp’s to see if they would take the scrap metal that we have (they will).

I went back to Centreville along the road on the eastern side of the Saint John River.

It’s not a road that I travel very often and so I don’t know all of the good views, but here’s a stunning viewpoint from a few miles south of Hartland. We can see the Saint John River of course, and in the background we have the wind farm up on Mars Hill in Maine, USA (my plot of land is to the right of the hill).

In the centre of the photo is the bridge that took Trans-Canada Highway version 2 (or is it 3?) over the river, but in front of this you’ll be able to make out the world’s longest covered bridge at Hartland.

My way back to Rachel’s took me over the river and back via Lakeville where there’s a car body repair shop. He always has some interesting stuff there but as he’s one of the best body repairers in the region his output is far too good to be suitable for these pages.

But there are always exceptions to this, such as this absolutely wonderful Mack Thermodyne B61 of the early 1950s.

It’s been stood for ages but he’s managed to make it go, however the water pump has failed. He says that it’s up to the owner to source one, and he wishes him good luck. The plan, I imagine, is that once it’s running he’ll restore it, and I’ll love to see it when it’s finished.

Hannah was supposed to be ringing me up to give her a hand to mow the lawn but she never did, and so I popped by to see how she was doing. But she had done it all on her own without my help and now she and her friend Journee were making a beer-pong table for her party tomorrow night. I went on to the shop and waited for closing time.

And this was when the storm hit.

Later in the evening Darren and I loaded up Strider with a huge fridge and a big stove. On my way round to Great Satan I’ll be heaving them out at Sharp’s.

Monday 24th August 2015 – I WAS ON MY TRAVELS …

… during the night. Although I wasn’t really.

In fact I was back home again watching this huge crocodile of children stream down the track at the back of my house, all singing and being happy. meantime there was someone who had come to visit me, someone official, and I’d sent him away with a flea in his ear. However he was loitering around on the public pathway between my barn and my house and was urinating up the wall of my well so I dashed out there and gave him a piece of my mind (not that I have much to spare). Meantime, all the kids were streaming back up the other side, on the pathway in front of my house.

From here, I was invited to take part in a very low budget horror film, about being the brother of a young girl who, at full moon, turned into a terrifying flesh-tearing zombie with huge claws. We had to build a rocket and time machine so that we could take her to the future before she transformed again, where treatment would be available Anyway we built it and set off – and there were quite a few others like us in there. We just made it away on time but we were held up at a railway level crossing in Crewe – a real cliff-hanger. The producer/director said that we would have to finish the film next week but one of the actors couldn’t make it so we needed to write him out of the play. We planned to stage a crash at the level crossing and set him on fire so as to write him out, so I had to go off and look for the petrol which had been left behind in a dump at Edleston Road near where Woottons used to be. And it amazed me – here we were in Crewe and we had little dumps of stores all over the place and no-one had given a single thought about them being looted by the inhabitants.

After breakfast we all went up to the shop and – surprise surprise – I started to tidy up the place there a little. As you know, my adventures with tidying up are legendary, mostly o account of when I do ever do any the place always seems to end up worse than it did before. This time however, you could see a difference.

And it also inspired one or two others to do some too, and that always helps. The place could do with it, I reckon. And I would love to give it a total reorganisation too, although that’s never ever likely to happen.

Later on, I went out and about. First stop was to the insurance to have the details of Strider’s new licence plate recorded. That needs to be up to date. And from there I went off to the Dollar Store to see if I could find some headphones for the Samsung phone, but with no luck there.

At Service New Brunswick I had a chat about the postal code for my property. It seems that although Service New Brunswick is responsible for the address, it’s Canada Post that is responsible for the postal codes – a typical Government-organised confusion. And so that was my next port-of-call, althugh not before finding out where I can take these two big fridges around here. Surprise as it might be, there are no Government-organised recycling centres here in this part of the world, no public rubbish dump service other than the weekly waste collection. The only answer is to hire a skip, and that costs $400:00. No wonder there’s all kinds of stuff all over the place.

From there I went off to the Post Office and chatted to them. It seems that I’m also allowed a public mail box too. However the manager of the Post Office wasn’t there so I couldn’t sort that out on the spot.they will call me back

Darren and Hannah came back from Ohio this afternoon and so we unloaded all of the stuff out of the trailer (they had been gone for 12 days) and spent the rest of the day catching up on things.

And the woman from the Post Office didn’t phone me back, but then, I wasn’t really expecting it.

Wednesday 19th August 2015 – HERE I AM …

… at 03:30 at Riviere du Loup, and this is the bus that brought me here – a Prevost.

It took that length of time for the bus to come all the way out here but to be honest I don’t remember all that much about it. I managed to have something of a doze.

But here, I had to change buses as this one that I was on is off down the Gaspe Peninsula. I’m waiting for the Coach Atlantic bus that will be here at about 04:00 ready to leave at 04:30 for Moncton, and that’s going to drop me off at Florenceville.

And this is the Coach Atlantic bus, an older Prevost, that brought me to Florenceville. We’re at Edmundston when this photo was taken, stopping to pick up and drop off passengers and also parcels because the bus does a parcels delivery.

And that gave all of us the time to have a coffee and to visit the bathroom, which I for one needed after all of that drive.

Strangely enough, we arrived at Florenceville on time, and Rachel and Amber were there to meet me. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, and that is that I will do this bus trip again. It was extremely painless, and much more comfortable than I ever imagined it to be.

I was dropped off at the garage to pick up my new toy, Strider the Ranger, and then took it round for its safety check. It passed okay, but I’ve had a new spare tyre put on it. The one that was there was quite worn and in any case it was the wrong size. I may as well have it done first as last, and it gave me an opportunity to clean and grease all of the spare wheel fittings.

Armed with a valid safety certificate, I went off to the insurance and there I had to lie down in a darkened room while I recovered from the shock. North American motor insurance is horrendous, even worse than Belgium.

I took the certificate back to the garage so that he could have a copy and so that he could register the sale and obtain the number plates. At the moment, Strider only has a temporary registration certificate.

On the way back up here, I noticed that Strider has a chronic misfire on one cylinder so I’ve booked it in on Friday to have a full service – that’s something else that I may as well have done before I go too far.

The three of us (Darren and Hannah are tractor-pulling this weekend) went out for a meal later at Woodstock and a good old chat, to catch up with what we have missed since last October. And then I came back here and crashed out.

Hardly a surprise.

-2

Saturday 1st August 2015 – NO WONDER …

… I had a struggle to leave my bed. And no wonder that I didn’t feel like anything at all until I’d had a nice hot coffee. In fact, I’d been to somewhere round Stockport during the night, and on a pushbike too. I had Paul Ross with me on his bike too and we had gone there with the aim of doing some taxi-ing with our bikes (don’t ask me how). Anyway someone came over and wanted to go up onto the moors and so I told Paul to take him – I didn’t fancy the mountains. But Paul was being difficult. He said that he had to be home soon and this was going out of his way. I explained that it was “sort-of” on his way (which it wasn’t of course” and he’d only be 10 minutes late, but he was still unwilling. Then onto the stage came another friend of mine from Uni. He’s a friend of mine in a social network and for the last year he’s been tetchy and argumentative, and tonight in Stockport (he lives no where near there) he was being his tetchy and argumentative self.

But whatever were these two doing in my nocturnal ramblings?

So today I’ve done nothing at all of significance except to talk to Liz, Hannah and a guy from Bangor, Maine on the computer. And I may have some exciting news to report on Monday night – who knows?

And apart from that, I’ve written three enormous pages of my blog from 2011 about my journey around southern New Brunswick. If you start here and go forwards, you’ll find them and you can follow my adventures from there.

All comments welcomed.

Wednesday 17th September 2014 – I AWOKE THIS MORNING TO AN UNEARTHLY SILENCE

And long after the usual waking-up time too. It seems that the battery in the European phone went flat during the night and so that was that as far as that phone was concerned. However, I couldn’t understand why the Canadian phone didn’t ring at all. Subsequent enquiries revealed that I can’t find it anywhere. I wonder if I have left it at the motel where I stayed the previous evening. It’s just like me to do something like that, isn’t it?

But last night I did manage to wake up last night after crashing out at about 17:00. It was just long enough to cook tea and edit the photos, and then I was off again, flat out once more. I must have been tired yesterday.

So having recovered from my exertions, I made myself a nice hot coffee and sat drinking it, looking at the sea for a while. You have to admit that I chose a superb spot for last night.

And I was feeling much better than the weather too. It’s all grey and overcast this morning. There are some right heavy dark clouds and I reckon that we are going to have a rainstorm before we’re much older. There is however a bit of blue sky out to sea. Let’s see if the wind blows it back our way.

I also had to fill up with fuel too. Well, I didn’t, but I’m on a little more than a quarter-tank and I’ve no idea what it might be like for fuel further on along the road. 136.4 cents per litre too – that seems to be the going rate around here. That’s a portent of things to come, isn’t it?

A few miles out of Inverness we turn onto Highway 219 to go around the top of the island. That is the road that I’ve been aiming for. If you think that the route has been picturesque to date, just wait until we’re driving along here.

This is probably one of the most beautiful views in the Maritimes, or at least it would be if the weather were to brighten up. This is Margaree Harbour, a few miles north of Inverness.

Crossing over the river at the bottom of the hill is a new bridge – I don’t remember this bridge when I was around here in 2003 and I don’t remember what was here in its place.

And here’s a surprise. It’s starting to rain.

This is the village of Grand Etang, and its harbour. The coast has plenty of these small harbours, a reminder of the days when everyone earned his living from the sea and there was no road communication between the village and the mainland.

And my wind turbine from 2003 is right behind where I’m standing, and still working too. I still don’t understand why they don’t go in for wind turbines in New Brunswick. It seems totally bizarre to me.

At Cheticamp there was a Tim Horton’s with a reliable internet connection so that I was able to update everything. I contacted Hannah and she contacted the motel from the other night and, sure enough, the Bane of Britain did indeed leave his mobile phone there. Hannah has set off to rescue it.

The place was decked out in advertising for this new Dark Roast coffee blend, and all of the fibre cups were plastered with the advertising. And so Yours Truly asked for a dark roast coffee, only to be told that “we don’t have it yet. The machine hasn’t arrived”.

Just after here we find ourselves on the Cabot Trail and in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. And a whopping $7:40 to drive around it too, even just for the day but she seems to have given me the seniors discount again as I’ve been charged a mere $6:40.

This is where I want to be and I shall have a good time here, especially as the weather has now improved and we are having a beautiful day.

You can see the road that i’ll be driving in a few minutes, climbing away over the headlands along the coast.

It’s one of the most beautiful places that I have visited. But just a word of warning. I’m only going to post a couple of photo here out of the hundreds that I took, because there isn’t room for them all.

And I could have taken thousands more had there been a place to park safely.

From the top of French Mountain there’s one of the best views in the whole of Canada – all away along the coast to the tip of Cape Breton Island to Meat Cove, the farthest northernmost point of the island.

And here I fell in with a couple from Rhode Island. We had a very lengthy chat about wind turbines and the like. But I wasn’t impressed with the notes from the Canadian Tourist Board –
“No-one knows who first explored these waters – probably Mikmac and other native cultures fished and hunted here long before Jacques Cartier’s voyage of 1534”.
There was nothing about Cabot. After all, this is called the Cabot Trail and a place just along here is claimed to be his landing site. And why is there nothing about the Norse? Not a single mention. It’s quite depressing.

A little further along the road is a quite amazing descent into the village of Pleasant Bay. Normally I let the car run down hills under its own steam, but that wasn’t the right course of action to take here. I might have made the first bend but not the second or subsequent.

And the village certainly lived up to its name – I’ll tell you that. But there again everything was stunningly beautiful around here.

We had a slight problem on the way out to Meat Cove. A set of road works that delayed us for quite some considerable time.

It seems that the old bridge has collapsed and a temporary bailey bridge has been installed. If you look carefully, you’ll see the old bridge underneath the current one. Meanwhile, major roadworks are under way to build a more permanent bridge and this is what is holding up all of the traffic. The old bridge clearly wasn’t holding anything up.

Out at Meat Cove I stopped to recreate the photo that I took in 2003 but I was amazed at the difference in the scenery over the last 11 years. It’s totally different today.

There were quite a lot of tourists around here too – maybe the camp site had something to do with that, and I was tempted to book myself in here, but I had my eye on another place that looked even more suitable.

But more of this tomorrow.

Tuesday 16th September 2014 – I’VE REACHED THE SEASIDE.

This motel where I found myself last night would have been really good value (apart from keeping on dropping the internet connection which annoyed me intensely when I was trying to work) but it was not at all the kind of place that I was looking for.

And I had a really bad night’s sleep too. That coffee that I had with Hannah did me no good at all.

Seeing as it was dark last night after I had left Hannah, I went off this morning for a little wander around the University campus to see what there was to see.

And it seems that apart from being at the most prestigious University in Canada, if not the entire English-speaking world, Hannah is also at probably the most beautiful one as well, because it really is nice and civilised here.

There’s a railway line here at Antigonish, which is a surprise as Canada really out-Beechinged Beeching when it came to decimating the railway network.

Judging by the rails it receives plenty of use, but the station doesn’t get any at all which is a tragedy for many people living around here. Canada really was ruthless when it came to gutting its passenger facilities. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is the main line for the oil that’s landed at Port Hawkesbury on Cape Breton Island, this line would have been long gone too.

From here I wander off along the Nova Scotia coast because it certainly is beautiful around here. I have thousands of photos that I took and it’s hard to find just one that would do justice to the view.

This one is as good as any, taken from the end of the road down to Williams Point, just a few miles outside Antigonish. If you’re a fan of the outdoor life, then the coast of Nova Scotia is certainly the place to be.

There’s a town called Monastery along the coast and it is so-called because there’s a monastery here. This is it, a couple of miles outside the town, and it’s called Our Lady of Grace.

It’s not very well-known but I once tried the monastic life, but I didn’t last too long. It was the monotonous diet that did it for me. There were only two monks who worked in the kitchen, the Chip Monk and the Fish Friar.

There’s the Canso Strait just down there at the bottom of the hill and Cape Breton Island is over there on the other side of the strait. That’s our destination for this afternoon and we’ll be there in 10 minutes with a bit of luck, God’s help and a bobby.

The south side of the island isn’t all that interesting apart from the old French fort at Louisbourg, I drove the central road in 2010 and so I’ll be going up along the north west coast.

We mentioned the decimated Canadian railway network earlier, and this is my lunch stop at the site of the old Troy railway station.

There used to be a railway line that ran from the Canso Strait to Inverness as there used to be all coal mines out around there and the railway was used to haul away the coal. It opened in 1901 but passenger traffic ceased in 1959 and goods finally ceased in late 1980s although been tottering along on the edge of closure for years. Of course, the mines have all gone too. In fact I can’t think of any coal mine still operating on Cape Breton Island.

Coming out of the back end of Port Hood on the old gravel road over the headland, you’ll see why I’ve chosen this particular way round the island. The views from up here are really stunning looking north towards Inverness

And you are lucky that I took this photo. 5 seconds later and I was shrouded in dust from a school bus that roared past me like there as no tomorrow and it was like a Sahara dust storm.

One of the “games” that we play on our travels is “101 uses for a redundant school bus”. School buses are only licensed for a certain number of years and so the countryside is littered with abandoned and redundant school buses. It’s interesting to see what people do with them.

Transforming them into pickups is certainly one of the best ideas that I’ve seen.

The biggest town on this part of the coast is Inverness and it’s quite famous for its wonderful beach. This is what I’ve come here to see, and you can tell that they aren’t wrong about that.

And although it’s not by any means late (despite how dark it looks), my bad night has finally caught up with me. I’ve not been able to find a coffee place and I’m too tired to make one, so I’m going to crash out right here.

-2

Monday 15th September 2014 – ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Next morning I troll off early towards Antigonish. It’s a long way away and I have plenty to do en route.

It’s quite an uneventful drive at least as far as Fredericton where I stop to pick up my purchase from Saturday. And in due course I’ll post a photo of it and tell you all about it.

Back on the road south-eastwards and at a certain moment a few miles south of Fredericton, I’m surprised by three tanks that drive over a bridge across the Trans-Canada Highway. And I don’t mean water tanks or that kind of thing, but proper great big self-propelled armoured machines with long guns. I wonder what’s up with them.

Just gone past me is a campaign bus for one of the candidates in the forthcoming elections and if you look very carefully on the nearside you might see something black flapping in the wind. It seems that someone has put out one of his windows, and the driver has covered it over with a black plastic bin liner to keep out the rain, but that’s burst now due to the air pressure as he’s been driving along.

And as we approach Moncton it seems to be brightening up now. We have blue skies and there might even be some sun about to make its appearance. It makes a change from the grey miserable misty morning that we had.

I struck gold in Princess Autos. They are having a sale and I bought an 25-inch power bar for $9:99, a set of 22 spanners, 11 metric and 11 AF, for $12:00, and a tyre pressure gauge for $0:99. An absolute bargain, that all was.

The only downside of this was that they didn’t have a cheap set of sockets to go with the power bar. But these were unbelievable prices.

And at the Salvation Army Thrift Store down the road they gave me a senior citizen’s discount on the CD that I bought. I’m not sure whether to be pleased of humiliated.

And on the Trans-Canada Highway, which is effectively a motorway with dual carriageways, just outside Moncton there’s a railway level crossing. And there’s another one too just a mile or so further on, by the Dieppe and airport turn-off. This isn’t something that you see every day on a motorway. We would have endless amounts of fun with a railway level crossing on the M25 in the UK.

Bob Dylan once sang “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, and that’s certainly true around here, isn’t it?

I’m at my lunch stop and you can tell that we are at the border between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia because tthere’s a pile of wind turbines down there taking full advantage of this screaming wind.

Where I am is actually in New Brunswick and there’s not a wind turbine in sight. I know that I have a “thing” in favour of wind turbines, owning four myself, but this lack of wind turbines in New Brunswick is just plain absurd.

Where I am is actually at Fort Beausejour and we’ve been here before, haven’t we?

It was freezing cold then in the middle of winter so I didn’t stay there long. And I didn’t stay here long today either as I was in quite a rush – just long enough to take a couple of photos and eat my butties. I’ll have to come back here yet again.

I made it to Antigonish right to the minute and Hannah was bang on time too. We went for a meal and a really good chat and she told me all about her first couple of weeks at University. She’s the first of our family to go to university straight from school by the way, and she’s at St Francis-Xavier University, the best University in Canada if not the English-speaking world. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m intensely proud of her.

The downside of this is that I have left it far too late to find a spec for the night and I’ve ended up in a wickedly-overpriced motel. Still, you can’t have everything.

Saturday 21st September 2013 – HERE IN MILLINOCKET …

… the weather looked distinctly less-than-promising this morning. Although we had spent the evening sitting out in a gentle warm breeze, watching the stars, something must have happened during the night and it all looked so depressing.

We were however told by the guy in charge of the airport that the day would brighten up, and as the morning wore on and the competitors began to arrive, some of them brought the nice weather with them and by the time the competition got itself under way, we had a bright scorching sunshine

There was nothing else here apart from the tractor pulling – no fairground or showground as at Clinton the other week.

And not that I know very much about tractor pulling, but the track looked to be in far better condition. And so it should have been, considering the effort that had gone into preparing it the morning of the event (it pays to be at places like this early so that you can see exactly what is going on).

Here’s one of our old friends, a grader similar to the thousands that we encountered in 2010 during our marathon drive along the Trans Labrador Highway
(except that this one has griffers on the back) smoothing to track out ready for the compactors to compress down.

. There were several more classes of truck than at Clinton, although nothing like as many entries, and the event was over long before nightfall.

What didn’t help was the number of breakdowns. All kinds of things were going wrong for some of the drivers – clutches disintegrating and the like. On one old truck, the effort to pull the sledge pulled a universal joint clean out of the si=ocket in the centre of the propshaft and I can’t say that I’ve ever seen that happen before, although on one of my old taxis many years ago, an out-of-balance propshaft tore the mounting out of the floor of the car.

In the middle of the contest Darren did a demonstration run in “Perdy in the Pink”, and then Hannah had her first effort. And when I find the USB lead to charge up the camcorder (which somehow I seem to have forgotten to bring), I’ll put a video of her run on here. Dad made 341 feet and a bit, and Hannah, putting everything that she had into it, did 337 feet, which is pretty spectacular considering that she’s only just 16.

Her second run though, she was doing even better until the fuel line split and sprayed ethanol all over her and the track at about 50psi. Nevertheless, first place in her class and in the top 10 overall is something to be proud of.

Highlight of the day has to be the guy who came over to me while I was filming and said “How do you manage to stand so close to the tractors and film then with all of the noise that they are making?” to which I replied “what?”.

And we can’t be bothered to go home tonight so we’re sitting here talking, drinking and watching the storm clouds gather. It’s going to be rough tonight.

-6

Saturday 7th September 2013 – JUST BY WAY OF A CHANGE …

… we’ll start with a video. I’ve not done this before so if it doesn’t work then don’t worry – I’ll sort it out.
While Hannah snaked pretty heavily down the track, you have to remember –
1) Hannah is just 16
2) this is her first year
3) we were having a torrential downpour
4) the track was rubbish
5) she got off the starting line (which was more than a couple of competitors did)
6) she got farther down the field than many people who have been pulling since before she was born.
7) her performance won her some folding stuff, which is always the most importand yardstick by which to mesure everything of course.

As for the town of Clinton itself, it’s a stereotype of the typical American one-horse town in the rural backwoods. Tattoos spelt wrongly, beer everywhere, hamburgers and hotdogs with fries and extra relish, and while the Liver Birds on the Liver Building in Liverpool used to flap their wings when a virgin walked past, here they would flap their wings when someone walked past who was not obese.

Even the fairground rides, such as they were, had, in prominent display, “in the interests of safety, large persons may be refused a ride”. How this lot became the Master Race these days I really have no idea.

The Americans use the word “thick” a lot to describe people. In USA slang, that means “fat” of course but in British slang to call someone “thick” means to call them “stupid” or “ignorant”. So here in the USA it quite possibly means the ame.

So apart from preparing the tractor, watching the racing and then repairing the broken fuel line, that was it. We went to bed.

It may not seem as if we did a lot today but I can’t think of 5 minutes where there was nothing at all going on.

-8

Friday 6th September 2013 – I HAD AN “AT HOME DAY” TODAY

The only difference being that I wasn’t of course at my home but at Rachel’s. I slept for at least part of the night with a cat curled up next to me, something that brought beck memories of course, and after breakfast (and the typical frantic hunt for keys) Zoe and I went off to do a few things.

We went too look at my little kingdom up on the USA border, and then went to see someone to chat to him about Ford Rangers. The Bank in Florenceville was the next port of call but I couldn’t get done there what I needed to do, so we headed to Woodstock. By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong of course and Zoe took me to see her new salon. Now that she’s a qualified and licensed aesthetician after her year ot college in Miramichi she’s planning on opening her own little business and has rented two small rooms. They will be ideal for a newcomer to the business once she sorts herself out.

We ran quite a few errands for her while we were there and after lunch it was back to the Bank where a few (but by no means all) things were sorted out. I went on to the Great Satan to sort out my entry permit and then back to Rachel’s where we loaded everything up for the weekend.

This led to the immortal conversation
Hannah “Will 2 packs of water be enough for us for the weekend?”
Yours Truly “How much beer do we have?”
Hannah “two 36-packs”
Yours Truly “why do we need water then?”
Yes, I’m fast becoming a redneck, aren’t I?

Rachel came with me in the Dodge on the long drive to southern Maine and the highlight of the journey had to be eating chips (or “fries”) in Dysart’s, a typical American truckstop and a team of cheerleaders coming in. A scrawny, scraggy lot, it has to be said but cheerleaders all the same. No, you can’t make up a story like that and I wish that I had taken a camera into the truckstop to prove it.

The pulling track at Clinton, Maine, is cold and wet.

But so what? So am I.

But at least I’ll feel better in the morning.

Hopefully.

-2

Sunday 31st October 2010 – I ATTENDED HALLOWEEN TODAY

First time ever that I have done something as North-American as this.

After what can only be described as a leisurely brunch (with my “never ever call me before midday on Sunday” I would fit in so well here) we all sat down at the table and started pumpkin-carving.

First job was to top and then to empty 15 or so pumpkins and that led to seeds and flesh everywhere. Darren had a pile of images and so we photocopied them and used them as templates for the carving.

We sellotaped them to the pumpkins, pricked out the patterns and then joined up the dots with a small knife. And considering that I’d never ever done it before, my group of bats, my witch and my “screaming skull” came out quite well, and I was so impressed. Little Amber even did a freehand carving of Strawberry Moose (you can see him modelling for his portrait) and that was pretty impressive too.

Darren’s friend George took a few pumpkins down to the gate and I set the rest up in the living room and put tea lights in them so that I could photograph them.

On a long exposure (which counteracted the flickering of the flame) the image came out really well and the effect is pretty good.

After Hannah and I had lined the drive with flaming pumpkins Rachel and I took Zoe, Amber and Amber’s friend (and Strawberry Moose who had donned a tutu and a bumble bee headgear for the occasion) out trick-or-treating.

It was all terribly tacky as you might expect but it was also fun and you can’t spend a Halloween amongst a family here in North America and not participate in the entertainment.

And tomorrow I’m moving on. My time here is up. I’ll be driving to Bathurst where my journey started in 2003 and heading north from there. The idea is to go around the shore of Northern New Brunswick and then round the Gaspe peninsula to Matane and then take the ferry over to Baie Comeau, where the adventure really began, and that will be the Great Circle route completed.

-3

Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

… and hasn’t it been a long time since anything like that ever happened?

In fact we had a recycling day today and with Darren’s big pick-up truck, Rachel, Hannah and I did a tour of the neighbourhood picking up glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium drinks cans.

Once we had a full load on board we went off to a recycling plant in Bath about 10 miles away from here where we weighed it all in.

The plant was quite interesting – it was a simple hand-sorting operation where you tipped out your containers onto a kind-of counter and two people hand-sorted the cans and plastic and they also weighed the glass bottles, not by scales but by eye.

And having seen the price is on offer for scrap over here, not only do I now understand why in several cities that I’ve been to and down several roads that I’ve travelled I’ve seen gangs of people picking up the litter, I’m also going to bring over the scrap aluminium off the two caravans that I dismantled and weigh it in over here.

It was quite a windy day over here too and so the highlight was definitely this giant inflatable pumpkin that was busily making a bid for freedom down the highway in the general direction of the USA.

What you don’t see in the photo is the guy from a nearby house who was giving a rather desperate chase after it.

Thanks in no small measure to the long piece of rope that was tethered to it the guy managed to restrain it but it was touch-and-go at one stage and my money was definitely on the pumpkin.

I was also taken out old-car spotting too.

Darren took me to see his brother-in-law who lives just down the road. He has an old Cadillac convertible that he has restored from a rusty heap and had taken it out for a run-around this morning. And so we headed off down the road to catch him up.

This evening we all went out for pizza to celebrate Halloween and a good time was had by all. My pizza is the one in the foreground – the vegetarian one without cheese.

If I’m very lucky tomorrow I might get to spend some time with my great-nieces but the trouble with teenagers is that they always seem to have a much different agenda to any agenda that anyone else is ever planning. So I dunno.

Mind you, I have an important decision to make. Do I go out trick-or-treating with Amber and Zoe tomorrow night or do I stay behind with Hannah and hand out the candy?

But all three of them have decided that once Halloween is over I can take off my halloween mask. I don’t seem to be able to convince them that this is my REAL face.

-3

Thursday 28th October 2010 – AND HERE I AM …

… in the bosom of my family – or at least the friendly part of it.

They say that being an intellectual runs in our family and of course anyone who has ever been an intellectual really had to run, and so it is nice to report that there is a civilised bit somewhere, even if one has to cross the Atlantic to find it.

Strawberry Moose has disappeared of course. I have three great-nieces aged between 7 and 16 and they have already worked out a rota as to whose turn it is to moosenap him for which night and so I don’t imagine that I shall be seeing him again until I go back on the road.

This morning though I went into Houlton, which is just across the river in Great Satan.

Its claim to fame is that it’s the town in the USA that has the largest fire brigade per head of population, and when you look at the statistics you’ll find that it’s also the town in the USA that has been burnt to the ground the most often.

Are these facts related, I wonder.

It was also the site of a German Prisoner-of-War camp for German soldiers captured in north-west Europe following the D-Day landings and I had to hunt around for hours until I found any trace of that.

But any trace – the site has long since been built over and it’s now a civilian airport and new industrial estate. There is however a little monument to the place as it was, but that’s well-hidden in the undergrowth and I stumbled upon it in more ways that one.

I was talking to Darren and his Dad about the Templars and my theory that Columbus sailed to America to recover the treasure for Ferdinand and Isabella that the Templars had carried across to there when they escaped from La Rochelle in France in the fourteenth Century. We chatted for hours about this and when we returned home,

Darren switched on the TV and there was a programme on the Templars taking the treasure across the Atlantic and the efforts made to recover it. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction at times.

-2

EPIC HALL

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

Tag Archives: Hannah

Wednesday 4th May 2016 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY EVERYONE

Saturday 12th March 2016 – BLIMEY! WHAT A NIGHT!

Thursday 27th August 2015 – WHAT A STORM!

Monday 24th August 2015 – I WAS ON MY TRAVELS …

Wednesday 19th August 2015 – HERE I AM …

Saturday 1st August 2015 – NO WONDER …

Wednesday 17th September 2014 – I AWOKE THIS MORNING TO AN UNEARTHLY SILENCE

Tuesday 16th September 2014 – I’VE REACHED THE SEASIDE.

Monday 15th September 2014 – ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Saturday 21st September 2013 – HERE IN MILLINOCKET …

Saturday 7th September 2013 – JUST BY WAY OF A CHANGE …

Friday 6th September 2013 – I HAD AN “AT HOME DAY” TODAY

Sunday 31st October 2010 – I ATTENDED HALLOWEEN TODAY

Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

Thursday 28th October 2010 – AND HERE I AM …

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