Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 18:02:56 -0700 (PDT)
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: "Tobin T. Copley" <tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca>
Subject: Big Trip Report [part 10, long]
*** Sorry this is so late, everybody! The stupid freenet server has been
down ALL DAY, and just came up a few minutes ago. I will get a new
account on a different provider soon. Promise.
Part X: The Canadian North
(or, Christa finally gets to P.E.I. "Anne Who?")
This week: Tobin and Christa putt happily through the snow-covered
Canadian Maritime provinces, with the gas heater running all the
way. Warm locals, cold weather, and a wind-chill that cuts like a
knife.
Hey kids! See a collection of fine photographs of Tobin and
Christa on their Big Trip at
--> http://www.teleport.com/~des/vw
And why not join us and other list members on a road
trip to the Beaufort Sea (on the Arctic Ocean) next
August? Check it out at
--> http://www.chaco.com/~coyote/trek
March 8, 1995 New Brunswick, Canada, just past the US border
The most striking thing about crossing the border into New
Brunswick from Maine has got to be the bilingual signs everywhere.
The signs were a great help to me, because it seems I can keep
only one second language in my head at a time. Since spending a
month in Mexico, every time I opened my mouth to speak French to
someone, Spanish came out. Very Disconcerting. I tried to
rectify the situation by reading only the French parts of the road
signs. Spanish won't do me a hell of a lot of good in Quebec.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we cleared the border, and the
sun was already creeping low in the sky. When we crossed the
border into Canada, we'd also crossed into another time zone: we
were on Atlantic Time now, meaning that we had a four-hour time
difference between here and home on the west coast.
We cruised down highway 1 towards St. John, and it was getting
noticeably colder almost minute to minute. As we were also
getting hungrier by the second, we pulled off on a little gravel-
based ice road looking for a spot to stop for a very late lunch.
We drove a couple of miles without finding a sufficiently wide
spot, so with a little help from the throttle and parking brake,
we made a tight U-turn and headed back to the highway. We were
both really hungry (and Christa was pretty growly) by the time we
pulled into a road-side rest area and parked on the hard-packed
snow.
We climbed in back, and because we'd partitioned off the cab from
the rest of the bus, it was waaay below freezing back there. I
pulled the hose from the gas heater back from the cab so we could
warm up the back of the bus, cranked up the heater, and between
the gas heater and our propane stove, we were toasty in less than
two minutes. I had to turn the gas heater off. Christa warmed up
some black bean soup on the stove, and we sipped piping hot soup
at our westy table while watching the ice-and-snow-covered scene
outside.
With full tummies, we put our dishes away and brought the gas
heater hose back up to the front of the car. Our trusty camper
fired right up, and we turned north towards St. John again. We
were passed by a couple in a Jetta who liked the look of our dirty
but very happy camper, and they waved as they cruised past. We
waved back, and had a laugh at their vanity plate: SIP TEA.
Shortly before 5:00, we pulled into the CAA office in St. John.
We had hotel reservations to make.
Now, as far as this trip is concerned, Christa has a great job in
two respects: 1) they let her take a three month leave of absence,
so she has a job when we get back; and 2) we can stay at any
Canadian Pacific hotels for $30.00 a night. Christa works in the
restaurant at the CP Waterfront Centre Hotel in Vancouver, and
Canadian Pacific hotels is one of the finest hotel chains in
Canada. Many of the places are grand railway hotels built by CP
Rail during the hey-day of rail travel in Canada. Most of these
old grand hotels are officially designated heritage buildings.
All this is to say that $30.00 a night is one hell of a perk.
Christa got reservations for that night at the Hotel Beausejour in
Moncton. Yippee! It was getting dark as we rolled out of St.
John, and we drove through the darkness and plummeting
temperatures for a few more hours.
By the time we got to the hotel, it was really, awfully, bloody
cold! Fierce winds cut right through us as we skated from the
camper across the driveway and into the lobby to check in. There
was no way Christa was going back outside, and she nominated me to
park the camper and come back with our stuff. I got back in the
camper, drove it around to the parking lot in the back of the
building, and nearly got stuck trying to get in to a parking spot
on the lumpy ice. I jumped in the back and grabbed our bags, then
took a minute to jettison all the water in the westy water tank.
I'd hate to crack our water pump that way. I guess I could have
added some anti-freeze to the water instead. ;-) I scrambled
across the icy parking lot and dodged into the hotel through a
side door. I hadn't put on a cap, and my ears were about to fall
off.
I met Christa up in our room, and we had a hot bath and watched TV
(a really wild thing to do after being 2 1/2 months on a trip like
this) until we got bored about 10 minutes later. We went down to
the "Windjammer"--a fancy restaurant with a tacky nautical
interior on the main floor of the hotel--and had some nice single
malt scotch before settling into dinner. Christa had lobster, and
I had Atlantic salmon, I think. Contented, and slightly
inebriated, we went back to our room, looked out at the frozen
scene for a while, and went to bed.
The next morning we banged around Moncton for a bit, doing some
long-overdue banking and stuff. For some reason it had warmed up
close to 25 degrees Celsius overnight, and it was nearly balmy
outside--certainly above freezing. Everything was melting, and
huge puddles of briny water spilled over gutters and up on to the
sidewalks, which were covered with two inches of muddy slush.
With the chores behind us, we slogged back to the camper and
loaded up. Most of the ice under it had melted, so my fears the
previous night of being stuck in our parking spot were not
realized. Without even a hesitation, our camper fired right up,
and we pulled out.
We headed for the ferry at Cape Tormentine, which would take us
across the Northumberland Strait to Prince Edward Island. We took
highway 15 through Shediac and Cap-Pele, dodging huge muddy
puddles of melted snow and ice as we drove through festively-
painted Acadian communities. The sun was out, the heater was off
most of the time, and the glare off the remaining snow and the wet
road had me squinting hard, and wishing I could afford a pair of
prescription shades.
We pulled into the ferry terminal at Cape Tormentine, and had over
half an hour until the next sailing. We were directed to the line
closest to the water, so we could see across to PEI on the other
side. While the family behind us in a minivan tried to keep their
squabbling kids entertained with some cheezy stickers they'd
gotten 'free' from McDonalds, we popped the top, stretched out,
and made a nice hot stir-fry type lunch. The kids in the minivan
stared in awe at our camper, so we waved, and they waved back,
eyes the size of dinner plates.
We snacked and read, and when we saw the ferry approaching, I took
the dishes to the bathroom to clean up (dumped the water,
remember?), and Christa put the stove and everything away. When
they made the boarding announcement, we closed the pop-top, jumped
up front, and fired up our camper. I'll bet I know what those
kids begged their parents to buy for the rest the day!
The ferry crossing was something else. We steamed through thick
pack ice from one side of the strait to the other, and the impact
of slamming into the huge ice floes shook the huge ship. Most of
the ice extended at least a foot above the water surface: if ice
is 10% less dense than water, this means there was another nine
feet of ice underwater, right? Still, the ship just crunched
right through and I looked over the side as impossibly thick blue
ice slid past the hull. This was too much. I went inside, sat
down, and listened in on conversations around me. Truckers, ferry
workers, parents with kids all seemed to be talking about somebody
named "Buddy." "...Buddy fell off de boat..." "...Ha ha, Buddy
never been t' Summerside! Buddy, dere, Summerside been on 'is
route fer yiars, 'e'll show ye..." "I'm tellin' ye, Buddy gotta
get outta de fishery--dere's no future init no more..."
Whoa. Buddy must really get around.
Some of you might be wondering what the hell we're doing in an
air-cooled VW camper in PEI in March. Well, when were first
planning this trip, I had a big map of North America and was
plotting where we should go in Mexico. See, we'd talked about
going to Mexico. Christa was beside me, and I suggested some neat
things we could see of the way there and back. And Christa piped
up, "Yeah! As long as we're going to Mexico, let's go to PEI!"
...Ummm, yeah. "No, really! See? It's not that far," she said
as she spanned her hand across the map from one place to the
other. "Yeah, only the far corner of the continent!," I replied.
We thought about it together, added up the mileages, and saw that
we could do a whole circum-continental route and make a really
wild trip out of the whole thing. Christa grew up reading Lucy
Maude Montgomery books (famous for her "Anne of Green Gables"
series), and going to PEI would be like a pilgrimage. It was
shortly after the decision to drive around the continent was made
that I began roaming the junkyards for a gas heater I could
install in our camper. So here we were, crashing through ice
floes on our way to PEI in March. And I was really enjoying it.
Christa always has the greatest trip ideas--the Inuvik trip was
Christa's idea too!
We pulled over for a picture as soon as we'd cleared the ferry
terminal and had our camper on PEI soil. I took a picture to
record Christa's first few minutes on the Island. We went into
the tourist information centre for some maps and stuff, but found
that it had been turned into a day care centre for the winter.
This should have been our first indication that PEI doesn't really
do much of a tourist trade in the dead of winter. A friendly
woman rummaged through some boxes that had been stored along one
wall, and found us a tourist map of the Island. We thanked her,
and headed off towards Charlottetown along a beautiful rolling
highway.
Charlottetown has got to be the smallest provincial or state
capital I'd ever seen. We had absolutely no problem finding our
hotel--we headed down to the waterfront, looked two blocks over,
and there it was. We walked through the front doors and into a
construction site. The lobby had been gutted: bare conduit hung
from the ceiling like dried-up spaghetti does when your eight-
year-old is learning to cook pasta ("See? It sticks! Time to
eat!"). Plywood barricades had been erected here and there.
Ladders, hammers, and tool boxes were strewn in an apparently
random fashion on the floor behind the barricades. An impact
drill ripped into some concrete somewhere and rattled our
fillings. Christa and I had to raise our voices.
We spotted the front desk across the lobby. The immaculately
groomed staff in their immaculately tailored uniforms had a crazed
look in their eyes, their nerves were totally shot. One was
running a rag over the long surface of the marble counter in a
vain attempt to fight off the dust which was settling everywhere.
When we stepped up to check in, the front desk woman smiled a bit
too widely and said "Welcome to the Prince Edward!" in an overly
chipper voice. Her smile was bolted on; maybe she'd already been
pushed over the edge.
We asked her what was going on with all the construction.
"Oh, were re-doing the lobby for next season. I'm very sorry
about any inconvenience." We told her not to worry about us, then
asked when it was going to be completed. "Oh, hopefully by May."
"How long has this been going on?," we asked, nearly shouting to
be heard over the din. "Oh," she said, a pained expression
washing across her face, "since about October." No wonder she
looked like she was about to lose it.
Hmmm... I guess PEI doesn't do much of a tourist trade in the dead
of winter.
We got up to our room and I spent the next half hour looking out
our window, watching a Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker returning
to port, carving a path through the thick pack ice into the
harbour. I could see our bright mango happy camper parked below.
It was covered in dark brown and red road grime, a spray fanning
up from the front wheels, a caked-on coating over the rear, and a
dark, even film over the front, except for two wedges where the
windshield wipers had done their bit. We sat by the window and
stared out at the harbour and our camper in the failing light,
sipped our beer in our warm room, and went to bed early.
The next day we drove around the entire eastern half of the
province. This isn't actually much of a feat, given that the
entire island is not even 150 miles from end to end. It was
positively balmy by PEI standards, well over freezing, although
the wind was still blasting in from the Atlantic, threatening to
remove the glasses from my face.
We stuck as close to the coast as possible, stopping to admire the
old light houses which dotted the coast line every few miles. The
ground was thawing quickly, and we often found ourselves heading
off on dirt roads to get closer to the light houses, and slogging
through thick, slimy, half-frozen mud. When we walked around, the
mud threatened to slop in over the top of our hiking boots if we
didn't watch where we stepped. The mud on the roads was
alarmingly deep in spots: the thick mud was completely covering
our tires, and had gooped up over the wheels themselves in places.
I'd have to be careful: I had a shovel, chains, and tow rope, but
I preferred to leave all that stuff where it was stowed in the
camper.
At East Point, we stopped to admire another light house and to
take some pictures. Our camper was reeeally muddy now. It's kind
of fun parking on muddy PEI roads because you don't have to use
the brakes: you just put the clutch in, and the suction generated
by the tires cutting through six inches of mud just sucks you to a
stop real quick. Makes a cool noise, too, if you turn off the
motor to appreciate the full effect. The other thing I thought
was cool was that we could have walked out on the ocean for
several miles, just by stepping out on the pack ice. If I were
suicidal. No way was I going to walk out on that ice with cold
air and water temperatures and ice pressure like that! Might make
for an impressive ad for a syncro, though, if the driver knew how
to drive on the stuff.
Christa was getting really excited. We were getting close to
Cavendish county, where the "Anne of Green Gables" books had been
set. We past dozens and dozens of little road-side boutiques
(boarded up for the winter) selling Anne-stuff. I pulled over as
we crossed into Cavendish county, and took a picture of Christa
hugging the sign marking the county line. Christa was beaming.
We stopped at Lucy Maude Montgomery's grave site, where Christa
paid her respects, and drove to the "Green Gables" house, which
Montgomery used as a model for Anne's house in the books.
Of course the house (which is now part of the Canadian National
Park system) was boarded up for the winter, but that didn't keep
us from walking around, peeking inside, exploring the grounds, and
taking lots of pictures as we walked through the melting snow. In
most places, ours were the only footprints. Our camper was the
only vehicle in the lot, there was no sign of a grounds keeper,
and there were only a couple of other tire tracks to be seen
anywhere. Not much of a tourist trade...
We very nearly got bogged down on the driveway out of the Green
Gables house. We came around a slight curve in the drive to see a
huge puddle with thick mud all around the edge. I considered
backing up and going out another way, but decided instead to back
up and take a run at it. It was less than a hundred feet of
puddle and mud, so I figured momentum was what I needed. We hit
the mess at 20 mph in second gear and began to lose momentum
immediately. We got through the water and into the mud, which was
much deeper and thicker than I'd anticipated. The engine speed
was little higher than it should have been at that speed, and I
knew I was riding that fine line with the accelerator between
power and traction. We bounced and jostled through, finally
climbing out of the mud bog and onto firm ground with less than
than five mph left and the engine lugging heavily. There was no
way I was going to risk a shift in that slippery mess! I'd also
succeeded in undercoating the car with a thick layer of goopy
mud--maybe it would offer me a bit of protection from road salt for
the next day or two.
It was mid-afternoon, and it was starting to cool off rapidly. I
might be a "come-from-aways" (not a local), but I could tell we
were in for a change in the weather. We headed back to
Charlottetown, through beautiful rolling red clay hills and potato
farms. Just after making a turn-off and crossing a bridge over a
small stream, we passed a beautiful old house that had been turned
into a restaurant. A Jetta parked in front caught our eyes: SIP
TEA! We turned around and headed back, pulling up beside the car.
We met SIP TEA's owner, chatted a bit, then he invited us inside.
He ran the restaurant, and they were closed for the winter, but he
showed us around, proudly pointing out what improvements they were
making. We'd been very impressed with how friendly folks in the
Maritimes had been, and he was a good case in point. He made us
some tea (which we sipped), we chatted and looked around, then we
said our good byes and headed back to Charlottetown, with the gas
heater pumping.
It took us less than an hour to get back to the hotel, but the
blizzard had already begun to sock the island in by the time we
made it back. Snow was hurtling sideways through the air, and the
cross-winds required my full attention, since I wanted to sleep in
the hotel that night, not in the camper sideways in a ditch. We
parked in our spot outside the hotel, and I stuffed plastic
grocery bags into the rear air vents so that the engine
compartment didn't fill up with snow.
That evening, we sat in the hotel's outdoor hot tub, marvelling
how the steam from the water was forming icicles in our hair and
eyebrows. The snow screamed around us as we sunk down up to our
chins in the warm water. Ah, PEI: vacationland!
The next morning I had to take our camper to a service station to
get some grease pumped into out ball joints, which had had water
and grit washed into them making them chatter loudly as we drove.
The snow had turned to freezing rain in the night, and the entire
camper was encased in almost an inch of solid ice. It was also
bitterly cold, and the gale force wind didn't exactly help take
the edge off. I hacked at the door handle with my Swiss army
knife until I chipped all the ice from in front of the key hole.
I inserted my key and the lock sluggishly turned to unlock the
door. But the latch mechanism was frozen. Solid. I pulled on
the handle as hard as I could. I levered it with my knife.
Stuck. I walked around to the passenger side and did the same
ice-chipping deal on that lock. I inserted the key, turned the
lock, gripped the door handle, and hoped.
The door popped open. Yippee! I swung the door wide, then
realized the door seal was still mostly frozen to the body of the
car, but parts were still attached to the door, so there were
these strips of door seal swinging in the wind. I carefully pried
the door seal off the body of the camper and stuck it back into
its place in the door.
I spent the next few minutes hacking thick ice off the windows. I
pulled the bags out of the air vents, and they split into pieces
instead of bending and flexing as I removed them. Hmmm... It
really WAS cold! I climbed into the camper and sat on the rock-
hard seats. It took four of five attempts to get the camper
started, but it fired up within a minute, albeit on 3 cylinders
for a few seconds before I was able to coax it into all four. I
was real glad I'd backed it into the parking spot and left it in
first gear. Drove for the first mile in first gear before even
attempting a shift.
The mechanics at the shop I went to were really impressed that we
were visiting PEI at that time of year in a VW bus. As they were
firing grease into the ball joints, they couldn't believe that
we'd left Mexico to come up there. When I told them we'd had no
mechanical problems in over 11,000 miles, and some of them pretty
tough miles, one of them just scratched his chin and said "Yeah,
they knew what they were doing when they made those old
Volkswagens." The squeak and chatter had disappeared by the time
I got back the the hotel. Christa and I spent the rest of the day
exploring Charlottetown in the snow.
That night, Christa received word that her Grandmother had passed
away. In addition to the grieving, her death forced a change of
plans. The funeral was going to be in Winnipeg in just a few
days, and we were a couple of thousand miles away. Christa was
going to have to fly, that much was clear. We figured we could
get to Toronto, and she could fly from there while I drove
straight through from Toronto to Winnipeg in a little over 24
hours. It would be hard, but it seemed to be the best plan we
could come up with on the spur of the moment.
The next morning we checked out and headed to catch the ferry back
to the mainland. We had a serious problem trying to get gas into
the fuel tank because the freezing rain and continued cold
temperatures had frozen the lock on our locking gas cap. The
eventual solution was to open the sliding door and pull the hose
from the gas heater around to blast directly on the gas cap.
After about three minutes of this, the ice in the lock melted, and
we got the cap off. After filling up, I put on our spare non-
locking cap so we wouldn't find ourselves in the same predicament
later in the day.
Although it had stopped snowing, the wind still whipped deep
drifts of snow across the highway, so we had to take our time
getting to the ferry. Once we were in the line-up, we turned off
the engine and used the gas heater to keep ourselves nice and
toasty despite the -20 degree Celsius temperatures and howling
wind outside. All the other poor sods had to keep their engines
running for the whole 45 minute wait.
The ferry crashed through the pack ice back to the mainland, and
soon we were driving along side the Nova Scotia border towards
Sackville. We turned onto the Trans-Canada towards Moncton, and
quickly passed the broadcast facilities for Radio Canada
International. We waved and honked.
We were going to try and get some serious miles in today--we
needed to if we were going to get Christa to Toronto so she could
get to the funeral. We kept rolling along, through Moncton,
Fredericton, and beyond, stopping only for gas. We didn't really
want to be romping around outside anyway, as it was still bitterly
cold. Late in the day, with night beginning to fall, I just had
to pull over in Hartland for some fun. I'd seen a sign informing
us that Hartland was the home of the world's longest covered
wooden bridge. I'm a sucker for "world's largest" stuff, and I
just couldn't pass this one up. We drove down to the river and
over the one-lane covered bridge. Yippee! Now that we were on
the other side, we had to turn around and drive over it the other
way. Yippee again! We cheered.
At Perth-Andover we pulled over for pizza and warmth. Even with
the gas heater running full tilt full time, we just weren't able
to keep the camper comfortable. We had good pizza in a nice warm
shop, then headed out again. It was even colder than before, if
that was possible. We started looking for a hotel, but could not
find one that both a) was open, and b) had a phone in the room.
We even ended up sliding backwards and sideways for thirty or
forty feet down the icy parking lot outside one place.
Finally, we saw a place with really great neon off the highway in
Grand Falls. Great neon is always a good sign for roadside
motels. This place was open, had phones, comfortable beds, and
one of the smallest bathrooms I'd ever seen in my life. It was
also hosting a local snow-mobile convention. Checking in, I asked
the manager if he knew what the temperature was. He looked at the
thermometer stuck to the outside of the office window and replied,
"Well, it's at least 40 below." "Celsius, right?," I asked.
"Yep."
Oooh, it WAS cold! We cranked up the heat in our room, poured a
hot bath, and thawed out. We piled into bed, and slept, thankful
we were protected from the frigid air outside our windows.
[Next week: Will the camper start in this cold? Tobin finds out
how cold it has to be before 20/50 motor oil looks like silly
putty. Our camper experiences the first mechanical break-down of
the trip. And we get one of the best rooms at the Chateau
Frontinac in Quebec City! ]
Tobin
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tobin T. Copley Currently =============
(604) 689-2660 Occupationally /_| |__||__| :| putta
tobin@freenet.vancouver.bc.ca Challenged! O| | putta
'-()-------()-'
Circum-continental USA, Mexico, Canada 15,000 miles... '76 VW Camper! (Mango)
| 
