On The Road Again

The Loudshoes family is currently on vacation; we left last Sunday for Ottawa, and then spent a few days in Montreal and now are in Ste-Sauveur, just north of Montreal in the Laurentians.
It was about a 6 hour drive to Ottawa from our house, then another 2 to Montreal and an hour more to Ste-Sauveur. Welcome to Canada: the Land Where Everything Is Far From Everywhere!

I don't mind a long drive; a good road trip can be almost as much fun as the actual vacation. I can read in a car without getting sick, which means I get plenty of uninterrupted book time, and it is an unparalleled opportunity to have a nap. I can get a lot of knitting done, too. It's pretty quiet in the car,
the Mister is usually a man of very few words, and he requires very little entertainment while he drives. What he thinks about for all those hours I do not want to know. (Once, when the Mister had a kidney stone and was all hopped up on Percoset, I drove us to Montreal with him nattering non-stop in the seat beside me...it was torture. In his drug-induced haze, he read every single road sign out to me for 500 miles. "It's 127 km to Kingston!"Every. Single. One. Throughout our marriage, I've been known to beg him for the occasional conversation, but right there and then I decided that him shutting up was the key to our success.)

Also, I'm of the firm belief that there are no calories in a moving vehicle, which means that one can consume as many potato chips, ju-jubes, peanut butter cookies and coffee as one's constituion and bladder will allow. Of course, this also has something to do with the fact that I have some control over where and when we stop, as well as how good the snack are in the cooler.

I remember many a long drive as a kid where I thought it would never end, and hell consisted of a hot car doing Mach 1 endlessly down the 401. Part of the problem, of course, when you are a kid is that you have no clue about how long this is going to take....you might have been put in the car to go pick up the dry cleaning, or you might be in there for the rest of the day, who knows?
Big Liver Girl told me a story that illustrates this nicely; when her now brother-in-law was about 7, his entire family (2 parents, 5 kids, of which he was the youngest) got into the station wagon (circa 1973....any bets on whether or not it had wood paneled siding?)to go to a hunting/fishing camp WAY far away. They drive all day the first day, stayed somewhere overnight and then piled in the car the next day and took off driving again. After about another 6 hours in the car, David asked with some exasperation "where are we even GOING???" like it had never occurred to anyone to tell him, and it really hadn't occurred to him to ask.

Two things have improved the summer family car trip immeasurably: air conditioning and IPods. Before air conditioning was commonplace in cars, there was no option but to keep the windows closed or have the windows open. If the windows were closed, you roasted. But if you had the windows open, it was only marginally cooler and considerably louder,  but you did have a hurricane force wind blowing through the car while you tried vainly to keep small children from being sucked out the window. After a few hours of that, you feel like you've spent the day Iin a wind tunnel. And your hair looks just bitching'.
Before there was any sort of personal musical device, one's choices were: A) play the radio for the whole car, or B) conversation between the passengers, or c) silence. Options B and C had their own dangers, depending on the temperment and current mood of the participants, and Option A meant that someone in the car was deeply unhappy, no matter what was playing. My friend Kelly's father thought that a perfectly reasonable compromise was to set the radio on "search" and have it play 5 second of every station along the dial, in a continuous loop. As you can imagine, that sent everyone batshit crazy in about two minutes.
Now, with the happy advent of earbuds and personal music devices, the car is blissfully quiet and no one is paying the slightest attention to each other. You would think this is exact opposite idea of an ideal family vacation, but in fact, it insures its success: the less we talk to each other, the better we get along. I never once had to threaten to stop the car and walk to Montreal by myself, as my mother once did.

When we get home, I hope my children appreciate the wonderful memories that their father and I strived to create for them, fuelled by potato chips and Ipods.

Tripping the Light Fantastic

Thing 2's Grade 7 class went on their end-of-the-year field trip to Niagara Falls on Friday, and I was able to go along. (Lots of parents were NOT "allowed" to go by their teenage children. That would have been a red flag to this particular bull, but to each his own.) I think I am an anomoly amoung parents, in that I like going on my kids field trips, so long as they are to my taste. And I consider myself lucky that my children see it as a positive thing that I come with them, too. The teacher said she thought I was the only parent she knew who asked to come.

I love Niagara Falls, it is one of my all-time favorite places to go. The stuff that nature made is endlessly fascinating, and the man-made "attractions" charm me utterly, as well. There is no end of entertainment, from the falls themselves to the wax museums to the cheesy gift shops. And the people watching! It's incredible; people come from all over the world to see Niagara Falls, and so you get to see an unbelieveable array of eye-popping outfits, unfortunate shoe choices and bizaare behaviour. It's like performance art.

First, we enjoyed the "Journey Behind the Falls", which is a very fancy name for "tunnels cut into the rock". For some reason, back in the day, someone got the terrific notion that people should be able to see the falls from the back of them. You go down an elevator to some serious clausterphobia-inducing tunnels which smell of years of moisture and cold sweat. It is very loud in there, because there are a few 6x6 foot holes cut into the rock, so that you can see the falls falling from the backside. (Honestly, if they just put a firehose outside of a window, you'd never know the difference. You can't see a thing.) Then they have an outside observation deck, right at the base of the falls. It is also very loud and wet; they give you a flimsy rain poncho which does nothing more than flap around and blind you. It is like standing in a Force 1 hurricane. The kids loved it; except for the girls who straightened their hair that morning. This is the only shot I got that does not have huge drops of water on the lens.

After that, we did another "attraction" that required more rain ponchos, and more more screeching about wet hair. Then it was on to lunch.

Let me tell you, everything costs like crazy in Niagara Falls. Even the coffee I got at Starbucks costs about 25% more than at home. So, when some of the kids wanted to go to the Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, I knew I should probably have called my financial advisor before proceeding. I was not wrong: a chicken Caesar salad and a diet Pepsi set me back by $26.00 after tip and taxes. That is the one thing I DO NOT like about Niagara Falls.

After lunch, when we had dried out and set our hair to rights, we drove up the Niagara Gorge to the Butterfly Conservatory. The drive up the Gorge is actually quite pretty, with an impressive view of the American side of the river. (When I told one kid that was the U.S. he was gobsmacked...."that's the UNITED STATES???" he replied, "I never knew we were that close!")

The Butterfly conservatory is a big glass-domed greenhouse with a bajillion butterflies flitting around it. It's fabulous; some of them are as big as your hand, and you can get up really close to them. Sometimes they land on your shirt or your head. I think the grown-ups liked it a bit more than the kids, although everyone appreciated staying dry. While we were standing around admiring all the butterflies, one of the other mothers mused "Imagine if these were all spiders..." There was a huge collective shudder from everyone within hearing. We got home around dinner time, and I thanked the teachers and Thing 2 for letting me go on the trip with her, and she replied that she liked having me along. So it was totally worth the bad hair day.

Sharks In Quebec

I was away in Quebec with 6 of my favorite people on the planet for the weekend. The Mother Sharks went away for four days together, and my stomach muscles are just now recovering from the non-stop laughing.

We set off most efficiently on Thursday afternoon at around 3 and arrived in the Laurentians at midnight. You've got to love a bunch of mothers; everyone was waiting with their bags packed when the van arrived, and with kleenex and garbage bags, too.

Its usually an 8 hour trip, but with the rush-hour traffic in Toronto and 7 bladders of various capacities, we added an extra hour to the journey. I love a good road trip; one of the rules is that there are no calories in a moving car, so that means that copious amounts of potato chips and chocolate and coffee, as well as the occasional cheeseburger, are perfectly acceptable fare. (Also, in case you were wondering, there are no calories in other provinces or foreign countries. Those rules are important to know.)

We spent most of the ride and the weekend talking non-stop and making each other laugh so hard and so long that I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a cardio workout.

Big Liver Girl and I managed to get some fly fishing in, which was sort of the main goal of our trip. The rest of the ladies watched and took pictures, with very good humor. We made them walk in the woods, which was good for them...some of those princesses needed to get outside.

Here is a picture of me fishing; don't I look like I know what I'm doing? Here I am demonstrating that I have no idea what I'm doing, I've managed to hook my sleeve. It was the only thing I caught the whole time. Here is Big Liver Girl and I enjoying the day. I think we both just liked the outfits. During one harrowing rescue of a hook on a rock in the river, Big Liver Girl had to borrow my waders (hers were still in the car at the time) and we both discovered, when we got into the river, that the left foot leaked a LOT. I somehow managed to drop her right boot into the river while I was trying to put it on (long story, don't ask) and then we discovered that the entire bum seam of my waders was blown out, and we were lucky that they didn't fill up with water entirely and drown one of us. Near death experiences make for a most exciting fishing trip.

We came home last night around supper time, happy and tired and delightfully pleased with ourselves. It was a magical weekend.

Thanks Sharks.