 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
DAY 7
BACK TO MONTREAL
Next morning, I was up and about quite early. I seem to be able to do that quite easily when I'm in North America.
To start off the day I reckoned that I'd go to the petrol station to fetch myself some coffee, and take a few photographs.
I remember being quite surprised when I opened the door to my room, and about a foot of snow fell in. We seemed to have had quite a pasting through the night, and it was still coming down now.
Well, you can see from the photograph that the above comments are something in the way of artistic licence. Nevertheless you get the idea from the amount of snow on the car. There wasn't any at all on the roof last night.
From the top end of the car park there was this really impressive view of the mountain in the background all covered in snow.
I was thinking to myself that this would make a really nice Christmas scene if I ever get round to making my own cards. You have to admit that the view over there is pretty stunning.
As for the motel, 30-odd dollars it cost me to stay here. Well well worth the price, I reckon. Much better that 300 dollars they wanted from the Wilderness Hotel and Ski Resort, don't you think?
Remember that I'm a tourist on the "Economy Package".
I headed for the street and wandered off in the general diriection of the petrol station for a coffee. It was cold, and I needed something to warm me up.
You can see just how cold it is by looking at the stream that passes under the roadway here. The steeper the stream, the faster it flows and the less chance it has to freeze, and this was quite steep.
However, where the stream had slowed up due to the friction from the banks, it had frozen solid.
Yes, it was quite cold again this morning.
But it was really nice walking through the snow in Colebrook, as we don't really get very much these days in Europe, what with global warming and all that. That is something I find really sad. I miss the snow that we had as kids.
Now as you can see, Colebrook looks like a nice, typically pleasant American mountain town, which indeed it was.
It reminded me of the kind of place where the Waltons would live. It was small, rural and inward-looking. The kind of place where everyone knows each other's business.
I could quite happily live here. Because of the injuries I received in a serious car accident in 1987, I often forget what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. Were I to live in Colebrook, it would be no problem at all. The neighbours would know, alright and they would soon tell me.
Not long after I posted the above, I had an e-mail from someone. He told me that he had lived for quite a while in Colebrook and he totally understood everything that I had written, both this morning and yesterday evening, about the town and its inhabitants.
That was exactly how he remembered the town. And from one or two other things that he was saying I thought immediately of NUTBUSH CITY LIMITS
I liked Colebrook. It reminded me of Pionsat, the nearest small town to my farm. Yes, definitely my kind of town.
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When I was adding a link to this page in April 2006, I happened to look at the petrol, or maybe I should say gas prices in the photo on the left, which you can see clearly if you click on the thumbnail to see a larger version. I had just reviewed a news bulletin that contained a photograph that showed prices on that particular day. The prices are not far short of three times as much.
You see, one thing the Americans and the British haven't learned is that each time they have a war with the Arab nations, they may well win a battle but the Arab nations win the war. The Arabs just increase the price of oil.
This causes a recession in the west. Businesses close, hundreds of thousands of people in the USA lose their jobs, their homes, all that they own. It happens every time.
In order to keep the economy going, the country has to sell off its assets to foreign companies to generate some kind of cash reserve. This is rather like burning down the house to keep warm, as ultimately there will be nothing left to sell.
Then there will be devastation.
Meantime, instead of the dividends being paid to American shareholders, they are paid to foreign shareholders. So the money floods out of the country even faster.
And each time you buy the goods and services of these companies, then your money flows out of the country. Your country gets poorer and poorer, while the oil producers become richer and richer. And you Americans and you Brits haven't cottoned on yet.
You would have thought that the politicians would have wised up to it by now. Instead of kicking the Arab nations about, make friends with them if you need the oil so much.
Alternatively, do something about independent renewable energy.
Some of us are already taking steps to make ourselves independent of imported fossil fuels, as you can see here and here.
I've been banging on this drum ever since the mid 1990s. One day, people will start listening to me.
Still, no time to worry about that right now - time to hit the road.
There's still a long way to go, the weather's looking bad, and after all, there's only so much to see in a small town like Colebrook.
And just as everything looks nice under the sun, I reckon everything looks nice in the snow too. I'll probably be terribly disappointed if I were ever to come back here in the rain.
I left Colebrook and drove across the river, then headed north along a minor road for several miles.
Then, at a crossroads in Hereford, Vermont, I came to what was quite literally the turning point in my journey. You can see quite clearly in the photograph on the left there's actually a sign pointing to Montreal, Quebec.
And that, of course, is in Canada, and where I was going to catch a plane back to Europe.
So much for Randy Painter and the others who said I'd never be allowed in. Either my quick visit to the U.S.A. was a triumph for free speech, or it was a condemnation of the shameful state of affairs of the American border patrol and the CIA.
Of course, Randy Painter wouldn't be telling any lies, would he?
As it was, the border guard who was supposed to be watching the crossing was asleep in his hut and I had to wake him up in order to hand in the visa that I had obtained at Calais.
So much for an alert and vigilant control of the nation's borders.
Don't forget, it was all of 15 weeks since Mohammed Atta and his friend had made the USA security forces look like the Keystone Cops.
Isn't all this security talk just unbelievable? I'm convinced that the Americans and the British are making up all this terrorist nonsense just so that the control freaks in power can snatch back everyone's personal liberties.
On that note, I crossed back into Canada.
CANADA AGAIN
As I climbed up over yet another Appalachian ridge, it started to snow again, really heavily this time, and the driving started to become quite precarious. For quite a long time my car was the only one on the road and I was taking it easy.
But then again, in my previous existence as a ski bum and coach driver,
I'd been over roads like this before. I remembered particularly 7th December 1990 when I took a coach loaded with tourists along the M6 around Birmingham in a blizzard, and I was the only vehicle moving.
I soon crossed the ridge and began to descend into yet another river valley, this one near Magog, Quebec. And seeing all of this made me wish I had
I had a quick lap around the car park to see if I could find a place to park so that I could go for a walkabout, but no luck, unfortunately. No matter. What I saw of the range didn't look a great deal to me.
Since writing this, however, I've been informed that this is part of the Mont Orford skiing area, with about 30 miles of cross-country skiing along 13 trails; and four mountain faces to ski down, in a total of 56 trails. Ah well. You live and learn. This reminds me, if you have anything to add or you want to make a comment about anything on my site, then .
A few miles further along the road, I came across this vehicle. It's a GM 3 ton pickup, and it's for sale.
This is the kind of thing that would ordinarily suit me, provided it had a straight six diesel motor, but unfortunately in this case the load bed is a little too short. It needs to be at least 12 feet, 3.8 metres, so that a Cortina estate can fit on the back. A 10 foot load bed is neither use nor ornament as far as I am concerned.
Well, maybe not an ornament - I can use it to haul lumber and building materials around the farm and so I wouldn't turn it down if someone offered it to me. But the straight six diesel is anessential.
A short way further along the road from the GM pickup, at a small road haulage depot just at the side of the road, I came across this truck standing forlornly in the snow on the forecourt.
Now to me, it looks suspiciously like it might have originally been a Fordson E83W pickup from the UK and dating from the early 1950s.
It was certainly the last thing I expected to see out here. I can't even remember the last time I saw one in the UK!
I remember these vehicles well. As it happens, the pot had a couple of the van versions of these when we were saucepans and we regularly travelled over the UK in them, all five kids wedged in the back among the camping gear and the old transistor radio hanging up in the back on a meat hook
Flat out at 40mph if we were lucky, there was a following wind and we were going downhill.
I can even remember their registration numbers - KLG 93 (a 1947 model) and XVT 772 (a 1956 model), if that's of any use to anyone. In fact, XVT 772 was the same colour as this pickup until my father brush-painted it blue and white.
There were a couple of guys in the workshop working on a modern 18-wheeler tractor unit, so I asked them if they would mind if I could photograph it. Seeing as they didn't raise any objections, I went ahead and took a few snaps.
Having a good look at all of this though, I have to say that I don't have a clue what they are trying to do to it. And I also suspect that neither did they.
Now I noticed that in the workshop one of the guys there was wielding a welding torch. The kindest thing that I could think of to say was that he had been practising first outside here.
I did go back inside the workshop to ask them a couple of questions about it, but they must have seen me coming and piddled off smartish-like before I could grab hold of them.
It wasn't until quite a long time later and after much gazing at some much blown-up copies of these photographs that the penny finally dropped.
A close examination of the chassis underneath here leads me to believe that this isn't the original chassis at all, but a much later North-American one (at least, that's my guess) and they are for some reason only known to themselves trying to get the body to fit on.
Now why on earth would anyone want to do that?
But whatever it was that they are trying to do, I'd go as far as to say that they've totally knackered this one, and that's a real shame. These vehicles are rare enough already these days without someone going about cutting one in half. And it's far too late to do anything about it now, though, more's the pity.
From here, I went off to Granby to do a final bit of shopping. It was my last full day in Canada. I'm sure there would be more things I might need
I'd left Granby and was heading towards Montreal and after negotiating a left-hand bend I happened to glance in the rear-view mirror. And this was more-or-less the view that I just happened to see. In real life, it was much more impressive than this.
It was just one long scarp slope resembling (as many European historians will understand) the Vimy ridge in North-East France. However the view from the top is of Montreal and its industry, not that of the coalfields of Lens and Douai which were for so long the goal of the British Army High Command.
Effectively this scarp slope marks the end of the mountains and signals the start of the Saint Lawrence flood plain and the symbolic end of the journey
MONTREAL
Pretty soon I was back in Montreal. The snow had stopped and it was early afternoon so I went for a drive around the suburbs at the northern side of the town for a good look around, and to see if I could find a different motel from the Metropole Motel where I stayed the last time I was in Montreal.
I didn't find a motel, but I did find this, which took me by surprise.
"Eh alors, qu'est-ce que c'est que je vois? Lulu! Qu'est-ce que tu fais içi? Le travail en noir, on dirait! Est-ce qu'ils sont au courant au bureau, heh?"
The drive around the suburbs was really nice, and I enjoyed it immensely. I could quite get used to living here. It was really nice.
Now, I said "three relatives I haven't seen" and although I've briefly mentioned Gary, I haven't introduced him. Yes, Gary Jewell is the third. I don't know what relation he is to me but it goes back quite a way. He's some sort of distant cousin a few times removed.
Later that evening after a chat on the telephone we met up, went for a meal, had a long talk, found we had similar tastes in music and so on. He even plays bass guitar! It was quite a pleasant evening all told and it was a real pleasure to meet him in person instead of on the end of an e-mail.
After a long e-mail correspondence for a period of 18 months afterwards, the communication came to an abrupt halt. I learnt much later from my niece that some time in the summer of 2003 Gary had died. I knew he hadn't been well for quite a long while, but this was so unexpected and so sad. He was such a nice guy. A similar age to me, too
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