Montreal

We’re presently in New York, where we’re staying for a couple of weeks.  I’ve only a smidge left of Canada to document and we’re almost caught up.  To it, then.

We took a ViaRail train between Quebec and Montreal, as we were now without conveyance.  This was no hardship as they have enough leg space to sleep in and enough luggage space above the seats to house a family of four.  The free Wi-Fi was also better and more reliable than at the hotels at either side of the journey.  A  piss-weak Canadian dollar also made beer cheaper than water on your average Pendolino trip.

What this picture needs is less space, more empty cans of special brew and a couple from Bolton having a domestic

We get there and already you notice the differences with Quebec:  half the folk in the streets are speaking English for a start.  It is both generally larger and specifically more diverse, the rather large Chinatown being an example.  We popped in to this last for something to eat when we got there, as it was close and open much later than the rest of town.  

We were sat down brusquely and given a pot of Chinese tea, some menus and a waiter’s pad and pen.  We bemusedly ascertained, after a fashion, that we were to write down the item numbers from the menu and hand the pad back for processing.  We promptly ordered far too much in the tradition of my people.

Fucksake

We grabbed some mystery confectionary from the vendors outside on the way back, because when you’re being a vile foreign glutton you should go hard or go home.

  
Sweet dumplings and Dragon’s beard candy.  I don’t know either.

The town’s historic districts have a much more definite ‘touristy’ feel, but there is plenty to see, eat and do.   Most restaurants are French-ish, but there is also a European pub-type configuration featuring fairly heavily too.  They also have a Nelson’s Column, which we thought a bit amusingly unlikely.  In fact, despite the occasional contemporary threat to blow it up, the local French of the time gave not one blue fuck about Napoleon or Revolutionary France and saw the Man’s moment at Trafalgar as "a triumph of virtue".  So there you go.

“I see no ships…now that I’ve sunk them all…several thousand miles away…as you were”

The town also has no shortage of cathedrals.  These aren’t buildings that serve any useful function for me, but I’ve enough catholic heritage to know a good one when I see one.

 

What we then saw was……wait a moment.  Oh shit, they’re closing in.

“Soon”

What we also made sure to visit was the local “Biodome”, a zoo-ish facility where they have emulated five distinct eco-systems of the Americas: Tropical rainforest, Laurentian Maple Forest, Gulf of St. Lawrence, Labrador Coast and Sub-Antarctic Islands.   The climate and plant life is as accurate as they can get it, so it’s pretty interesting.  You do spend half your time trying to spot the damn sloths, mind

This one doesn’t count

  
This lynx is thinking over its life choices and drawing upsetting conclusions

This penguin is racked with existential doubt

This toucan stands vigilant against enemies, within and without

Comrade Beaver hates the stench of sedition and fifth column, and he smells it everywhere.

The same complex also houses a Planetarium, which we had booked tickets for later in the day.  To kill time, we went and watched Jurassic World at a local multiplex.  We watched it in French, as this was the only option open to us.  I don’t think we missed much in the way of dialogue:  I ascertained that the boss lady realised that she should stay at home and have babies (and demonstrated that heels are always appropriate) and that those children should’ve been eaten.  Being in French may well have added a modicum of sophistication to the proceedings.

I was worried that the planetarium production would be another dumbed-down travesty, like you’ll find if you ever go Madame Tussauds in London. That particular show is of such blistering stupidity that I came out of it having had several years of schooling erased from my brain, whereupon I promptly attempted to eat my shoes.

Fortunately this show was of some actual merit (voiced by Neil deGrasse Tyson, no less) and explained some of the phenomena by which we understand observable space, black matter et al included. Fun.  The other show was of a more traditional “local expert points at stars on the ceiling” variety, which I’ve always enjoyed but then immediately forgotten all constellations beyond Orion’s Belt on exiting.  We’re going to the other hemisphere later in the trip anyway, where all the stars are wrong. 

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Heute habe ich gelernt, das Wort "Planetarium" wird dieselbe in Deutsch gesprochen. Nebenbei: Gehen SIe niemals das Planetarium bei Madame Tussauds.  Es ist furchtbar und macht man doof. Waffenfähiges dumm.

Little House on the Prairie

(Editor's note from Gareth - This post refers to the 4th August. So between my posts on Mount Rushmore/Deadwood and Milwaukee.  She works at her own pace, folks)

Gareth was told when we got married that he had two people to aspire to: John at the Vale and Charles Ingalls (Or at least Michael Landon's TV version).

Some of you will have read the title to this post and immediately remembered the books or more likely started humming the theme tune and picturing the 3 children running down the meadow. For those of you that did not you could: a) skip the rest of this post b) persevere and maybe do some wiki-ing later.

Laura Ingalls Wilder is a very well known figure in US culture. She is the "pioneer girl". She was born in 1867 and died in 1957. In the 1930's she started publishing a series of children's books about her childhood as a settler. A long running TV series was made out of the books and most American children study her life in school at some point. The TV series is set in a town called Walnut Grove where Laura did live for a while, but the place where she spent a significant portion of her childhood and where her family remained was De Smet in South Dakota.

So I had decided that having read all the books and avidly watched the TV series, we too should traipse to De Smet. It wasn't very much out our way. We just needed to go a bit north first. Well about an hour and a bit north.  Hundred miles or so.

We arrived in De Smet in time for us to be able to go on the penultimate tour of the day. So I went on the tour as we were on a budget and G thought he could have more fun for 90 minutes thoroughly not on the tour. I made sure he didn't miss out anyway as I told him all about it during the remaining 382 miles of the drive to that night's hotel.


This is the house that the Ingalls lived in when they first arrived in De Smet, which was a surveyors house they looked after for the winter until their homestead was settled. (no internal pictures were allowed)

One of the worst winters occurred whilst they lived there and the tour talked about blizzards that lasted for 3+days at a time. This stopped the train and other supplies being able to get to the town, so the townspeople ended up making these knotty things out of grass in order to use as fuel to burn to warm their homes and cook etc. Apparently boiling a kettle would take at least 10 or so of them.

This was the school house which Laura actually was taught in. The desks are from the time period as well and original blackboards and other items.

               

When Laura was 15 years old she obtained her teaching certificate and lived away from home for the first time, teaching at a small school. Laura did not, however, ever graduate high school as she got married to a local farmer when she was 18 years old. As married women were not able to be teachers either she basically worked with him on the farm until she wrote her books when she was in her sixties.

 Ma and Pa Ingalls remained in De Smet and lived in this house, which Pa Ingalls built. Mary Ingalls (Laura's older sister) also lived here with them as she had gone blind in childhood. (Again couldn't take pictures inside) Laura eventually moved to Missouri with her husband and her family home there is also a museum.

However, Pa Ingalls had itchy feet and a sense of adventure, for which I can sympathise, but he did drag his family around the country thousands of miles in covered wagons for days and weeks at a time. The experience in places wasn't a picnic either: he persuaded his wife to move to Walnut Grove on the understanding that there was land and a house waiting for them. However when they arrived, the house was actually a dugout. I would be incandescent. On another occasion the harvest was wiped out by locusts two years in a row and Charles ended up walking over 150 miles for work to pay all his bills.

Like my other post, this history is very different to Britain of the time,  although many people were tempted by the American dream (or were forced to) and made a new life as pioneers. It was only about 150 years ago, so still close enough in history for people to remember their older family members telling them about the experience. It was really interesting to actually see the things I had read about in Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, however.  The tour guides imparted the sense of adventure and new frontiers of those times, which was even more interesting.  One thing about the tour was that it was at two separate locations, so you had to drive between the two while following the tour guide. I did think that a UK tour wouldn't assume that you would have access to the car. The result was that poor Gareth had to wait outside for 90 minutes so that he could chauffeur me over to the second location instead of sitting in the coffee shop in town. Bless his cotton socks.

We then headed out to Walnut Grove, which was not nearly as exciting as De Smet. The dug out home collapsed years ago so the land is just kept as prairie. We arrived early evening and just had a drive and walk around the town. My fellow tourer in De Smet had proclaimed that she hated Michael Landon because he couldn't be bothered to grow a beard for his role and basically suggested that there were fans of the TV shows, but only the book fans were true fans. I completely disagree with her; I rather felt that Walnut Grove only existed because the TV show was set there and wasn't really worth the trip (luckily this wasn't a detour).

We arrived at our hotel in Trempeleau after midnight (sorry again G). This was a little town on the Mississippi with a railroad running through it.

Our hotel

View from our balcony

Quebec

 

Well this was about as French as one could find without being in France. Well, not that French as it’s August and people are still turning up to work, but a feel of the continent about it nonetheless. Admittedly with fewer Renaults, more bears, a staggering number of uses for maple syrup and equally baffling quantities of cheesy chips and gravy.  I joked as much to a porter. His mouth smiled but his eyes flashed a warning about mocking the syrup and poutine.

  
Well isn’t this a vibrant scene

We turned up at the Hertz office –which was fortuitously attached to our hotel- and divested ourselves of the Focus and the half-tonne of Algonquin mud up it’s rear window.  Newly-pedestrianized, we set off about town to see what’s happening.  Street performers, it turns out.  Some rather good ones, too.

 
Mexican chappy.  Was doing gymnastics trilingually, which has got to be worth a couple of bucks.

We popped in for some obligatory cheese, wine and cocktails in Le Château Frontenac, which is apparently one of the more photographed hotels in the world. One must drink in such places. The cocktails below both have some variation of maple syrup in them, because they cannot help themselves. They were very nice, however.

  

We made sure to go to the Citadel because I loves me a fortress, I does.  It’s rather impressive and the outer fortifications are spread concentrically through town, so you happen across quite a few cannon and mortars as you walk about.  It must’ve been a mild disappointment that no-one bothered to attack (the French within or the Yanks without) after it was done. 

  

Ah well, as my grandmother used to say: we Brits do know how to fortify a dominion using irregular star-shaped citadels, comprising four bastions and three curtain walls to maintain two defensive fronts from any direction of attack. 

The museum staff call this monster here “The Ikea” because it came in pieces and took 12 years to assemble.  We only export our finest fucking imbeciles to reassemble our guns.

 
3 kilometre range and never fired.  Blue balls.

So, it was a fascinating juxtaposition with the other Canadian cities we’d visited, such that it feels like a totally different country.  Which, I hear, is a point the locals haves raised once or twice.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Die Einwohner aus Québec sind viel wie die Franzosen, aber sie essen Pommes Frites und Käsebruch in Bratensoße.  Auch Ahornsirup.  Alles mit Ahornsirup.

Things take a French turn…

 

We knew that Canada was a bilingual country; we didn’t really didn’t count on it actually being unilingual in two separate places.   Or rather we did know about Quebec’s French-ness and occasional dalliances with ideas for independence (not being totally uneducated in the plight of the colonies), we just didn’t think about it very hard.  Ottawa has the last vestiges of anglophonia before they drop the bilingual road signs and pretences of civilisation and it all goes full-blown fromage, mersy bunkup mon sewer.

Prior to dawdling around Quebec and Montreal cities proper, we ran off to the hills via several places I cannot pronounce, to stay on Lake Sacacomie for a couple of nights, at the hotel of the same name.  They do lay on several activities on and around the lake and mountains, but frankly we were done for outdoorsy things for a while, so were content to languish in the spa and its various baths.  It is a struggle being me, but one drags oneself through, one day at a time (and we had been bitten to shit already, so were equally happy to hide underwater from our buzzing buddies).

Pictured: Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Since Gregor the Mulifaceted had fed us handsomely prior to leaving Northern Edge, we didn’t feel the need to eat en route to Sacacomie (apart from ice-cream and Timbits).  Thing is, it was still a long day’s drive and we didn’t get there until past ten.  Upon arriving in the middle of nowhere, Chan announced that she was hungry. On further discovery that this not being the kind of place that caters outside meals times, I had to get creative with my hunter-gathering.  Chan looked proper grumpy too, so buggered if i was going back empty-handed.

After some skulking around the lower corridors -among the laundry and the like- I happened across the staff kitchen, which had some plated meals on one of those carousel vending machines.  The walls and machines were daubed “Staff only” or some kind of barbaric foreign equivalent.  I make it a point to ignore any sign not written in the Queen’s English using Parker’s Royal Blue ink, so set about it. I selected something pasta-based and some cold pizza and wrestled with my change – all the while checking for the enemy.  I forwent using the microwave as a bridge too far.  I grabbed a set of cutlery and sneaked back to the room with my haul concealed in a laundry bag. 

Chan didn’t like the pasta.

The following day featured very little beyond indulging our slothful nature and eating savage food dressed up pretty.  Poutine with confit duck, anyone?

So dense you can see light bend around it

   
Beer and a Maple Éclair

So yeah, otherwise we did the Macaque monkey impression and lurked around water for the duration.

 

Fight on, comrades

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben sehr wenig gemacht und es hat toll gegeben.  Fast jeder hier spricht Französisch.  Ich spreche keinen, also dann spreche ich Englisch lauter.