after an 11 hour drive from Quebec City to Halifax. That stretch of road is very familiar to us. We marvelled at how little traffic there is on the Trans Canada once you
turn south and east from the 20 at Riviere de Loup. Compared to the US the Maritimes are empty.
But we are also very glad to be home. Lots to do to catch up on missed calls
and chores. We've been gone for 49 days! That's the longest either one of
us has been away on a trip together. Prior to that, I spent eight months in
France - attending language lessons 12 hours a week - hitch-hiking around Europe with my best friend the rest of the time. It was a formative experience for me at the age of 19. It's not something I'd recommend to everyone but it sure
hones your sense of judgement and direction. (No GPS assistance back then!)
That sense of direction was challenged multiple times on this trip through the southwest US. As I've said, the GPS can be wrong! I would sit in the passenger
seat with two different sets of maps and the GPS and we'd still get muddled.
Chicago was more than just art and architecture and the way home. When the
weather got bad we went to see a movie - Ides of March with George Clooney and Ryan Gosling. I bought myself a ''vintage" Roots backpack/purse. Blair is more flamboyant. He bought a Chicago fedora! Now he just has to convince himself to wear it.
We took in some music too - not the famous Chicago Blues sound - but a rock concert at a well-loved Chicago club called the Double Door! The performer? A guy by the name of Rich Robinson - the former lead guitarist in the successful group The Black Crows. Blair was very keen and it was only a ten minute walk from our place.
No question it was loud! We were the oldest 'young' farts there - to mangle one
of Blair's expressions.
We reluctantly left Chicago on Friday October 21st. We would have liked to have stayed longer, but we wanted to get back to Perth to celebrate my Dad's 86th birthday on the 28th. And the warm sunny fall days had given way to chilly ones - skies filled with slate grey clouds. Time to get home and get the house ready for winter.
So, on the 26th we joined my brother and his family with Mom and Dad at the Red Lobster in Ottawa: It was a fine celebration!
I've enjoyed writing about our trip especially because Blair was along to take so many pictures and add his thoughts to the account. We discovered that keeping a blog requires commitment - and some good material! Once again, the pictures were essential. (Blair says he feared on many occasions that he had caught the Japanese shutterbug disease - he took more than three thousand pictures - 14 gigs of data!) Writing a blog also requires you to be on the lookout for strong wireless signals at every motel/hotel/bedandbreakfast. It's almost as important as having a phone.
On the subject of phones, we went without one in the US, mainly because my cell phone company (Bell) charges exhorbitant prices for out-of-country usage. We could have purchased a cheap phone with a phone card. We could have used Skype through the wireless function on my 'smart' phone. But the one thing we could not do was use a pay phone: they are truly an endangered species if not completely extinct.
We covered 13,576 kms...the Mazda 3 handled them all exceedingly well. It helped that gas in the US was two thirds the cost of gas in Canada. We went from as low as $3.19 a gallon to as high as $3.69. In Halifax, the regulated price of gas is about $1.23 a litre which works out to $4.92 for a US gallon (I think I have the math right.) ... $1040 approx in gas...no I still haven't done the currency rate calculations and I have to double check the sums.
We hope you enjoyed our stories from this trip. Thanks for sharing it with us. It really amplifies our own experience of travel to know that others may be dropping in from time to time. It was a trip of a lifetime. I'll let you all know what our next one will be.
TTFN! (TaTa For Now!)
