For this trip we did something highly unusual. We woke and packed the car in a reasonable amount of time. I remember one year we were embarking on a trip to Arizona it took us so long to get going, it appeared that we might not get past St. Pierre Manitoba. That day we had a late lunch at Mitchell Manitoba about 6 miles from Steinbach. Not a great start. This year was much better. Far from perfect, but much better.

Our packing this year was suspiciously efficient. Christiane and I are not famous for being efficient. Something must be wrong. This time both of my two bags and Christiane’s 2 bags were not full!  Moreover, the car was not full either. Have we missed some urgent items?  Are they large ones? Any other explanation seems highly unlikely. Even the bulky walker we packed for Chris does not eat up all available space.

As we drove down the Trans-Canada highway we marvelled at the Canadian scenery.  The beauty of Canada is stunning. Some friends have actually said to us that there is nothing to see between here (Steinbach) and the east coast.  This is also insane. It is not Canada that is boring. People who think that are boring. They are boring.

We saw rocks and trees and lakes in endless combinations of beauty are that are never repeated and are boring only to the boring.

The golden phragmites beside the Trans-Canada highway in some places were a gorgeous unique white gold. The leaves of trees were just starting to turn colour. That is what we were hoping for. We expect to be about 6 weeks on this trip, going right through the leaf season and we want to soak it all in.

One thing I found frustrating about this trip and I noticed it within about 2 hours of the trip.  That was that it is very difficult along the Trans-Canada Highway to stop and take photographs.  I had purchased a new camera recently, since I had accidentally smashed it earlier in the year in Arizona. I wanted to take a lot of photographs.  I was still learning how to use the camera. But there is very little room to stop and take photographs on the highway. It is basically illegal in most places. More importantly, Chris gets easily annoyed with me and my frequent stops. So I did my best not to make too many stops along the way.

As a result I have no photographs of the historic Winnipeg River.

I had taken a book along as sort of a guidebook. An unusual guidebook. It was Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, by Barbara Huck and had many interesting illustrations and photographs. Some of the photographs were taken by my friend, and great photographer,  Dennis Fast. The cover of the book invited us to “Discover the Highways that Opened a Continent.”  That is what I wanted to do.

At Kenora we crossed the historic Winnipeg River. Huck’s book had some interesting information on this river I had crossed many times:

Dropping from Lake of the Woods in the Canadian Shield into Lake Winnipeg at the edge of the Manitoba Lowlands, the voyageurs knew was a wild, beautiful waterway that traversed Earth’s most ancient mountains.  Eric Morse, historian and discriminating canoeist, called it “unquestionably the grandest and most beautiful river the Montreal Northmen saw on their whole journey from Lake Superior to Lake Athabasca.

This meant this was a fantastic river to cross in the first couple of hours of our journey.  What a great start. We were ready for adventures.

The book went on though in its description of this grand and beautiful river as she called it:

“Over its 225 kilometres length it drops 100 metres and was once a river of spectacular falls and rapids. Today, though tamed by eight dams along its length, parts of the waterway still invite even challenge, paddlers.”

 

What a pity. I love waterfalls and photographed many of them on this trip, but not the Winnipeg River. There were none to see from the highway. All gone in the dubious name of progress.  I have photographed the river on other occasions in many places, but not on this trip.

This also sums up our trip. The best of times the worst of times. We saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of Canada. We saw places of splendid beauty. We saw places of desolation.  we saw Canada rising and we saw Canada in sad decline.

I always consider such little islets in the Canadian shield to be the essence of Canada. I am not sure why.

After the trip was over, I thought Charles Dickens summed it up well in the first sentence of his book A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going the other way…”

That really summed up this crazy trip. This wonderful trip. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I should have thought about longer.

The idea for the trip arose when I retired from the practice of law. That process took a while.

I was slow to jump into retirement. 2013 I  reached the age of 65 years and decided to retire.  I gave formal notice to my partners in the firm, about 6 months before my 65^th birthday as I needed the time to finish my files and the partners needed to figure out what to do with all my clients.

I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. /When I returned from a 2 week holiday and returned to the file just to complete my file turnover, the firm offered me a position I had never considered—counsel to the firm. I had no idea what that meant. Neither did they. The idea was that I would stay in the firm, not retire and work mainly with helping other younger lawyers in the firm. To some degree I could work as much or as little as I wanted.

Frankly, it was a pretty good gig. I could work as much or as little (more or less) as I wanted. We agreed the firm could fire me at any time and I could quit without notice at any time.  Yet I was still working. After nearly 10 years of this I decided it was time to quite entirely. That is what I did at the beginning of 2023. I retired completely. I did not renew my license to practice law and was done with law. I had finished what I considered a great career, but it was time to turn to new adventures.

Now, in 2024, I had the time to do the things I always enjoyed doing.  Travelling was one of them. In the first year, 2023 Chris and I continued what we had been doing for about 9 years, namely spending 3 months in Arizona and a lot of time at our cottage at the lake.

This year we wanted to do something different. We decided to travel by car across the country! What a magnificent dream! What a dumb idea! Before we left my brother-in-law said we were too old for such a trip. He was probably right.

Starting out in Steinbach, approximately in the middle of the country, makes this tricky.  We decided to break up the trip into legs. First, we would travel to the east coast and back again. Really the distance of the country, in 6 weeks. We did not want to travel all the time. We rented rooms or homes  each for about a week, in 3 places in Nova Scotia—our favorite province.

Then, sadly,  my cousin Ernie Neufeld who had lived in the Ottawa area for most of his adult life, died suddenly. He was the cousin I had always been closest to. But we had grown apart on account of the vast distances between our residences. I wanted to go to his celebration of life in his last home town, Brockville, Ontario. It was right on the way. So it was a no-brainer, but it meant adding nearly a week to the trip. No problem, we thought. So we struck out on the road—a grand adventure. From the middle of the country to the east coast and back.  The second leg to be made from the centre of Canada to the far west coast back, would be done after Christmas. So, we hoped.

It turned out the plan was mad.  We returned home utterly exhausted.  We were forced to reconsider our plans. At least in part.