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 65th 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.