Friends and Family – North East America and Canada

Boston. After an early Saturday morning flight to Boston from Baltimore, Peter, an ol’ army commando buddy was waiting for us (airside) at the airport. He’d very kindly rearranged his schedule and returned overnight from San Francisco on a red-eye in order to put us up (and put up with us) for the weekend. Later in the morning, his son Thomas introduced us to the finer points of ice hockey (whilst Peter explained the rules to me), after which we went to Mass at the local church along with Thomas’s sister Elli and their mother Michelle, followed by an excellent dinner with them in the evening.

They all live in Andover, twenty miles north of Boston and with the warm weekend weather we walked from their house down into town along sleepy town roads where the cars creep along slowly giving way to pedestrians (since pavements are a rarity).

The houses have a characteristic New England style – they are all large, wooden, and individually different from their neighbours both in colour and design. Sunday found us stacking logs in preparation for the winter before heading off to a friend of Peter’s for a late BBQ lunch in Hew Hampshire.

The food and wine were a gastronomic delight – aided by Peter’s links to the wine trade, and the high quality meat and fish from the local family run supermarket, with whom he does business. Monday found us in Boston touring the Freedom Trail on foot.

The city is rightfully proud of its revolutionary past, with historical characters such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere (who is supposed to have placed two lanterns in the Old North Church and made the famous horse ride to warn those sympathetic to American independence that the British were making moves to capture their weapons) and Benjamin Franklin, the scientist, instrumental, amongst others, in the formulation of the declaration of independence. We had dinner with Peter on the waterfront, where Emily was introduced to the delights of raw oysters, before flying to Buffalo in preparation for crossing the border into Canada the next day.

Niagara Falls. After a shuttle from our hotel in Buffalo and a local bus ride, we were dropped off near Rainbow Bridge on the US side of Niagara Falls and crossed the border on foot over the bridge into Canada. The Falls came into view as we crossed and the closer we got the louder and more impressive they became. The US has the short straw when it comes to viewing Niagara Falls – they are best seen from the Canadian side. We walked up the side of the river, at the top edge of the gorge towards the Falls, towing our small(ish) cases behind us, but the day was pleasant if a little hot, and the walk provided excellent exercise and a spectacular view.

We lunched close by the edge – I sat on the railings, next to the edge taking in the vista, eating my hot dog close to where (we later heard) a Japanese tourist had fallen off a week before and been taken by the river to her untimely death. A most excellent hot dog, and our first meal in Canada.

We retraced our steps back along the river later and caught a Greyhound bus to Toronto about two hours away.

Toronto, Ontario. We spent nearly a week in Toronto with family – cousins of Emily first for a few days to the East in Brampton, and then cousins of mine for the weekend in Oshawa to the West.

Janice is Emily’s dad’s first cousin, and she and husband John, both retired, have lived near Toronto for 30 years. They have seen it change, with mixed feelings from a small almost British-colonial rural community into a multicultural, megacity that continues to grow along the banks of Lake Ontario. Janice and Emily have many similarities, not least in their conversation, and our time with them was very pleasant, particularly meeting both daughters, Alison and Caroline, and their young families – Emily’s second cousins.

John, an aeronautical engineer, is a keen cyclist in his 70s and thinks nothing of going out for two or three hours on his bike covering 50 to 60 kilometres – he used to do more but is slowing down a little he says. We said our fond farewells to them on the Friday and headed into Toronto by train for the day.

Rosemary, my cousin, lives north east of Toronto with her husband Ken and two daughters, Rachel and Kirsten. We were very well received into their spacious house near Whitby, complete with basement games room and swimming pool – the latter of which we made good use, since the weather was still hot enough despite the commencement of the Fall signalled by trees beginning to turn.

Rachel reminded me of my niece Jessica with her effervescent enthusiasm and ready laugh; an intelligent, hard working girl, she has ambitions to be a paediatrician, an interest brought on by her own childhood illness now thankfully resolved.

Kirsten, a quiet, pensive but equally intelligent teenager has ambitions to be a primary school teacher, in fact in England, and took an instant shine to Emily. On the Saturday we went to watch Rachel practice Ringette, a game played on an ice hockey rink but with a straight stick and small rubber ring. The trick is to skewer the ring, skate along the ice with it and pass or hurl it goal-wards. For someone with the skating skill of a blancmange this looked for me next to impossible, but Rachel looked unfathomably proficient at it. Our fun-filled weekend with Ken and Rosemary continued later with a trip up the CN Tower (until recently the highest building in the world), an exceptional excursion which offered an uninterrupted view of the city and lake, and, most disconcertingly, had ground facing windows on which one could stand (or in my case lie) whilst looking 1,136 ft down on antlike pedestrians bustling about below.

We followed this with an excellent ‘downtown’ dinner in a Thai restaurant with Rosemary’s twin sister Veronica, also an émigré, and husband Alan, along with Alan’s uncle and aunt, like us visiting from the UK. Kirsten joined us for Mass the next day at their local church and after brunch we went walking later in the local conservation area, Heber Down, whilst the kids did homework. With the extraordinary amount of development that appears to have occurred in recent years to create new suburbs or ‘divisions’ of Toronto it was reassuring to be able to find unspoilt walking woodland with greenery in the last flush of (northern hemisphere) summer.

The weekend was rounded off with a BBQ at Veronica’s house, 15 minutes away, where we were introduced to the delights of Alan’s culinary skill, and after a fond farewell on Monday we made tracks into Toronto to collect a hire car for the next phase of our ‘friends and family’ foray – into French speaking Canada.

Ottawa and Montreal. We broke up the 500 mile journey north east to Quebec City, where my university friend Julie resides, by stopping in the capital Ottawa and Montreal en route. Canada has two official languages, English and French, and the law requires that packaging such as food containers describe its contents in both. In English speaking Toronto, Ontario for instance all the information points had descriptions in French below the English, and in Ottawa, also in Ontario, day to day business in the (very impressive) Victorian government buildings on Parliament Hill are in both languages. This state of affairs, amongst other things, appears to have assuaged the independent spirited Quebecoise populous who have on a number of occasions come close to voting for independence from ‘British’ Canada, but always drawn short (though once in the Trudeau era with the tiniest of majorities against succession).

On entering Montreal however we found that the mustard doesn’t cut both ways and despite the law, most instructions and information sheets were in François with, rather challengingly, not a sign of ‘Anglais’ to be seen. This rather reminded me of how we in the UK follow every European dictate to the letter, with Yorkshire market stall holders being jailed with alacrity by officious local council inspectors for failing to show the weight of singular pieces of fruit in kilograms rather than pounds, compared to the infamous French custom for ignoring without exception, and with a simple shoulder shrug or Gallic guffaw, every bylaw to have oozed from the financially obese, hulking bureaucracy that is the Strasbourg-Brussels-centric European Parliament. British independence minded – moi? Ce n’est pas vrai. Putting all discrimination aside, Emily and I determined to speak Franglais for the remainder of our time in Quebec, to each other and the general public alike, i.e. we got into “we’re in France”-mode and thoroughly enjoyed observing French architecture and walking the cobbled streets of Montreal that are reminiscent of Paris.

Quebec City. Thursday of that week found us arriving in Quebec City to stay with Julie, her husband Paul and Imogen (age 7) who live on the L’Ile d’Orleans which sits in the middle of the Lawrence River – the outflow to the sea for all of the American/Canadian Great Lakes, and connected by a narrow and somewhat dilapidated narrow bridge. They live in a quaint island cottage that has centuries old wooden beams but many modern features – in part because three years before it had caught fire and nearly burned down, with the subsequent renovation adding many improvements – including modern electric wiring!

They thankfully, safely survived the incident and were, apparently mostly unaffected by it, having had to move to an alternate rented property for a couple of years during the rebuild. We were royally received by the family with both Paul (a geophysics professor at the University) and Julie (a medical Doctor now home-educating her daughter) sharing the cooking of some magnificent feasts over the next four evenings. Imogen, a charming, chatty and clearly intelligent young lady, took great delight in ballet dancing around the living room whilst engaging us in lively conversation.

The fact that she has a guinea pig and a rabbit immediately endeared her to Emily (who has two g-p’s and a rabbit at home being babysat by her mum Jane on Hayling Island).

Over the next few days we enjoyed a range of scenic adventures the first of which involved walking down into, up again and generally around the Montmorency Falls opposite our island bridge, rivalling Niagara for height if not dramatics – but better in some respects for the closer proximity with which one could approach.

On the Saturday, with Julie (et famille) we travelled up to L’Ile aux Coudres, another island 100kms north of theirs. En route the trees were beginning to display their Fall colours – tinges of yellows and browns that one sees in UK but also the bright reds for which the NE American area is famous; unfortunately we would miss the height of the display by a couple of weeks and had to satisfy ourselves with just the start of it. We crossed onto the island by car ferry, went for a very pleasant walk just before the rain started, had a bite to eat in a boulangerie and returned by ferry to the mainland – with a boat full of damp Canadian soldiers returning from a days exercising on the island. Around the corner from the island we stopped off in a quaint village called Baie St Paul.

Almost picture-postcard in looks, it was a combination of personalised art galleries, chocolateries (where we rested briefly!), and gift & craft shops, all with finely manicured visages, decorated in a timely way with Halloween paraphernalia – pumpkins and witches (including, briefly, my beautiful wife).

Emily’s favourite was the Donkey milk product shop – where all the products were made, yes you’ve guessed it, from crushed donkeys. On the return trip Emily and I dropped into St Anne de Beaupré – a large Cathedral-sized basilica that is a popular pilgrimage site for Catholics.

We arrived after the Saturday evening service when the church was deserted, very quiet and warm (after the wet and cold weather outside). We sat for a while in the central pews, drinking in the atmosphere, whilst off to one side, in the Eastern transept, a couple appeared to be standing very still at the small alter in silent contemplation. When they had not moved we began to suspect that all was not as we imagined and on closer inspection they turned out to be mannequins, a man having just risen from a wheel chair and walking with the aid of a stick in the direction of the altar, observed all the while by a woman and child, most likely his family.

It might have been nice to attend Mass there the next day but we had resolved whilst Imogen was at ballet practice to go with Julie to their church in Quebec as it afforded us the opportunity later to meet with some of their fellow parishioners for a pleasant coffee and chat. We enjoyed an excellent lunch afterwards with Paul and Julie in the local art museum before Emily and I went exploring in the Vieux-Quebec – not an easy task as it turned out due to the bitterly cold and windy weather. The place was bustling with two cruise ship loads of Japanese and Yorkshire tourists – and we were treated to well known Old City sites to interesting combinations of ‘ee by gum’ and ‘Ahh so’ or so it seemed.

We were sad to leave the L’Ile d’Orleans, and Julie and Paul’s excellent hospitality but Emily was determined to visit Yellowstone National Park - which if we were to fit it in before other distant commitments loomed later in October, would necessitate a quick return across part of Canada and the States. With this in mind we made the 500 mile return journey from Quebec City to Toronto in one fell swoop on the Monday, arriving at 6pm after 8 hours driving, but ready to return to the USA the next day to continue our onward journey and adventure in the mid-west.