Quebec to New Hampshire

Drove south out of Quebec before 9 a.m. this morning, into Vermont, down I-89.  Got off on hwy 104, looking for Green Mountains, maple syrup, the "real" Vermont and, apparently, trees.  Glad to say, we found all.  Had a great day, stayed ahead of the rain, or came to places that it had happened but not on us.  The land was beautiful, the mountains and rivers, the people both friendly and not, but altogether Vermont is lovely.  Morristown and St. Johnsbury in particular.  We happened across Fairfax early in the day and found something we didn't expect:

Crossed into New Hampshire at Lancaster and we're still here, having stopped the day early.

From Drain, earlier today:

"Canada seems like a beautiful country of natural wonders."

Absolutely.  It's why Tamara and I undertook this odyssey to begin with.  Canada is beautiful because it's incomprehensibly large.  Cities of more than a hundred thousand people are very few and far between, so that seeing a sign that the next such city is 735 km away is normal.  This allows parts to lack internet and phone service completely, even on the main highway between such cities.  We didn't encounter this in the prairies, where there are many small villages serving as farming residences or service centres, but in northern Ontario, "no service" on phone and internet still happens.  We were cut off by entering a non-service zone while making a reservation at one point.  We even found a dead zone like this within 150 km of Ottawa, the country's capital.

All this "nothing" means some spectacular scenery, some of which I've tried to photograph to no avail.  In reality, this enormous shelf of mountains looks fantastic, but in a flat picture it's nothing.  The scenery is unphotographical.  This dramatic cliff?  Here are ten like it.  This idyllic lake?  Here are 20 others.  Hundreds have no civilisation at all upon them; others have a small, quaint, homespun campground clinging to a tiny corner of it, making me remember campgrounds like it from my youth.  But while mine are gone, gobbled up by commercialism, these are still here, on the fringes of a real wilderness.  Each has yet the power to hold the memories of a whole generation to come.

We shall see what happens in the next few decades.  Canada's weather is more severe than America's.  It's summer now, but much of where we're travelling would be impassable in winter.  And even if the winter's are mitigated in the next few decades, it's made clear by this summer that the amount of wood there is to burn in Canada is enough to drive human beings back south for at least a generation.  Canada is not a refuge for people suffering the dangers of climate change.  People ought to know.

We've been checking maps for particulates, looking for fires as we've come east, and so far, we've been lucky.  Don't know about the way back, do we?

In the meanwhile, we're off into Maine tomorrow, then the Maritimes.  We were going to Newfoundland, but we've had to give up that dream.  With the distance between where the ferry lets us off on the island and St. John's, the cost of the ferry, the cost of hotel rooms, the cost of gas, we probably can't do that leg of the trip without an exhorbitant cost, so we've given in on it.  Newfoundland just isn't that pretty.  We've already seen wilderness.

There was a disaster in Nova Scotia that happened last week, that we missed.  Hopefully, that won't happen again in the next few days.

Just saying that alongside the beauty of Canada, there's enormous danger, too.  We've taken measures, we're able to get help if we need it, even in "dead" spots, as there are always other cars, and this is Canada.  Because of the weather, because of the danger, we don't care half as much about what we say to each other, as we care about being there for each other.

So we'll be fine.  If you come to Canada to visit, however, ask questions, take precautions, be equipped and most of all, be friendly.  We all need each other to get by.