House Wife

I’m no Martha Stewart. I consider myself a barely adequate and unenthusiastic housewife.

I don’t like cleaning, or polishing, or dusting all the knickknacks that one naturally collects over one’s lifetime. Putting out pretty plants that need tending, decorating for amusement just to take it down before the next occasion – I can do without that. I’m sure that makes me a terrible housewife.

It’s been six years since we sold our 5 bedroom house. We became free from house and yard responsibilities, traveled wherever we pleased, and the only cleaning and maintenance required was confined to 34’ feet of trailer.  I am a happy trailer-wife.

This year we are experimenting with staying a full winter season in Canada, staying in a farmhouse on the shores of Lake Ontario. 

It comes with accommodation for our Airstream, a lovely lane stretching back past the fields, and a scenic view overlooking the lake.

It is located in a friendly rural area, which means people drop by, often unexpected, at all times of the day. I quickly learned that I need to have tea and baked goods at the ready. As a result, I have gained weight. And its not that we’re eating more. At the trailer, people would often come over for campfires and happy hour, and indulge in snack foods and alcohol with us. I just didn’t realize how fattening tea could be.

Adapting to a temporary home does have some issues.  For the first little while, our feet were automatically searching for the pedal flush of the RV toilet. And it is disconcerting, first thing in the morning, when one is not quite awake, to come upon an unexpected full length mirror. Downright shocking, in fact. Especially after a full week of that sinful tea.

In a house that has more than 10 times the living space than we have grown accustomed to, we have a lot more storage space than we have had for many years. As a result, we have been buying in bulk during sales, gleefully shopping in Costco, and picking up larger sizes of supplies than we normally would have.

This means we are more likely to lose things. Or forget we bought them in the first place. I just hope we can use our stash up by the time we move on again. Especially the tea. We‘d better not have too much of that left over.

So far the experiment has gone well.  Hubby is happily involved in a massive project, located in another building on the property. He is completely gutting and renovating an old Airstream. His project keeps me happy, too. It means he’s not underfoot all day, but he is still nearby. 

And there are many amenities at the farmhouse that we have enjoyed: a laundry room, a huge flat screen TV, and a lovely woodstove to comfort us on cold evenings.

All this does not mean we want to stay stationary permanently. The opposite, in fact. We miss the excitement of having new places to explore, the comfort of being in our own little space, and the freedom to head off on adventures. We realize that we made the right choice in our lifestyle.

I love being a trailer-wife.

W

The Other Saskatchewan

I am vertically challenged.

Yes, I am physically short, but I also do not like being high up. I do my best to stay clear of standing on anything taller than my shoulders.  And don’t forget how short that is.

You would think that Saskatchewan would be an ideal place for me to hike. Everyone knows what the quintessential prairie province looks like, right? Flat.

No humps or bumps and definitely no cliffs or steep slopes.

So imagine my dismay when our daughter showed us the highlights of her province. High, being the operative word.

We camped at Buffalo Pound Provincial Park – as if there hadn’t been enough bison in our lives recently. But at least these hairy residents were tucked in behind tall fences, and observed at a distance.

This park is situated along a river, in the southern, and flatter, part of the province. But the river carved a few hills along its route. And it was these hills that we got to hike on.

Up and down we went, not a flat piece of earth anywhere. 

Nothing too terribly steep, but at one spot at least, the downward slope was such that I worried if I slipped, I wouldn't stop rolling until tomorrow.

Hubby and daughter were kind enough to leave me behind for the next hike. Castle Butte is a large hill of sandstone and clay, but it is craggy and steep, and I’m glad I stayed home in my cozy tent. For some reason, they seemed to enjoy the scramble to the top and the view of their tiny car at the bottom. I find it ironic that they had to drive over flat farmland to get to it.

Being in the prairies, it meant that when the weather changed, we could see it coming and act accordingly.  In other words, head for the car and keep ourselves dry. 

In fact, we headed for the underground. 

Someone in the city of Moose Jaw was smart enough to realize that outdoors was not a place to be when winter hits Saskatchewan. So, many years ago, under the downtown of the city they created tunnels to get across the streets and from one building to another. 

There is now a company that demonstrates what else the tunnels were used for in the past decades. They have recreated an old Chinese laundry, with bunkhouses and workrooms, and carefully explained the prejudice faced by these immigrants in the late 1800’s. Then they showcased the gangster life of the 20’s when Al Capone took the train from Chicago. They had hidden doors and staircases, and a tunnel behind a fireplace. 

Now, this is where I'm comfortable! 

I didn’t even have to duck under the doorways.

W

Scat

As an individual, I am not normally into scatology. But while hiking in the wilderness, it really is the best way to know what creatures are around that have their eyes on you.

At Elk Island National Park in Alberta we shared the woods with, surprisingly enough, not elk but plains bison. These big animals are almost as numerous as the mosquitoes. We hiked 21 km over 2 days and you really had to watch where you put your feet.

It was like taking a stroll in a cow field. With really big cows. But we knew for sure that they were around us.

Our first sighting of bison was along the road, a single bull grazing by the campground entrance.

Whether in a herd or alone, these park kings are totally unconcerned about anyone else’s agenda. They will stroll across the road at will, and regardless of traffic will get to the other side and immediately decide to go back again. They can do this for hours, occasionally stopping mid road to stare down an impatient little Honda. 

Even inside our truck we found it intimidating when one large patriarch chose the middle of our lane and walked straight toward us. All we could do was stop and wait and hope he swerved.

We were a lot less protected on our last encounter. Walking along a trail, dodging bison pies, we met a bull coming in the opposite direction. All three of us stopped, apprehensive of each other. After raising his snout to catch our scent, Daddy Bison continued on, confident that he had the right of way. We graciously allowed this, scrambling uphill into the raspberry bushes.

Bison weren’t the only ones we shared the woods with. As the trail wound among the numerous berry bushes, we saw lots of other droppings. Bear, for sure.

Scat!

I mean, Shoo!

W

Camping

Camping is such an imprecise term. It can mean a tent in the wilderness with a cold stream for bathing and a bush for a potty. 

Or spending vacation time in a 45’ motorhome with an inside shower, 50 inch TV, and electric fireplace.

So, if someone in a house uses a motorhome for their time away, what does a person living full time in a trailer do? 

Go tenting, of course. Have yourself a primitive experience that will make you appreciate what you come home to.

It was past time to get away from it all. We were tired of sitting still, having been in our seasonal site since May. We locked the trailer and lit out at warp speed. Twelve hours and more than 900 kms later we stopped for the night in Michigan. 

We found a regional campground that we had stopped at before, in a trailer. A regional campground, like state and national parks, are very fair minded. Whether in a tent or trailer, your site is the same as everyone else’s. It was late, and still warm, so we threw up our screened shelter, inflated our air mattress, and crawled into our sleeping bags.

We should have taken the time to erect a proper tent. The mosquitoes found their way into the shelter. And the air found its way out of the air mattress.  Not a good start, but not discouraging, either. 

Hey, we had real flush toilets close by!

Off we went to our next stop. We skimmed the corner of Indiana and blew right through Illinois. Our goal for the second night was to be in Iowa, a state we had not yet stayed in. New places are exciting. 

We drove past farmland and low, rolling hills to find a state park near our route.

A Wal-Mart along the way had provided us with a new air mattress, so we eagerly put up our real tent. And would have inflated the mattress if we had a pump that fit. I considered blowing it up manually, but after a couple of breaths realized that it would take all night. So again, we slept on our old self-deflating mattress. At least the mosquitoes kept out of the tent.

Wal-Mart was our new best friend. We bought a 12V inflator and crossed our fingers for the coming night. That one was spent at a small campground just outside the South Dakota Badlands.

Our tent site happened to be beside the tallest pole in the area. Just before we retired, we could see this massive thunder storm cloud advancing over the plains towards us, lightning flashing.  Too late to do anything but tighten all the ropes and pegs, we rolled into the tent, onto a still inflated mattress.  The rain came down so hard; it was as if someone had dumped a bucket over top of us. It took about half an hour to recognize that our tent was waterproof, and our mattress was firm. We relaxed, and fell asleep to the pounding of water over our heads.

Amazingly, the hot and dry prairie wind overnight dried our tent fly completely by the next morning. So when we woke up and saw another storm coming, we packed up in record time. However, we weren’t in any hurry to hit the interstate. We were on the edge of the Badlands, an area where the grasslands gave way suddenly to a deep river valley. Erosion along the edge created a steep section of canyons and gullies of loose rock that would have been very difficult to cross in the days of foot and horse travel, hence its name.

The road through the  Badlands National Park loops up and down along the edge, giving you spectacular views of the grasslands along the top and the colourful strata of the cliffs and canyon edges below. After driving the 30 miles of scenic road we hopped back on the highway, headed west to see Mount Rushmore.

It was not a good time to visit this popular tourist area. On a Saturday afternoon in the summer, the traffic is very heavy going through the mountain roads to this monument. Fortunately, we were able to get a good look at the carvings from the road, and did not need to actually enter the park area around it. A quick turnaround got us heading back to the interstate and on our way.

Once we crossed into Montana, we decided to view the countryside from roads less traveled. We got off the interstate so that we could see more of this “big sky country”. We drove long, long country roads that bordered expansive ranches and interesting geography. These 2 lane roads were mostly straight and empty. We could set the cruise control at 110 kph, which was under the legal speed limit, and cover many miles in a fairly fast time. 

The roads gradually climbed increasingly higher hills, creating a roller coaster effect of going up steep hills and down long, deep slopes. I would have thrown my hands up in the air and yelled “Wheeeee!”, if I had felt at all comfortable doing that speed on a 2 lane country road being watched speculatively by the mule deer standing alongside. And when those straight roads started winding through a low mountain pass in the western side, with no lessening of the speed limit, I was ready to get back onto the wider interstate.

There were many questions at the Canadian border about why we would have driven through the States from Ontario to Alberta just to catch a flight to San Francisco. However, they did let these suspicious characters back into their own country. 

Our last tenting spot was in a private campground in Fort Macleod, Alberta.

Now, in many campground “resorts”, the tent camping area is often hidden in the back acreage. It has always puzzled me that the big RVs, with their TVs and self contained bathrooms, are placed close to all the amenities – the full bathroom and showers, and the games room with the TV. While the second class citizens in the tents have the smelly pit toilet and no sink to wash in.

But hey, I’m not complaining. We chose this vacation style.

And we chose this town because of its close proximity to our last sightseeing goal for this leg of the trip. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is just outside of town, on a ridge with steep cliffs. I always thought the name referred to the buffalo that leapt to their deaths, but instead it was named for a curious young brave who wanted to stand under the cliffs to watch the event unfold. Obviously, he didn’t survive the show.

I was also expecting to see deep piles of bones at the bottom of the ridge. In fact, this site is so old, and had been used over so many thousands of years, that the bones are buried along with other dirt, rocks, and plant material that had also fallen from the cliff. Scientific digs have proven that the bottom of the jump contains 36 feet of bones, rubble, and artifacts. So while what we see today are grass covered mounds under a short cliff, hundreds of years before this there stood a tall and deadly precipice.

That was our 5 day camping trip. It wasn’t high end camping, but at least I never had to pee in the bush. The next leg of our vacation will be at hotels and family homes, with hot showers that aren’t costly and timed, and clean flush toilets. A little bit of luxury for a couple of weeks at least. We don’t want to get tired of camping.

We will have to do it on the way home.

W

Summer Home

May is always a marvelous month.

Lilacs bloom and the sun grows stronger. 

People venture outdoors and even allow some skin to peek out of the swaddled layers. 

At least until the mosquitoes show up.

Wildlife comes out of their winter hideaways, sometimes with little ones in tow.

We found these curious fox kits peeking out of a driveway culvert.

And May is when campgrounds open up in the Canadian north.

People work hard all year long to remove bugs, dirt, and darkness from their homes. Then comes the summer and they spend their weekends camping. 

In the bugs, dirt, and darkness.

For us, it’s a lifestyle choice. Not that I thoroughly embrace bugs, dirt, or darkness, but I have learned to contain my cleansing efforts to the 34 feet that I reside in, and let the outside live on in relative peace. And to enjoy, well, maybe not the bugs and dirt, but for sure the darkness of night outside of urban lighting. 

Providing there are no bears in the area. My empathy with the universe only goes so far.

Our regular campground in Adolphustown opens its gates and lets us move into our seasonal site once the snow is gone and the ground is dry.  All at once our lifestyle changes from the nomadic to the stationary.  We have even put up semi-permanent structures in the form of a deck and a shed tent since we will be staying put for the next 5 months,

Well, actually it is not us that is staying put, but the trailer. Hubby and I still find time to roam around the countryside, visiting family and going on short trips. 

We wouldn’t want to get too used to being in one spot.

But since our beloved Airstream will be rooted for the summer, we’ve been busy making our “yard” – a good sized campsite – look nice. Hubby buried the water and power cables, I raked and reseeded some spots on the grass that had died off last year.  Foolish, I know.  I’m just going to have to mow it later. 

And hubby put up a couple of bird feeders to invite feathered friends to come closer to our trailer and truck. That I am going to have to wash later.

Hum, there seems to be a theme here.

Maybe that’s why I’m so pleased that hubby has a project this year. A 1978 Airstream for him to gut and renovate and keep him busy for the foreseeable future.

So I can enjoy our deck and yard in peace. With the bugs and dirt and darkness.

W

Tenting

When we crossed the border into Canada, it was sunny and very warm. What a great welcome!

But it didn’t last. In true Canadian style, the rain and cold came back, and even hail and snow flurries. I guess it can’t let us forget what we tried to get away from in the winter time.

But because the fickle ways of Canadian nature means that winter could return for some last blasts anytime before the end of May, open campgrounds are scarce. And even the open ones rarely let you hook up to water. You only let the water connections freeze solid once before you realize that it’s easier just to shut the whole system down.

We were very lucky to find a campground that would let us stay for a week just north of Peterborough. 

It was made clear, however, that we would have no services. No electricity or water would be provided. 

In other words, we would be sitting in a great big aluminum tent. On wheels.

Over the years, hubby and I have done a great deal of tenting. When we were young, we even enjoyed it.  

Sleeping on the cold, hard ground, and warming yourself on a log so close to the campfire that your shoes melted was fun in those days.

Bathrooms with walls were an adventure best enjoyed quickly. And in those days, we could.

Now, we are sitting in our aluminum “tent”, on a cold, snowy day. Snow is building up along the truck windows. 

The trees are bare and rattling in the wind. What birds are here are puffed up against the cold. 

It would be a perfectly miserable time to be outdoors.

But we’re not. 

I am sitting comfortably on my couch, with the heat on. 

There is electricity from the battery to run the furnace, the fridge, and the lights. We have just finished breakfast cooked indoors, and eaten indoors.

 I have used my warm indoor bathroom to brush my teeth and wash up with water from our holding tank.

Best.  Tent.  Ever.

W

A Monumental Small Town

We have just come from Washington DC, a very large city, with numerous monuments and statues strewn throughout its environs. They seemed to be everywhere, but in fact there can be a good mile or two between some of these special places.

Not so for Gettysburg. In a rectangular area of 3 by 5 miles, there are over 1,400 monuments, statues, and plaques.

This little town was the spot where two armies met and had a small disagreement. The resolving of this argument left about 51,000 men dead or wounded – all of them around or within the town that only had a population of 2,500.

The town is larger now, thanks to a bustling tourist industry. It has roads specially designed to carry cars and buses in a pattern built to display the most number of monuments in the most efficient manner and still not disturb the townspeople’s lives.

Most people drive or take a tour bus, but because the area of interest is small, there are other ways of getting around to see everything. There are bicycle tours, horseback tours, and segway tours. I would even suggest walking except that there are no sidewalks outside of town. Besides, you do enough trudging over fields and rocks to get to some of the statues that you really don’t need the extra exercise.

The statues are in places depicting where certain generals or other important people died or did an act worthy of noting.  Since battles do not stay nicely on the clean roads and paved drives, you sometimes find these works of art in remote areas, like right in the middle of fields or hidden in the woods. 

Monuments and plaques are put where a regiment held its ground, with smaller stones on either side showing the right and left flanks or the rear. Really, you can literally trip over them, there are so many.

And then there are the cenotaphs, often huge monuments to the soldiers of each state. These can be graphic or whimsical, ornate or simple.

Interpretive signs will detail for you all the tactical strategies that the officers used as the battle raged. And also any errors in those strategies, and failures that occurred due to mistakes made. In short, far more than I had ever wanted to know about war.

It is admirable that the government has kept most of the battlefield out of private hands, and with buildings and fences just as they were during the battle in 1863. It gives you an idea of what obstacles the infantry and cavalry faced during advances, charges, and retreats.

They have also set up the cannons where they would have stood during battle, aimed out over the fields and hills.

The only thing “new” is the cemetery. It was created a few months later, to give the Union soldiers a proper place to be buried. The poor Confederates were shipped home or buried in a group. 

But even the “winning” team had so many unidentified dead, that most of the stones in the cemetery just have the word “Unknown” on it, or sometimes only a number.

Ok, we all know the words, so let’s sing it together:

 

War, huh,

Good God, y’all

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’……

W

A Slice of Cherry Pie

It was the best time to be there, it was the worst time to be there. (Apologies to Charles Dickens)

We came to Washington DC to see the cherry blossoms, and indeed, it was the perfect time to see the cherry trees bloom. 

We watched as the trees started out bare, with no leaves and barely the nubs of buds. Despite optomistic newspaper predictions, we thought we had misjudged our timing.

But over the span of just one week, clusters of these tiny, fragile blossoms began appearing on the stark branches. A tree that we had not even noticed earlier in the week would be bursting with petals by the time we left.

 But we learned an important lesson.

In the north, March break is in March. In much of the States, it seems, Spring Break can be the second week of April. So, in our northern ignorance, we visited Washington, DC at the height of its tourist season.

We experienced masses of blooms and masses of people. Simultaneously.

But although we came for the cherry blossoms, we stayed for the man made attractions.

When it comes to monuments, the capital of the United States does it right.

Every day, for six days straight, we journeyed into the core of the city to see something amazing. 

Considering that we used transit each day, and that it cost us a small fortune over the week, it was a good thing that all the museums and monuments were free to the public.

We started out with the obvious. We walked the National Mall to see the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and the White House.

The Mall is just a big long park, with grass and geometrically shaped ponds. It appears to be well used by walkers, picnickers, kite flyers, and bike and segway riders.

Well used, and well loved, much like this Charlie Brown kite tree that we found along the way. 

Kites on the top, kids on the bottom. Actually, an apt description of the National Mall, too.

The Lincoln Memorial is breathtaking. Right from the moment you climb the long, long set of stairs, up to the time you see the much-larger-than-life statue of Abraham Lincoln, surrounded by his most famous speeches. 

You recover your breath just in time to go back down again. And those steps are steep going back down.

We spent a day at the Arlington Cemetery and saw the Iwo Jima Memorial, surprisingly set outside of the cemetery grounds.

Perhaps it is only proper that they saved the space for the soldiers that deserve it.

During a night tour we saw the monument of Martin Luther King, Jr.  With 2 large granite rocks framing the entrance, and the sculpture of King carved out of the matching third, it was just as impressive as if we had seen it in full light.

Then there were the building tours. The Capitol building tour was incredibly efficient, even with the other 15,000 people that toured it the same day we did. 

The 5 pubs that we checked out during the week were not nearly as crowded, but just as satisfying.

Although we stepped into four different museums of the Smithsonian complex, it was the first that was most memorable. The Air and Space Museum was packed stem to stern. It was the perfect time for the power to go out, and for the authorities to declare an evacuation of the building. It gave us time to have a drink at a pub nearby, and to return to find much more elbow room than before. They should have done that all week.

We didn’t have nearly enough time to properly view the museums. We got a taste of some, but plan to come back so that we can really savour them again at a slower pace and discover several more.

Just like the cherries. A slice is not enough when there is a whole pie to enjoy. W