Home from Nova Scotia

October  7.

Flying in an airplane for hours is not my idea of a fun way to spend my time, but that is what I did today. I have been vacationing in Nova Scotia, Canada for the past week with  my sister and  her husband, Stu. He is one great guy. My going along makes his job harder. He makes our travel plans with airline reservations and rental car. He makes sure our luggage gets where it needs to be  and that we all get to the gate where we need to board.

On a trip out of the country we must have our passport up to date and be sure our bags don't contain anything that is not allowed. Since I don't fly that often, I need instructions and some help to be sure I don't cause any trouble with the security folks. Gay, my sister, knows the rules and teaches me what to do. 

View of Bras d'or Lake from restaurant in Baddeck where I ate fresh halibut fried to perfection. Seafood chowder is a  popular item on almost all menus. I had scallops, fish, and a whole lobster during my week there.

Our trip began in Atlanta at the busiest airport in the world. We flew to Toronto, Canada where we had an hour and a half to connect to our flight that took us to  Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was unanimous among the three of us. Toronto airport is not very well organized. 

We had to go through immigration so we stood in line for a half hour until an airline employee came by and asked if anyone needed to  make a connecting flight. Once she realized that we were going to be late, she rushed us along and we made our flight, barely. 

Once we arrived in Halifax and loaded into our rental car, we drove to a hotel for the night. That was when I began my love affair with Canadians. No one seemed surprised when I asked for a chemical free room with no scented products. Unlike American hotels where the artificial smell of chemical fragrance hits me like a brick to the head, the Canadian hotel had no odor at all. My room was very clean and had not been sprayed with "air freshener" so I slept well. 

I remembered there was a hospital in Halifax for those with chemical sensitivities such as I live with. Throughout the week we were all impressed with the cleanliness of the house we rented and the places we visited, while none of  them smelled of  synthetic scents. The ALTA hotel at the Halifax airport where we stayed Monday night, a  modern futuristic building, had no odors in the elevators or hallways, nor in our rooms. We were told that only sanitizers were used in the rooms, not artificial fragrances to cover smells. I could breathe safely.

As I have felt in the past when visiting Canada, I hope, if  I come back in another life, I come back to live in Canada, preferably in the Canadian Rockies or in Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. 

We stayed in a rural area of Cape Breton Island, above Baddeck in a house right on the water. At night I opened my window to hear the waves lapping on the rugged shore. Far over the water we could  see a blinking lighthouse The only sound other than the waves was the wind whistling around the  corners. The only light was the moon streaming across the black expanse of lake. 

The house had beds and a bath in the loft where sun spilled in through a skylight. The entire living and dining area looked out through floor to ceiling windows giving a view of endless water that opened to the Atlantic Ocean. My bedroom on the first floor held a most comfortable bed that begged me to climb in each night and held me captive in  the morning even after I woke up.

Here I am under an apple tree, little green apples all over the ground, bright flowers bloomed all over the place, in pots and wild along the roadside. 

If I could have, I would  have stayed another week or a month. The peacefulness of that  place and the friendly people we met in restaurants and shops convinced me that those who make their home on this island are very lucky folks. Though the economy is  not too good in that far north country, they enjoy life by making and listening to their own kind of music, Gaelic or Celtic, made with piano, guitar, and fiddle. The fiddle is king and the kids learn to play when they are very young. I could not keep my feet still as a pretty dark haired girl and a boy entertained at the Red Shoe Pub. Those memories will stay with me for a long time.

We spent an hour at the Glendora Distillery where these men made mighty fine music. The fiddler first played piano. The musicians pound the floor with one foot, hard, no matter what instrument they play. It seems to be an important part of this kind of music.

Click on this link to hear some Cape Breton Fiddle music .

Let me introduce you to Kathy

I have a new blog URL listed on the sidebar under Great Places to Visit. The blogger is Kathy Rhodes who edited a great southern themed online journal, Muscadine Lines; a Southern Journal, until she ended that venture last year.

I was happy to have a couple of my pieces accepted by Kathy.

You can read them here:
http://www.asouthernjournal.com/Ezine/Archives/2009/2009v27beall.html
http://www.asouthernjournal.com/Ezine/Archives/2011/2011v36beall.html
I see where we can order a copy of the anthology of all authors who have been published on Muscadine Lines. My work is in that book.

Kathy writes about a trip she is on similar to the one I call the cruise from Hell a couple of years ago. I went with my sister and brother in law on a cruise that would take us up the New England coast and on to New Brunswick Canada and to Nova Scotia. It would have been a dream trip except I became ill standing in line for hours waiting to get on the ship. The computers were down.

And, on the ship there was a perfume shop that sprayed the crew members each morning with "fragrance of the day" so the entire inside of the ship was polluted with chemicals that I had to breathe. One day I'll write more about all that. But Kathy is enjoying her trip and I'm happy for her. 

Reading Kathy's post today reminded me we did have a couple of days when I was able to leave the ship and enjoy the fabulous countryside. I still go back in my mind to the drive above Fundy Bay and along the shoreline dotted with white houses and buildings that begged to be subjects for a large painting.

I learned also that Kathy lost her husband, Charlie, five years ago June 27.  So she and I have much in common. The anniversary of Barry's death is July 21. She has written a memoir,
Remember the Dragonflies, which she tells about on her blog. I want to read it. 

Visit Kathy at /http://kathyrhodes.wordpress.com/

On the Road in St. John and St. Martins - Canada

In a rented car we drove north from St. John, a town on the coast of the province of New Brunswick. What a sense of freedom - climbing into an automobile and driving when and where we wanted. My feeling on this cruise was that of an inmate in a huge prison  - over 2000 of us, herded this way and that, under the control of a Filipino army, but once our feet hit solid ground, we were free for the day. This was to be one of my favorite shore excursions and my last one for two days because I came down with a flu-like virus.
Thanks to the advice of a woman we met in Jere's family restaurant, we traveled east from St. Martins and discovered the most scenic drive of the entire trip. Tall dark fir trees covered the rising shoreline as we traversed the Fundy Trail, a private non-profit project with carefully placed pull-outs to catch the best views of the huge waves, white-capped and lapping the empty beaches far below us.
Overcast skies threatened rain and some sprinkles on my Nikon lens show in these photos, but I had to capture these memories.

A Place of Beauty in New Brunswick, Canada



From high above the Bay of Fundy where the river runs into the ocean.

We did not know that a boat and its crew had been reported lost in the bay while we enjoyed the spectacular view.


The clouds tempt me to grab a paint brush and capture this scene on canvas,
but the camera does a much better job. I fell in love with this place.




The skies have it today. They change the color of the water, the atmosphere and mood.

Canada is a country with a vast difference in landscapes from east to west. My all time favorite place I have been is the western part of Canada, the Canadian Rockies, but now I've been to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and fallen in love with the countryside of these provinces. We disembarked the ship at St. John and took a car up along the north eastern coastline of New Brunswick toward St. Martins. After stopping in Jere's Family restaurant for lunch of lobster rolls and excellent seafood chowder, we were told by a friendly customer to drive up the Fundy Trail since our time was limited. She said we would see fantastic views.
She was so right. I was captivated by the sky, overcast and gray which reflected on the water turned a turbulent dark pewter shade. I felt Barry there telling me how to shoot to get the best picture. And, I heard him say when the rain came, "don't get the camera wet."
So, from within the car, I shot a few more pictures but nothing could capture the sheer beauty of the cliffs, the bay and the wild sky.
We looked at brochures for rentals and discussed a future vacation in a cottage there, but secretly we knew we would not be back this way again.

Ottawa River Cruise in 2006

Glenda With

Captain Terry of St. Lawrence Cruise Line

October 10, 2006, on the Ottawa River in Canada, Barry took this photo of a beautiful schooner passing by.


This was one of my favorite vacations. Only 45 people on board a river boat and we stopped at interesting towns and cities along the river before going through several locks and then into the St. Lawrence Seaway.
We traveled for seven days on the water.


Scenery was beautiful. The people on the boat were fun to talk with. We had a couple of Brits, a few Americans but most were Canadians, the nicest folks I've ever met. The small crew met our every need. Meals served by attentive waitresses were tasty and plentiful.


I hope to do another river boat cruise next year. We want to try the Snake river this time in the far NW part of the U.S.