I couldn’t get a campground any closer than 25 minutes south of downtown Ottawa at Camp Hither in South Gloucester.  It was perfectly nice, but more of a motel than a hotel, if you know what I mean.  I took an Uber into town and had a lovely day of art galleries, museums, a walk along the canal past all the locks, and a wonderful (and slightly winey) lunch at Aiana, a ‘Canadiana terroir’ restaurant.  I had the venison, and that, along with the midday wine, made an afternoon nap back at the campground mandatory.  Only regret – I had wanted to do a canal cruise but the timing just wouldn’t work.  Note: a lot more homeless than I had expected.

I did my ‘maiden voyage’ with Scout, Gaspé with LL, and Rockwood with JK – now it’s my first truly solo trip.  Off to eastern Ontario and Georgian Bay, staying in KOAs, private parks, and Harvest Hosts (one is a gin distillery).   A major concern with Class A and Class C motorhome travel is: parking in town.  This isn’t like when my family would park the travel trailer at the campsite, unhitch the car, and drive off to restaurants, beaches, and tourist sites. No, my dwelling comes with me, and it’s cumbersome.

As part of my planning, I asked Copilot: Please list good parking places for my huge motorhome, that are easy parking and are convenient to access the centre of the following towns: Peterborough, Perth, Ottawa, and Parry Sound.  Its reply was both amusing and very helpful: Got it — you’re looking for practical “where can I park a 27-ft rig and still walk into town” suggestions. Here are reliable options in each of the towns you mentioned, focusing on larger surface lots that don’t feel tight.  So friendly, so helpful, so chatty – but it does take getting used to.

Peterborough has a lovely campground right in town, with walking trails to the lift lock, the Canoe Museum, and into town.  The Canoe Museum was excellent!  I cannot recommend it enough.  I was disappointed that the lift lock museum wasn’t open – I headed on to Peterborough’s Heritage Museum, which was okay, not the best small town museum I’ve visited, but fine.

My friend & neighbour Jodi would love to try out my motorhome and see how her aggressive dog Brinn would handle travelling.  Three days at Rockwood (30 minutes form home) should tell us all we need to know. 

I love Rockwood – I used to canoe here with my friend’s kids.  We got a great site, which I was able to back into, no help from anyone – quite proud of that accomplishment.

Lovely hiking trails, tranquil setting (well, you can occasionally hear the cars on Hwy 7 and the train at the level crossing), and only 45 minutes to Elora, St Jacob’s, & Elmira.

Jodi took Brinn home each day while we sightsee’ed (sightsaw?) and picked her up each afternoon.  I thought she did very well while in the park – she may have scared away a few people (and dogs) with her bark, but I htink that’s a good thing. And it was a nice three days.

I’ve booked the RV in at Heidi’s for a series of repairs.  But it will have to stay overnight.  I’m discovering the major drawback in purchasing a vehicle from a dealership 90+ minutes away.  But I have a cunning plan – a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel (IYKYK).  My friends from Timmins are driving down to Milton on Friday, passing right by Heidi’s.  I’ll drop the RV off in the morning, spend a couple of hours in the waiting room reading, and catch a ride home with them.  Perfect.

Stopped at Tim’s on the way up to Heidi’s and picked up some tim-bits for the staff – that was a big hit!  They weren’t going to be able to look at it that day, but that was fine, I already knew that.  What I had miscalculated was when my friends would be arriving – I had just assumed that people driving from Timmins to Milton (about 8 hours) would leave before 10am.  But no, they didn’t text that they were leaving until after noon, so I was at Heidi’s from 10:30am to 6pm.  But, it turned out that that worked out very much in my favour.  The combination of bringing donuts, chatting up the service staff, and showing complete patience whilst waiting meant that the wonderful Tina cajoled/coerced the mechanic to at least take a look at my rig and walked me through every repair required.  He showed me how to re-set my generator and acknowledged every single one of my teeny-tiny requests.   I really do love the service team at Heidi’s.

I wish I could say the same of the staff at the Heidi’s campground.  Because the Service Centre closed at 5 and my ride wasn’t arriving until after 6, Tina suggested I go and wait at the attached campground; just tell the staff what I was doing and they’d let me sit by the pool.  Oh, no, they would not.  This was my third set of interactions with the campground staff, and all I can say is, they are not a pleasant bunch.  (Maybe not happy in their jobs?)  Anyhoo, I was welcome to sit on the bench out front, if I had to.  Lovely.

Edit: The RV came back, all nice and healthy.  Every break fixed, every squeak gone.  Yay. But I still have to arrange undercoating and sealant.

This motorhome, brand-spankin’ new, has bugs.  I’ve started a list of all the repairs I want done.  The generator, a sticky slide-out, broken clasps, unstable passenger seat (it was most disconcerting when I took a corner, and LL’s seat suddenly shoved back and swung around 130° so she was facing the dining table behind me!), and a broken closet railing.  We refer to this list as the RV F*#% Up List.  It’s getting longer.  Oh dear.

We were getting a little tired of the sheer amount of driving we were doing, especially in the mountains.  So, map, guide book, and cell phone in hand, we’ve re-arranged the last few days of our trip.  Less rural southern Quebec, more Quebec City, and home a day early.  KOA Lévis, we’re coming back! Now we had two more days in Quebec City.  We booked a Michelin restaurant – Légende, which had Michelin-worthy food, but maybe not Michelin service or ambiance? Still very good service, but ‘Michelin’ means it should be a cut above.  However, I’d still recommend it to anyone going to Quebec.  We wandered neighbourhoods, asking anyone local where they would recommend moving to.  We checked out real estate offices, looking at what was available.  And we shopped.  Again.  The sales clerk in Le Mouton Blanc actually hugged us good-bye as we left, that’s how much we’d spent there over three separate visits!

Oh, and, LL has decided to move here. Really.

I’m not a cat person.  I’m constantly fascinated by cat-owners who, when asked about the scratches on their arms or neck, say, ‘oh, Buttons did that this morning, the naughty thing.’  Who wants a pet that will attack?  I mean, the worst thing Scout ever did to me was throw up on my shoes – and I like to think that wasn’t intentional.  But my friend LL has the most easy-going, chill-est, most laid-back cat, Safiya.  Safiya RV’ed across Canada and the US in 2022/23 and is quite the seasoned camper. 

But, Safiya has one flaw: if there is a place you DON’T want her to be, that’s where she’ll go.  You’d prefer that she not ride on top of the slide-out, for fear of her either being flung to the floor at a sudden stop, or caught in the gears as the slide-out is moved?  Too bad.  You don’t want her crawling beneath the gas pedal because you can’t get her out and you’re afraid to start the engine?  Too bad.  And you really don’t want her climbing into the hole under the bed slide-out in case she gets stuck and can’t be retrieved?  Too bad. 

But all of that aside, she’s a great traveller, and could almost make me a cat person.  Almost.

You expect differences when you travel from province to province.  And not just terrain.  Obviously there are language differences, differing levels of multi-ethnicity, different traffic signage, and so on.  You also expect certain consistencies across Canada – for example, most Canadians are polite and friendly.  Tim Hortons is Tim Hortons.  And, grocery store chains are going to be all the same.  Wrong.  I noticed it last year, and it was even more evident this year – Quebec consumers are far more interesting than Ontarians, at least based on their grocery stores. 

I had thought the IGA in Chambly was the most impressive grocery store I had visited in Canada (and I’ve shopped Whole Food, Farm Boy, Pusateri’s, etc…), but then we went to the Pasquier Delson in Sainte-Catherine.  Ooh, mon dieu.  The choices in the cheese, deli, meats, and junk food sections are amazing.  Next year I plan to travel to the Maritimes and I’ve decided: no grocery shopping before leaving the GTA; I’ll just wait until I hit the South Shore to stock up.  I mean, what is a holiday without smoked duck, or boar sausage, or potato chips from Breton, France?  Really.

I’m sure Parc du Bic is a lovely National Park, and we were to spend a couple of days there.  But somehow, after pulling in and parking, it just didn’t grab us. I think we felt we’d Gaspé’ed out.  And, we were rather dreading the next few Harvest Host stops with our faulty generator (the temperatures were starting to climb again), so, several emails and phone calls later, we had completely rearranged the last 5 days of our trip.  All our Harvest Host stops were cancelled (I made sure we confirmed with HH’s 48+ requirement for cancelling).  We left Parc du Bic first thing the next morning and headed back to the delightful KOA at Lévis/Quebec City, followed by the KOA south of Montreal (so pretty – one of the prettier campgrounds I’ve seen), then on to the truly exceptional KOA north of Kingston. 

I started to see these little restaurants in almost every town we passed: Dixie Lee.  By the end of the week, we had seen at least 10 of these fried-chicken places, even though neither of us had ever heard of them.  LL is a fried-chicken nutter, but, because of their low-key signage, we would have always already passed one before we had realised it was there.  So, when we saw there was one in Amqui, one of our last towns in the Gaspésie, well, we had to stop. 

According to the map on the paper tray-liner, these places are all over eastern Quebec, New Brunswick, and parts of Nova Scotia. 

It was okay.  I liked the fries, but LL said the chicken was just okay.  And that the vinegar tasted weird?!?!? 

Anyhoo, we had another uniquely east-Canadian experience.