For the last month, I have had maps and calendars taped up on my office walls – Google maps, Rand McNally road maps, blank calendar pages filled with location options, and lines showing hours of driving crisscrossing the maps.  It’s starting to look a bit like a war room just before a major incursion. 

Speaking of incursions, DJT has just wandered into Iran, and now my gasoline budget for this summer has gone through the roof.  Splendid.

But back to spreadsheets.  I now have a colour-coded, carefully laid-out, 2 page (legal length) Excel spreadsheet set up for the dates July 6^th to October 13^th.  This has become my master planner, my bible, my cornerstone of travel planning.  Each morning, before I do anything else, I try to make at least some progress on firming up our travel plans. 

It’s a work in progress.

This will be the year of all things east.  I intend to spend this summer in eastern Quebec, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland (Labrador is too hard to access).

My sisters plan to join me for one Ontario trip (well, one sister does, the other is less of a fan of camping but will have a good time nonetheless).  I have several friends who want to join me at various points along the way, so it should be a fun summer.  Can’t leave until after our club’s annual summer picnic in early July, which is just as well, as I’m not a big fan of Ontario’s springtime blackflies.

I like travel planning – one friend is so confident in my skills that when she was still working, she would just leave it to me to check out cities, and book restaurants and tours. The choices (all of which I have registered for) are: Provincial/National Parks, KOAs, private campgrounds, and Harvest Hosts.  I learned last year that Harvest Hosts does not have great representation in eastern Canada, particularly Quebec, so I have signed up with a similar Canadian-based service called Terego  A bit of duplicating costs, but worth it for this year at least.

I am so lucky – I have great friends.  My friend Jennifer has offered to let me keep the motorhome in her barn over the winter.  The barn is massive – hubby Ivan repairs sports cars in it, stores at least 3 recreational vehicles for himself and friends, has hundreds of cardboard boxes that our club uses for its annual book sale, and still has room for my monstrosity. 

What a load off my mind.  We made sure my 11’3” rig would fit in his 12’ high doorway, I stripped the place of every hint of food that might attract mice, and I waved good bye to it for the next 6 months.

My rig has two closets: the big one at the foot of my bed, and a narrow one in the bathroom, perfect for guests.  The rail of the smaller one is the kind you find in hotels, with inverted triangular holes for the hangers. LL used it on our Quebec trip.  She had hung at most (and really, I mean at most) 5 items on the rail.  On day two of the trip, she opened the closet to find the rail (not just the hangers, the entire rail) had fallen out of the top of the closet.  Some engineering genius had thought that two 2” screws, sans anchors, screwed into the ceiling (therefore vertically supporting the rail) would be the strongest way to affix a clothes railing in a moving closet. 

So when I had the RV in for generator repair, I told Terry I also wanted a bunch of minor repairs done (squeaky window, stuck door latch, fallen railing, etc..)  When I got to Heidi’s, I went looking for the clothes railing.  I looked in the long storage space under the bumper, in the bottom of my big closets, in the deep drawers under the benches – nothing.  Where on earth would I have stored it?  I never did find it, so Terry wasn’t able to replace it.

I got the rig home and – oh, remember when I mentioned it was a ‘narrow closet’?  –  well, guess what I found lying in the key dish on the table?  The 6” railing.  Six inch railing.  I had had it in my head that because I was looking for a clothes railing, I was looking for a long pole, having completely forgotten that the closet is a maximum of 6” wide, and the ‘clothes railing’ could fit in the palm of my hand. Sigh.

(If you squint real hard – you’ll see it in the ziploc baggy.)

Because of Heidi’s discovery that Elaine Reid wasn’t a complete moron (well, hold that thought – there’s always room for stupidity), and the Yamaha generator didn’t seem to like the Omega HVAC system, I cancelled the remainder of my trip, took the RV home, emptied it, and took it back to Heidi’s.  It wasn’t going to be an immediate fix; as Terry had never seen this model of generator before and he suspected he’d need to order parts, I had to leave the rig with them.

It did eventually get fixed, was all under warranty, and Terry did say that it was an interesting problem to tackle.  I felt vindicated (frustrated, but vindicated).

But that means that, apart from a 3-day trip to a campground 20 minutes from my home, every one of my first summer’s trips had ended too soon, and under a shadow.  Bummer.

Last month, Lori & I absolutely melted in the Gaspe, on the days (well, really nights) when I was relying on the generator for our AC, and we couldn’t make it work.  Multiple phone calls to an on-the-whole pleasant and friendly, but still somewhat-exasperated mechanic at Heidi’s didn’t resolve the issue.

We would turn the generator on, then the AC, and if we so much as looked at the clock on the microwave, or flipped a single-bulb light switch, everything would simply shut down. 

After that trip, I took the RV up to Heidi’s (which is quite a pain, as it’s 90 minutes minimum from home and I either have to find a friend willing to follow me there and bring me home, or take two GO trains & an Uber) to my favourite mechanic, Terry.  He had looked it over, found everything to be working just fine, showed me that I was in all likelihood not flipping the breaker firmly enough, and sent me home.

Well guess what happened at Kismet?  It was a cold night, I turned the generator on, turned on the furnace, and click, after 5 minutes, everything shut down.  (Thank heavens for multiple duvets.)

So here we are again – I’m having to re-adjust the last few days of a well planned out trip, cancel Wiarton and south Georgian Bay, and head to Heidi’s.

This time, when Terry came trotting out saying it was working just fine, I made him watch me walk through the steps I follow and of course, wouldn’t you know it, it was working just fine.  We stood in the RV, scratching our heads, assuming that yet again, I was doing something wrong when using the generator whilst on the road.  Not sure why, but Terry turned on the AC one more time, waited 3 minutes, turned on the lights, and ah ha!!!!! everything failed.  Yay!!!!! (well, you know what I mean.)

This was a breakthrough – it wasn’t just me!  More to come on next steps.

One of my goals for my travels across Canada is to visit (and hopefully support) as many independent bookstores as I can.  I got to Parry Sound on a Sunday, so not a lot was open and the streets were pretty quiet.  My only previous experience of Parry Sound was visiting a boyfriend who had a cottage outside of town, and we pretty much spent all our time out on his boat (loved Henry’s Fish Restaurant). 

It was definitely not my most exciting day of travel, but there was one highlight – Bearly Used Bookstore.  I’ve never seen anything like this – the closest I can think of is one of those movie sets meant to show a quaint, old, overflowing, quirky bookshop from the 1950s.  Rooms, and rooms, shelves upon shelves, and stacks 8’ high, just piled up, with every type of book imaginable.  I don’t think this staff has ever met a book they have said no to.  There is a marginal sense of order (oh, who am I kidding, apart from some faded signage and a token attempt at cataloguing, this is what it would look like if you took The World’s Biggest Book Store, put the contents in a snowglobe, turned it upside down, and shook it).  I did find a couple of books to buy, but as someone who gets overwhelmed in department stores, I was only able to spend bout 45 minutes in there before admitting defeat and retreating to the local KOA (which was very nice).

The lady who runs Kismet Farm asked if I would mind waiting until 6pm to arrive.  No problem.  I left Bancroft at 5:55 and within 10 minutes I was wending my way along a very narrow, very rough backroad (inexplicably lined with mansions) to a farm lane out in the middle of nowhere.  The farmhouse looked like something from either a Nicholas Sparks or a Stephen King novel, dark wood, wooden porch, gingerbread scrollwork, uneven dormers (adorable or menacing, hard to say which).  Then the owner Roz came out, looking like a cross between Hansel & Gretel’s witch and an aging flower child.  She was absolutely lovely, but all this atmosphere, coupled with the fact that I had no internet, data, or telephone access up on this hillside, did make me a tad uncomfortable.  I sent texts to my sister, knowing they wouldn’t go that evening, but telling her where, if she never heard from me again, I had spent this last night of my life.  (She received them the next morning, and was relieved to hear my voice when I called her from Bancroft as soon as I could.)

Roz was lovely, as was her farm – I gave it a 5 star review in HH, and didn’t mention my irrational reaction to remote farm life.  (As I said, the road was full of huge houses and in the morning there were school buses going by – I was just being silly.)

Next stop was Bancroft, where I had booked a Harvest Host at Kismet Farms in Dung, Ontario.  Yes, Dung.  The farm’s mailing address is Dung, ON, but when you key it into Google, nothing shows up (no wonder, the shame of it all).  But it is Dung nonetheless.

Driving has been stressful, particularly going down hills.  You’re not supposed to ride the brakes, but this is an extremely heavy truck barrelling down a Canadian backroad hill, and it’s a tad freaky.  First thing: as you’re cresting the hilltop, make sure you’re already going slower than you might think.  Then, click on the tow-haul, which slows down the rate at which the truck shifts up a gear.  Then, shift into manual, and gear down.  Okay, that’s all very well and good.  But, once you’re at the bottom of the hill, it’s time to get back into gear and speed up to the speed limit.  Which is where the fun really begins.  I don’t if it’s my rig, or Ford trucks in general, or just that it’s new, but when I try to move the gear shift back from Manual to Drive, invariably it shifts into Neutral before I can pop it back into Drive (all while having palpitations and terror sweats).  One time, on the highway in Quebec, it actually jumped to Reverse for a nano-second – dear God, my 60+ heart.

So this trip to Dung through the Canadian Shield was a doozy, and I was glad to make it to Bancroft (Dung is a suburb of Bancroft it seems).  Kismet Farm couldn’t receive me until 6pm, so I had time to kill in Bancroft.  Unfortunately the local gallery was closed, so No Frills, Shoppers, and Timmies it was. 

But the reason I’m an idiot?  I have a friend from high school, whom I’ve only seen once since returning from Scotland.  Recently he & his partner Jen moved from London and set up a bed & breakfast in Bancroft.  Did it occur to me to let them know I was in town?  To let them know I had 90 minutes to kill that afternoon?  That I was going to be again killing time the next morning at the Tim Hortons?  No, of course it didn’t.  Instead, I sat, bored, reading a magazine and eating timbits.  It was a full 4 weeks later before it hit me – why hadn’t I called Pete?  Doh.

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.