Tis the Season for Family, Friends, Fun and Feasting

Here we are in one of my favorite times of year, the amazing mix of crazy and calm, frantic and reflective that I associate with the final two weeks of the year. Asked today by a young friend in China (with whom I email regularly) about how we celebrate Christmas, I had these thoughts: family, fun and feasting. One of her professors had started her thinking about it when they spent some class time on the way Americans view the holiday.

Once the Thanksgiving holiday is past, the momentum picks up. We try each year to buy things we think will make good gifts when we see them. There’s a closet into which these items go, awaiting birthdays and Christmas. The good news is that we find things that someone might really like and we get “ahead” this way; the bad news is that we often forget that we’ve already bought a present for someone, so we buy another. And, of course, as the season ramps up, the urge to buy ramps up, too.

Even when I’m fighting traffic at the mall, I’m thinking about family and friends for whom I’m finding gifts. As I’m vying for a parking spot with two or three other agitated drivers, I’m thinking that there must be one special thing or one more thing that will make this Christmas really special for someone we love. There must be something on sale that is really great, better than whatever I bought two months ago that was good, but maybe doesn’t seem so special now.

It’s the time of year, too, for the holiday letter. This is when we can catch up on our friends’ lives and tell them what’s happening with us. For our Facebook friends, it’s probably redundant, but others get our year in a page of highlights. It’s become a creative outlet for me and a way to show off some of Mike’s great photographs. My challenge every year is to try to remember how Microsoft Word works so that I can put words and pictures together. Our theory is that some will read and enjoy, some will be too busy to read it, but might look at the pictures and others will simply sigh and say this is what retired people do because they have too much time on their hands.

Now we’re getting down to the short strokes. Christmas is only a couple of days away and we’re ready to travel, the car is stuffed with the packages we’ve wrapped and the few clothes that we still have room to take. We’ll spend the next week driving from place to place, hugging and laughing and trading gifts, both precious and silly. And we’ll eat. Then we’ll eat some more.

There will be meals, of course, with the bounty of the holidays on each table. Meats and side dishes will be followed by cakes and pies. In between meals, there will be cookies galore and dishes of candy and nuts. Egg nog and mimosas will surely add to our caloric intake and I can’t pass through Nashville without indulging in the boiled custard that appears on store shelves there this time of year. Our “yums” will be followed by “ughs”, perhaps accompanied by a polite belch and, finally, “zzzzzs.” There will be a nap or two, undoubtedly, and, weather permitting, a walk to help digest the volume of refreshment that passes through our lips.

One final thought about my young friend’s query is ambrosia. When I was a kid, my mother always made ambrosia, a kind of fruit soup made from orange sections, crushed pineapple and coconut. We ate it as dessert or breakfast or a snack from a big bowl that she kept in the refrigerator.

As my life has unfolded and various folks have influenced the mixture of ingredients, I’ve added cherries and miniature marshmallows and deleted the coconut. These changes haven’t diminished in any way the dish’s diverse attractions. If we’re too sated to eat it after one of these filling holiday meals, we just attack it late at night or eat it for breakfast. I still use a spoon to scoop out the oranges, section by section, rather than cut up the orange or resort to canned mandarin oranges, already sliced. Mama always said having your hands in the process added to the sweetness of the result.

For me, the natural sweetness of ambrosia (no sugar need be added) with its mixture of flavors -- the acidic pungency of the orange and the exotic tang of the pineapple, the sweetness of the cherries and marshmallows – represent perfectly this time of year. There’s a certain amount of work involved in getting ready, an almost hour-to-hour variation in pace from frantic shopping, wrapping and decorating to the serenity of listening to our favorite Christmas music and reminiscing. Then there’s the finale: the opening of presents and the sharing of joys both hoped for and unexpected.

With any luck, we’ll all experience the wish expressed by Clement Moore in his famous poem, “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

Photos by Mike Lumpkin

Remembering Dorothy Ann Moon Pettes

 I have been lucky in life, not least in the remarkable women I have known. These women have shared their strength and experience with me, mentored me and offered me their friendship, their warmth and their wisdom. They have, one and all, inspired me with a variety of ideals to be both admired and emulated.

Dorothy Pettes

One such woman died a few days ago in Atlanta. She left this earth richer for her time here and us poorer for her loss. Her legacy extends well beyond the children she raised and the friends she made. Her life achieved a goal many seek and fewer realize—she made a difference. Her integrity alone was a positive influence in the lives of many.

Young Dorothy

Dorothy Pettes was less than a month shy of her 99th birthday when she left this life. Born Dorothy Ann Moon in St. Louis in 1912, she had earned a nursing degree and worked as a visiting nurse and college nurse before her marriage to Tom Pettes. Once married, she became a wife and mother and, in my view, a true domestic engineer and the mother of four children.

I met Mrs. Pettes when invited to her home by her daughter, Sara, a high-school friend. I was amazed, first by the orderly and intelligent design of their home, then by Mrs. Pettes herself. I was not unaccustomed to formidable women as my mother was one herself. But where my mother’s force was some electric combination of high intelligence sparked with high emotion, Mrs. Pettes, also very intelligent, was more reasoned in her intellect. She was clearly cut of another cloth.

Her practicality was evident in her dress and style. She was attractive without having made much effort with makeup, lean and wearing a simple housedress with sensible shoes. No frills were in evidence, no hairstyle of the moment. Sara has said that her mother came to understand Sara’s love of fashion only late in life.

As I explored their home I marveled at the room in which one whole wall seemed taken up by a world map. I was awed by the design of the house with its retractable walls allowing rooms to grow or diminish in size as needed. What astonished me most was a posted schedule of activities and duties for mother and children. This was a practical household run by an educated, organized and pragmatic woman.

When it was time for dinner, rather than yelling for her children to come home, Dorothy Pettes simply stepped outside and blew a whistle. They not only knew what it meant, but learned to expect that sound near suppertime and to respond forthwith.

What I’ve learned about Dorothy Pettes since was that she was a woman of distinct and deeply-felt opinions, a life-long liberal who lived her beliefs, rather than just espousing them. Sara has told me that after Dorothy’s children were grown and on their own, she cared for foster children and, a lifelong member of the League of Women Voters, engaged in local political activities.

Engaged is a word that seems well-suited to Dorothy Moon Pettes. From her early decision to become a nurse through her years as an involved and loving parent to her lifetime commitment to social action, she was engaged in life. She saw the value of order in life and seemed to see clearly the way in which lack of disciplined care for others could be irresponsible and hurtful.

One of my favorite memories of Mrs. Pettes is that she took Sara and her friends (including me) to see the Paul Newman movie, “Hud.” For those who haven’t seen the film or don’t remember the main character, Hud is an angry, often drunk and abusive cowboy, described on the movie posters as “the man with the barbed wire soul.” I don’t remember clearly why she went with us. We might have begged her to go with us to a movie rated beyond our years or she accompanied us because she felt it inappropriate for us to see without an adult to provide perspective. In either case, it was we girls who simply had to see that particular movie and she acquiesced.

We girls, then teenagers with raging hormones, found Newman’s sultry portrayal of Hud at once frightening and exciting, crude and sexy. As we left the Emory Theater, Mrs. Pettes stopped on the sidewalk commented tersely that she “certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to that man.” I’ve never forgotten how stunned I was by her practical analysis of the character. Though we laughed at her comment later, we’ve acknowledged in our grown-up years that she had, indeed, hit the nail on the head.

Lest I paint a picture of a woman too orderly and practical to be warm, I must say that I always felt her sincere welcome when I was in their home. She had a beautiful smile that lit up her eyes. Her home was open to her children’s friends and she accommodated our silliness and our attempts at serious discourse with patience. A woman with a wry sense of humor, she must have found some amusement in the strange politics of the occasional Tri-Hi-Y club meetings held in that room with the wall-size map.

I think she might have agreed with what Confucius wrote: “To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

I am convinced that Dorothy Moon Pettes had set her heart right. She will be missed and she will be remembered with tears and laughter, affection and admiration.

Anger, Fear and Disappointment -- What's Next?

It seems a lot of people are angry today, at least that’s what they say. It looks more like too many of us are afraid and putting on our angry face to chase away the demons that threaten us. It’s one of those disappointing times when those who spread fear like a virus are winning and they freeze too many of us like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

They tell us there’s no room to support one another, encourage us to assume that every man, woman and family is isolated, preyed upon by everything from Al Qaeda to big government. We’re to fear the Democrats who spend too much and Republicans who only care about the rich. We’re to feel a threat from anyone who doesn’t believe as we do. Too many of us are discouraged because, in these difficult times, we don’t feel safe and we’re not sure that we and our country are going in the right direction.

It is important to remember that we’ve been here before, not once, but many times. The price of independence and American democracy is high. As long as we can acknowledge that its value is of equal or greater importance, we remain reasonable. But, at times like these, when we’re more concerned with what we don’t have today or don’t know about tomorrow, we become fearful and we attempt to protect ourselves with anger. It’s as if we believe that shouting will drown out our problems.

There’s often talk of the “founding fathers,” those men who crafted and signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. We refer to those men and that time as if they were in perfect harmony and had all the answers for the questions we have today. In truth, they, too, knew disappointing times, times of partisan politics, bitter divisions, fear and anger.

John Adams, our second U.S. President, and pivotal in the country’s founding, said: “The people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally, and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority."

Thomas Jefferson, our third President and a key architect of our country’s foundations famously fell out with John Adams, once a close friend. As Adams left office, to be followed by Jefferson, Adams’ last-minute appointments, Jefferson said, were “among my most ardent political enemies.” Their estrangement lasted a decade until mutual friends encouraged them to begin corresponding. They did so until both died on July 4, 1826.

Of course, the Civil War was the height of disaffection and anger that was carried to the ultimate level of conflict. We can be grateful that the current uproar hasn’t led to that! Abraham Lincoln was, of course, not popular with Southern politicians. But even staunch Union supporters managed to say some pretty awful things about him. His own Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, for whom Lincoln generally had high regard, referred to Lincoln’s “painful imbecility.”

So, it’s nothing new, this incivility. It is, however, a regrettable sign of our times. We can only hope that whatever the outcome of today’s elections, the message taken by both parties and lived out in Washington sooner rather than later is that there is important business to do in this country and it’s time to do it. It’s natural for there to be disagreement about which solutions will work. If there is no compromise, thus nothing is done, and then none of them deserves to be called public servants.

[Sorry no pretty pictures with this one.]

Back in the U.S.A.

We slept in a little this morning with a shorter drive planned today from Bangor to Boston. Interstates 95 and 295 are the quickest routes south and allowed us to have a repeat visit to the New Hampshire coast.

We enjoyed Petey’s Summertime Seafood Restaurant so much on our way north that we decided to go there again for lunch. Their lobster dishes are simply wonderful. We decided to get out and walk at a nearby state park on the beach and enjoyed the fresh air and ocean views there. There are amazing huge homes along the coast there, quite a few for sale, probably with hefty price tags.

Rye Harbor

We stopped, too, at Rye Harbor to watch a lobster boat unloading its catch onto a waiting truck. The afternoon was sunny and beautiful as we hung around the docks. There are a couple of granite memorials there commemorating men and women who have fished these waters for a living. Mike took pictures and I met and talked with a woman taking photographs. She had brought her 21-year-old son there to take advantage of the relatively warm weather on this late October day. She shared their story of her son’s struggle with an illness that has been difficult to diagnose.

This positive and pleasant lady (who lives nearby) pointed us further south to Hampton Beach and another park with a row of small, colorfully painted beach “shacks.” There was also a small, creatively designed garden there and lots of people walking and jogging on the path along the seawall. All along the coast here there are benches with plaques dedicating them to folks who have lived and vacationed here.

We made our way off the beach road and down I-95 to the airport where we checked into an airport hotel and turned in our rental car. This has been a wonderful trip in so many ways, but we’re ready to head home where Michael will meet us at the Charlotte airport tomorrow. We’re happy that we could celebrate with others in Halifax. And there’s no question that we found great places we’ll want to visit again and learned about others that go on our list of places we want to go.

(All photos by Mike Lumpkin except this one by me.  Wherever we go, he's got his camera in hand, finding the shots that remind us of sights we never want to forget, memories we want to save and savor in years to come.  My joy is being in those places with him, sometimes pointing out something he might want to photograph, always reveling in his unique eye for the beauty and often the humor of what we see.  This one was taken as he turned back toward the car from the gorgeous colors of autumn on a little road in New Hampshire. You can see in his stride the pure joy he experiences in capturing the special moments we find.)

Canada Farewell

Moose Signs-No Moose

Monday morning dawned as departure day for those of us who had come to celebrate Ramona and Bill’s new life in Halifax. It was a day of flight schedules, airport runs and time for Mike and me to pack our car and head across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for our return through Maine and Boston back home to Charlotte.

Our drive took us north and west, making a big loop around the north end of the Bay of Fundy that we had crossed by ferry on Saturday. The farther we traveled away from the coast and toward higher elevations, we noticed that many more trees had lost their leaves, but we continued to see at least some golds and oranges along the way, often set against the deep green of evergreen forests.

We became intrigued by the signs for roads leading to Cape Breton, the part of Nova Scotia farthest north. One of Ramona’s friends we met in Halifax over the weekend lives and teaches there. She has promised to send us information about a possible visit. Cape Breton’s rich heritage and natural beauty make it a highly desirable vacation destination.

We also saw signs for Prince Edward Island and picked up a brochure touting its allure for travelers. Canada’s Atlantic Provinces are all attractive areas with their picturesque seaside settings, the fabulous seafood available at every turn and their rich and diverse history.

Our drive through New Brunswick took us through rolling countryside and through the Saint John River valley. Though many signs commanded our “Attention” with a moose graphic, those were the only moose we saw. We did see lots of farms, a good many of those beautifully red fields of wild blueberries and miles of the “north woods” for which Canada is so well known.

We found a lunch place on the outskirts of Fredericton in New Brunswick not too far from where we would re-enter the U.S. at Houlton, Maine. What we noticed on our travels along Canada’s well-maintained freeways, including the Trans-Canada Highway that we followed from Nova Scotia almost to Maine, was that they rarely go directly through any towns or cities, but stay outside them.

Our customs agent at the border asked a very few questions and welcomed us back to the U.S. As I drove down through the Maine countryside toward Bangor, our destination for the night, Mike kept a lookout for the moose that more roadside signs alerted us we might see. As in New Brunswick, we saw not one moose. Somehow we felt the moose were hiding behind the trees laughing at us and our eagerness to see even one of them.

Our hotel in Bangor has been a good place to stop after a long day of driving, providing a tasty clam chowder and a comfortable bed for the night. Today we will wander down the Maine and New Hampshire coast, find some good seafood and stay overnight in Boston before our morning flight back to Charlotte.

(Photo by Mike Lumpkin)

Weekend in Halifax/In Celebration of Our Ramona, Dr. Lumpkin

Somehow I’ve been unable to find time and will to write over the past three days, but we’ve been busy as we made our way into and out of Halifax and back down to Bangor, Maine, where we’re up before the sun this morning.

Saint John Sunrise

Saturday morning we were up early in Saint John, New Brunswick, to catch the ferry that would take us across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia. The Princess of Acadia was our ship for the crossing. She’s a massive ship with none of the grace or delicacy of a fairy-tale princess. We drove into her cavernous belly along with many other cars and several huge tractor-trailer trucks.

Up a couple of steep flights of stairs we went into the lounge in the ship’s bow and found a spot near a window to enjoy the voyage. The ship included a place for breakfast, so we went there and found something to eat. It’s best that I not describe the fare too explicitly as I don’t cherish the memory.

Princess Deck

Back upstairs, I settled in with my book about Halifax, Burden of Desire by Robert MacNeil. It’s a novel structured around the horrible explosion that occurred in Halifax’s harbor in December, 1917. It was initially my intention to read awhile and then go outside to enjoy the crossing with my face in the cold wind. Mike did go out to take some pictures.

Since I became engrossed in the book (and I recommend it heartily) I didn’t go out right away and by the time I might have done so, the crossing had turned rather rough and I could hardly walk inside the ship, must less venture outside. When I looked up from my reading I could see the movement of the ship through the windows as first just the waves, then just the sky. The ship was really wallowing in high seas along the route to Nova Scotia.

I chatted with a young man who was traveling with his family to Yarmouth. They have made this ferry trip many times, but he said they had never experienced a crossing as rough as this one. His sister was having a tough time with it, spending most of the crossing either lying down or in the restroom. Fortunately, I don’t suffer motion sickness, so managed the ups and downs comfortably and settled back into my book.

Digby NS

Our three-hour journey ended quietly enough in the harbor at Digby. We stopped at the Nova Scotia Information Centre to get a map, then headed north and east across the island toward Halifax on the other coast. The countryside is beautiful. Our route took us along what is called the “Harvest Highway” through agricultural areas in the middle of the island before we turned east toward the Atlantic Ocean.

We stopped in Bridgetown and found lunch at the End of the Line pub. It’s located in an old railway depot building. We were welcomed and treated to pretty good pub food, getting there just in time to get our food before a huge group of parents and teenaged girls arrived. We discovered that Bridgetown was hosting a soccer tournament. Our waiter described the pub’s business for the weekend as “hungry teams and families coming in waves through the day.”

Back on the road, we completed our three-hour drive to Halifax, finding that the Mapquest directions took us easily to our destination. We arrived at the Blackburn-Lumpkin residence to find a houseful of family and friends who had come, as we did, to celebrate Mike’s eldest sibling’s installation as the twelfth president of Mount Saint Vincent University. The honoree herself, Ramona, was at a tea in her honor, but we were happy to see her husband, Bill, and Mike’s mother and sister, Linda, and Linda’s husband, Robert. In addition several of Ramona’s friends from her previous post (Huron University College in London, Ontario), as well as longer-term friends from New York City and Lexington, Kentucky, had come to Halifax.

In the two weeks or so Bill and Ramona have been in Halifax, they have settled into their new home. Bill has painted walls and hung paintings. They had unpacked boxes, shelved books and arranged furnishings. They offered a house full of guests an inviting “inn” for the occasion.

The rest of the evening was a chance to catch up with those we’ve not seen in awhile and make new friends of others. Ramona and Linda and a few others went to a poetry reading to honor the incoming president.

Sunday morning was a flurry of activity. Everyone had to get ready for the installation ceremony which was held as part of the morning’s fall convocation on campus. Those of us staying with Ramona and Bill got ourselves ready at home and helped transport guests staying at a nearby hotel to the event. The day was chilly, but pleasant.

Mount President

It was a very proud moment for everyone to witness the pomp and ceremony of the occasion. There was beautiful music from both a quintet and a bagpiper. Ramona was welcomed with speeches, greetings from many other universities and from faculty, staff and students of “the Mount.” Then we saw the conferring of graduate degrees on over a hundred educators, sharing their accomplishment with proud families and friends. It was truly an emotionally stirring occasion with its combination of robed academics, the beautiful music and the reading of a moving poem commissioned to celebrate Ramona’s new position in this place rich with history. It was a long morning, but never tedious.

After a nice luncheon, we guests left Ramona to officiate at the afternoon convocation. We headed home first and then some of us ventured into Halifax to explore a little before the special evening dinner to come. Mike and I stopped at an old graveyard where we were told some of the Titanic victims had been buried. As it turned out, we weren’t in the right one, but did see some heart-rending memorials to those who died in the Halifax explosion of 1917 that I had been reading about.

In one single decade of the early 20th century, Halifax experienced two tragedies. It was the port to which many of the ill-fated Titanic passengers came after that ship’s sinking in the North Atlantic, both survivors and victims. Those who lived were taken into the homes and hospitals of Halifax. Many of those who died were buried in Halifax cemeteries in that sad April of 1912.

1917 Victims

In December, 1917, two ships collided in the Narrows, so named because it divides the outer reach of Halifax Harbor from the inner Bedford Basin. The S.S. Mont Blanc was entering the harbor on a highly secret wartime mission, loaded with ammunition headed for France, stopping at Halifax as many ships did before making the Atlantic crossing. The S.S. Imo was leaving Halifax on its way to New York to pick up relief supplies for delivery to Belgium. Through a series of mishaps and miscommunication, the two collided and the Mont Blanc exploded with tremendous force, so extraordinary that an entire section of Halifax was leveled.

More than 2000 people were killed and many thousands more were injured. It was so horrific that it’s been written that the scientists who made the first atom bomb studied the effects of the Halifax explosion as they did their work.

The Citadel

Halifax today is still a busy port city, as well as home to a number of universities in addition to Mount Saint Vincent. It is hilly and at its highest point sits the Citadel, an historic fort completed in 1856 to defend against land attack from the United States. It was the fourth such military installation at the site, the first built there in 1749. Now a Canadian National Historic Site, it commemorates the city’s long history as a British naval fortification.

Halifax is also, like all of Nova Scotia, a tourist destination. It has shops and restaurants galore, many along the harbor wharves. The city’s signature tall ship, the Bluenose II, is remembered in a replica of the same name, built from the plans of the original ship. Although it is now in dry dock for this year, it is usually a working vessel, giving public cruises and sailing to other harbors as an ambassador for the city.

We were guests of Mount Saint Vincent’s chancellor, Sister Donna, at a really nice dinner on campus Sunday night. It ended a day in which it became ever more obvious that Dr. Ramona Lumpkin will be a great and fitting leader for the Mount.

(Photos by Mike Lumpkin, the photo of Ramona a replica from the installation brochure--original photographer's name unknown.)

O, Canada!

Bar Harbor Sunrise

Perhaps today’s title is a little misleading since most of our day was spent in Maine. But, knowing that we would come into Canada today, I've had that song echoing in my head all day.

The day began early in Bar Harbor because we wanted to see the sunrise and spend some time in Acadia National Park. The sunrise was predictably pretty and, after a cold front passed through with last night’s rain, it was sunny, colder and quite breezy.

We found a good breakfast spot, Jordan’s in Bar Harbor Village, famous for their blueberry pancakes. We stuck with our protein plan except for one of their wild Maine blueberry muffins since they advertise their blueberry muffins and pancakes in very large type. The muffin was not a thriller, only average as these things go, so we nibbled enough to know what we were not missing and went on our way.

Acadia NP

Acadia National Park lives up to its reputation as a wonderful place. It wraps around Mt. Desert Island (which we learned is pronounced as di-ZERT, as in “desert one’s post”), flowing up from the waters over the hills and to the top of Cadillac Mountain at its height. There is a terrific 27-mile loop that we drove around, as well as lots of hiking trails, carriage tour trails and horse paths.

Our drive took us down to Sand Beach in a cove that is washed by the Atlantic. Further on we stopped at the “Thunder Hole,” where a rock formation on the shore funnels waves through a sort of tunnel and blows it up into the air. Since it wasn’t high tide, we didn’t get the full effect, but it was a beautiful spot.

Sand Beach

We found ourselves driving through the beautiful woods that cover the island with both hardwoods and evergreens. In some places we seemed to be in tunnels of gold as trees grow up from both sides and out over the roadway, covered now in golden leaves that were lit this morning with the special slanting sunlight that makes this time of year uniquely picturesque.

We spent a couple of hours riding, stopping to take pictures and glorying in the beauty of it. We could have easily spent the entire day there, but wanted to get to Saint John, New Brunswick before sunset. Since this part of Canada is in the Atlantic Time zone, an hour earlier than Eastern, we knew it would be getting dark well before six p.m.

We made a brief stop at the park’s visitor center, then headed out of Bar Harbor. We stopped long enough at a little post office to mail a couple of postcards, then off the island to find our way to the road that would take us to Canada.

Blueberry Field

Heading north, we found this part of the journey took us through roads that reminded us of the back roads in our part of the U.S. There were long stretches without much sign of life, a number of abandoned properties falling into ruin and signs for “towns” that didn’t have much town to them at all.  We did see a lot of fields that combined rocks and beautiful low-growth red plants.  Later we understood that these were wild blueberry fields.

When we turned east onto the Airline Highway, there was even less sign of life and, much as we experienced yesterday, we weren’t seeing places to eat lunch. We came to the Airline Lodge and Snack Bar, accompanied by the Airline Rest Area (restrooms in a newish building), so decided to take a chance.

We found the food was good and enjoyed it all the way through the homemade blueberry pie, justifying this departure from our protein-centered diet with the thought that we owed it to Maine to consume their famous Wild Maine blueberries. The pie was, in fact, delicious, as was the vanilla ice cream that came with it. Every place is famous for good vanilla ice cream, eh?

We enjoyed listening to the other diners, too. We heard quite a bit about hunting and fishing and farm maintenance since these are the primary activities in this neck of the woods. It is, in fact, a thickly wooded area with trees for miles and miles, interrupted occasionally by lakes and more rarely by a sort of roadside community, usually a stretch of houses and farms a couple of city blocks long from end to end, if that.

We asked about the name of the road, Airline Highway. It seemed an unlikely name for a place that seems remote from any airline. It was, they said, named that because years ago when it was a dirt road, the small planes that occasionally landed on an airstrip nearby, called it the airline road. Perhaps it was the bush pilot’s idea of a joke as he delivered hunters and fisherman into what was then and still is a wild area.

When we reached Calais on the U.S. side of the border, our navigator (me at that point) got confused by our Mapquest directions (a common occurrence), so we missed our turn toward Canada, but discovered the mistake quickly enough to turn around before we got too far. Reading the map more carefully, I discovered that, if we had continued in the wrong direction, we might have ended up at the island made famous by Franklin Roosevelt, Campobello.

We cleared Canadian customs at the border between Calais and St. Stephen, Canada, without a hitch. Thanks to Mike, we had passports in hand, and, when he ascertained that we weren’t carrying any firearms, the border guard was friendly. He noticed that we’d been in the Yukon this past summer and told us he had recently moved to this post from Alberta.

Canada, like the U.S., is always working on their highways, but most of our road to Saint John was in really good shape. Away from the coast for some miles, the foliage was not as colorful as we had been seeing, but once we came back to the water, we saw more color. We also discovered we would have to go through a toll booth entering Saint John without having changed any currency. Then we got in the wrong lane and had to depend on other kind motorists to let us move to the lane we needed to use.

I apologized to the toll booth attendant, suggesting we are yet another couple of crazy Americans, but he assured me kindly that the locals do it all the time. It was a 50-cent toll, but we didn’t have a “loonie” (Canadian dollar), but he took our U.S. dollar and returned our change. I drove away wondering if he was thinking he had just helped another couple of “loonies”!

Fall Color

Once again, Mapquest directions had us bollixed up, driving around uptown Saint John in circles trying to get to the Hilton Hotel on the harbor. We finally overcame the madness and got to the hotel. We’re told that we’re only five minutes from the ferry. I’m not sure that I’ll be comfortable allowing less than half an hour to get there by eight a.m. tomorrow, based on today’s twists and turns.

We plan to have dinner nearby at a place recommended by the hotel concierge and make an early night of it. We’re both excited about tomorrow’s ferry ride across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia. So far, so fabulous on this trip!

(All photos by Mike Lumpkin)