BrickFair is nearly upon us, and for the fourth consecutive year I will be attending.
Last year, Zatth, Xaeraz, and I went around the convention making all sorts of six-second videos on Vine. We had no shortage of ideas and I'm certain that this year will be no different - especially with Takuma Nuva in the mix.
In addition to our regular fare of insanity, the promise of a custom Vine was presented as a prize in the recent crowdfunding campaign. But that's not all that I have in mind.
So I present to the good members of BZPower a challenge: come up with an idea for a Vine we can make at BrickFair. As long as it follows BZP rules, BrickFair rules, and the law, we can make it.
Since BrickFair is nearly here, the entry period will run until 11:59 Eastern time on July 30th. Polling will be on the 31st, and then the winners will have their ideas filmed the following days.
"I can't believe I wasted that much time on something that looks that bad."
"Well, that looks really nice from this one angle, but it's not connected to anything and there's no way of doing so without completely rethinking the torso."
"This is the fourth time I've rebuilt this torso just to replace a freaking axle."
"Ah, screw it, I can't be bothered with custom legs."
"Can't make sounds ... parents are asleep ..."
"I just KNEW I had another one of these somewhere ..."
"..."
"Well, at least I didn't screw up the color layering!"
There's a number of ways to word the first paragraph of this entry, but suffice it to say that I've been a fan of the vlogbrothers since late last year, when I stumbled across their educational videos and then to their main channel. The great thing about the Green brothers' work is that even if you're not watching one of their myriad educational channels, you still end up learning something. They have a passion and excitement about the world that, frankly, few others have.
The fact that people dislike John Green is not something that particularly bothers me - after all, no one will be universally liked or appreciated. Like everyone, he has flaws - but most of the criticisms I saw of him were blatantly untrue slices of Internet hearsay. Reasons given were illegitimate and that made me kind of sad.
But I really had to withhold judgement, I thought, until I had the chance to read one of Green's novels, books which seem to elicit sharply divided opinions. When I had the opportunity to read The Fault in Our Stars, I would have been remiss if I hadn't taken it.
So I did. I read the whole thing in about six non-consecutive hours. (I'm a pretty fast reader.)
The end result was just sort of ... meh.
Regardless of my positive opinions of him as a video blogger and person, I have to say that he's actually a really bland writer. I'm not going to comment on the story itself because one cannot blame the "problematic" aspects of a story on the writer (which is the origin of most legitimate-looking John Green hate)*, but I can comment on the characters.
Green's characters don't have individual voices. Sickly, bookish, introverted Hazel speaks with the same advanced eloquence as the public-high-school-educated Gus. But it's not just there - alcoholic Van Houten is as well-spoken as his continually frustrated assistant Lidewij, and the parents of the main characters - aside from the tear-prone father of Hazel are practically indistinguishable from one another.
I could legitimize Hazel and Van Houten - perhaps Lidewij as well - but the fact that the dialogue of any one character could be given to any other character with only a little bit of recontextualization is not a good sign. Throughout the whole book, not one person spoke in the way that normal people speak.
It was, by extension, impossible for me to feel any kind of sympathy for these characters. Granted, I haven't cried over a fictional character since I was about four years old, but I was kind of thinking that it would change because everyone always goes bananas over John Green's ability to wrench waterworks from the eyes of his readers.
It's not like I was expecting some kind of modern classic from whence quotes would be hewn for books whose publications are four hundred years distant. But for all the hullabaloo of John Green's writing abilities, I would be lying if I said that I wasn't a tad bit disappointed.
* TFiOS, for its shortcomings, does not romanticize cancer, or illness, or disease in general. I've lost two of my grandparents to cancer, and it's not pretty at any age. Given Green's background, which he has talked about extensively, anyone who claims that TFiOS romanticizes disease is hearing it from someone else and/or completely skipped the passages where the characters discuss just how disturbing/dangerous doing so is.
According to the government, I am eighteen years old, but that's actually not quite true. I'm still seventeen until around 7:30 PM.
So for around nineteen and a half hours, I'm in the twilight zone - both a legal adult and not.
Also, general update because last I told anyone here it was still before the concert on the third. That went extremely well and actually had a pretty decent turnout, mainly because they stuck a few string players on the program between my performances, which gave me some time to relax backstage. There was some fun with getting a substitute page-flipper, and I talked about the music of Sorabji at length with the John Green lookalike who ended up filling in at the post. I also gave a brief speech before my second onstage appearance to discuss the selections I played next - that they were dedicated to a young legally blind piano-violin prodigy.
The second concert, featuring works from everyone in the workshop, actually had less turnout than mine but was still a grand success despite the technical difficulties that arose. I returned the favor by flipping pages for the fellow who filled in for me, and I played the piano part of a piece that was originally going to be for viola, piano, and percussion but ended up just being for viola and piano because a percussionist could not be procured, leading me to make some last-minute edits to the piano part. Though there were a few slips, they sounded less like mistakes and more like intentional gorgeous messes.
Also I wrote and performed a rap at an open mic night (a performance impressive enough to accrue compliments over multiple days), played ultimate frisbee up a hill in pouring rain while enjoying a concert of flamenco music (the encore was a cover of Hotel California that was, in my opinion, better than the original).
Today/Tomorrow (it's late) I'll be at my grandmother's house for my birthday, eating ice cream cake (accept no substitutes), drinking one of the few blueberry sodas left from our adventures in Maine, and beginning to figure out what life is like as someone who is legally allowed to drink alcohol in Canada.
I've practiced a ton and I'm really well prepared and really excited. July 3rd is less than a week away, almost everyone I know in real life who could realistically make it has been invited, and three string instrument players have been added to the program, meaning a larger audience because there are about a zillion chamber music players this summer.
Would have gotten more practice but I met this girl who is in the film program but is pretty handy with a piano despite a lack of formal lessons, and ended up spending a majority of the of the day showing her around the music building, finding grand pianos and an old out-of-tune double bass before going up an old staircase to the back of a concert hall. We struggled to find the lights at first, but once doing so we found all of these random percussion instruments and ended up doing an impromptu duet on a glockenspiel.
So the composition workshop is going astoundingly well, all things considered - and by all things I mean that there are eight of us this year so not everyone can get everything they need done given that there's only one music technology lab. That's fine by me, because I'm not as interested in writing for the abstract little films, and my time in said lab has basically been to assist the others in the operation of various bits of technology because, having attended for three consecutive years, I know more of the ins and outs of the software.
So, within the next week, I should be:
- Playing the piano part of a fellow composers' song, which she'll be singing at open mic night next Wednesday - Playing and singing Tom Lehrer's brilliant song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" at aforementioned open mic night - Continuing to practice the recital pieces I'll play on July 3rd - next week aaaaaaaaaaa - Finish writing, practice the piano part of, organize the rehearsals for, and present a piece for viola, piano, and percussion on the 11th - Possibly a performance of a piano trio that was recorded last December but is still the only trio that has not had a public performance - if this happens, I'll be at the piano with aforementioned fellow composer on the violin and one of her friends on the cello
Which is insane.
At some level I feel as if I may have bitten off more than I can chew, but, to quote Leonard Bernstein: "To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."
Having only returned twenty-four hours ago, I get just a few days off to unwind and rest from the trip ...
... except not.
I'm finally starting on the BIG THING that Pablo and I have been talking about for a while, but - and this is SUPER EXCITING NEWS that I literally only had confirmed earlier this week - I must practice and prepare all of the pieces that I've ever written for solo piano because I'm having a RECITAL DEDICATED TO THEM.
A RECITAL DEDICATED TO MY COMPOSITIONS AND I'LL BE PLAYING THEM. THIS IS A MAJOR EVENT.
It'll be part of a composition workshop that I've attended and had great fun at for the past two years, but this is a much bigger deal, for in the concerts that have capped them off I've played the piano part of various trio ensembles. I'll do that again this year (piano, viola, and percussion), but I get THIS AS WELL.
In terms of number of pieces played this will be the most and longest I've ever performed at one sitting.
It's EXACTLY TWO WEEKS FROM NOW TOO LIKE AHJSAHJASJKHFGUASGKHSAHJSAHJFSHJGASFFHFAK I"M REALLY SORT OF UNPREPARED FOR THIS I MUST GET TO WORK IMMEDAITRELY
We began the day by looking at the route home when I discovered a place that we'd unexpectedly pass: Montpelier, the home of President James Madison. It was a detour of just a few miles from our initial route, so we decided to take the detour and tour his home.
Having visited Monticello many years ago, I kind of knew what to expect, but that was a while back and a completely different house. Montpelier was similar - starting in the visitor's center, we watched an introductory film and learned about how the house was undergoing extensive research to return it to what it would have looked like at the end of the Madison tenure, as it had been extensively modified by subsequent owners after the widowed Dolley Madison had to sell it to pay her debts.
The tour started off slow but picked up interest as it went along, and was given by a nice older man whose general facial features, unfortunately, resembled Dracula. They've pretty much finished stripping back the additions and restoring the structure to what it would have looked like during the residence of the Madisons, but there were very few original pieces of furniture. While everything was a period piece, tracking the original furniture and knick-knacks from the house is a difficult and time-consuming process.
Among the interesting information was the importance of Dolley Madison in the fledgling nation's affairs. She was the longest-serving First Lady, as the socialite and trend-setter had served as the de facto First Lady under widower Thomas Jefferson. In addition to her popularization of ice cream (her favorite flavor: oyster), she popularized the turban and made her husband so popular that his presidential opponent said that he could have beaten Mr. Madison, but not Mr. and Mrs. Madison.
We exited Montpelier and endured the blistering heat back to the air-conditioned sanctuary of the visitor center, where we added an ornament to Mom's Collection and rolled on out, continuing down the road to our original first stop of the day at Appomattox Court House. Though long hailed as the end of the Civil War, as Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had long posed the biggest threat to Union forces, and Lee himself had just earlier in 1865 been appointed commander of all Confederate forces, it was not the last action of the Civil War. Other armies surrendered later, and the last battle - in Brownsville, literally as far south as you can go and still be in the United States - was won by the Confederates.
The sweltering heat had not diminished in the least as we sweated around Appomattox Court House. While it's only just a few houses situated at a crossroads, it served as the administrative district for Appomattox County, which is confusing because the town of Appomattox is just a few miles from the Court House.
Easily the most interesting thing on the grounds was the famous McLean House, site of Lee's surrender to Grant. The magnanimous Grant made sure that Lee's depleted army - starving and tired to the point that some would just fall over asleep while marching and captured by the Union forces coming up behind them - was properly supplied and sent back home in an orderly manner.
Amazingly, Lee didn't want to give up the cause, saying that he wanted to keep fighting to the death than give Grant the unconditional surrender he demanded. Though the war was lost, a short battle was waged the night before, with the Confederates unsuccessfully trying to break through the lines of the Union army that finally had them surrounded. Cut off from their only way out - south to General Johnston's army, which surrendered not long after the events of Appomattox - Lee realized that attacking was suicidal.
The McLeans were forced to sell their house after the war, as their fortune, which was entirely in Confederate money, was worthless. The new owner was an enterprising fellow, and took extensive notes on the interior of the house before meticulously taking it apart, with the intention of taking it to the Chicago World's Fair, like the building at Harpers Ferry that housed John Brown. But with the travel cost from Appomattox to Chicago prohibitively expensive, he decided to re-build it in the much closer Washington, D.C. ... but he went bankrupt shortly after, leaving the McLean House not much more than a pile of stones and slowly rotting wood.
It was re-built on the spot years later and restored to what it would have looked like when it hosted the generals of both sides. With a mix of originals and replicas, it really wasn't all that big.
Though still immensely hot, we made the trek to the gift shop, where - in addition to the obligatory ornament - my dad got a few books for himself. I have no shortage of assurance that he will have completed these tomes within the week.
Back in the car, we continued down the road a little ways. Hungry, and with nothing to eat on Route 29 itself, we exited and found an Applebee's, where we all got what we'd had yesterday, purely in the interest of time, as our main priority at that point was to get back home during the daylight hours. I'm glad to report that there was no atrocious karaoke at this establishment, only a waitress who called all of us "sweetheart" and "honey" in alternating order.
Two hours of driving later, we made it back home, just as the sun was setting.
This trip clocked in at 4625 miles on the dot, about 55% of the mileage that we covered on the first two trips. Strangely, it feels like we've done more, as the things to do in the Northeast are generally more tightly packed. The wilderness of northern Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and parts of Québec and Vermont was more like what we've been accustomed to out west. Though there are more baseball teams in the northeast, the number of pennants we collected was significantly lower, which I can only attribute to the fact that, in terms of mileage, this is only half a trip.
Our beloved car has finally seen its last road trip. With over 120,000 miles and many road trips in its rearview mirror, it's broken down six times on these road trips, and we were on track for five if this third trek had gone a full 8,000. She's a retired greyhound now - still a great car, but we're not going to put her through any unnecessary stress.
Tomorrow: we sleep in our own beds for the first time in roughly a month - and tonight, I don't have to pile pillows on my head to protect my ears from the wood-chipping quality of my parents' patented Tandem Snoring™.
We left the New Jersey hotel before noon and almost immediately got turned around due to the fact that there were two possible routes out of New Jersey towards Valley Forge. We ended up paying a toll and crossing over into Pennsylvania - and, like New Jersey, Pennsylvania has no welcome sign.
The roads to Valley Forge were long and tedious. Somewhere along the line we ran into a section that was just plain awful - the four lanes of the road literally slanted into each other, so much so that, if there had been two eighteen-wheelers in the middle two lanes, the inwards slant of the road would have made the tops of their trailers collide. We did not see very many trucks on this particular stretch, which was practically the only good thing one could say about it, as it featured every highway atrocity from lane-wide potholes to lanes that were cut off for road construction completely without warning.
Yet we were as determined as ever to get to Valley Forge, and get to Valley Forge we did, but not after seeing two of the most bizarre road signs on the continent within a half-hour of each other: "Beware of Aggressive Drivers" and "No Shoulder Next 1540 Feet."
The visitor center (and film) at Valley Forge didn't include any historical information we didn't already know, but it felt good to walk around and stretch our legs for a bit. But with the temperature outside at over 90 degrees, most of our walking was confined to air-conditioned establishments.
We took the driving tour around Valley Forge, which, again, wasn't much - nothing original of the encampment remains and attempts at determining the precise location of various huts and bases is nearly impossible. Nevertheless, the driving tour took us through some gorgeous countryside, passing ornate monuments to the generals who wintered there and faithful reconstructions of the log cabins the various regiments built for winter quarters.
After Valley Forge, we got onto US 202, which was atrocious. The stop-and-go traffic in the right lane - awful on brakes even in the best of conditions - was augmented by traffic going well over the speed limit in the left - and in a work zone, no less! The good news was that we didn't have to spend but two miles on this road before reaching our exit onto US 30, upon which we made good time.
We rolled through small town after small town, looking for something to eat ... and literally everything was on the other side of the road - an impossibility, even when a middle lane was available, due to the veritable horde of drivers coming in the opposite direction.
Eventually - finally - we see a Chick-Fil-A on that side of the road. With rumbling stomachs and no guarantee that there'd be any palatable food options for miles ahead, we got three chicken sandwiches and soon were continuing on our merry way - but not before we got a report from my mom, who said that the women's restroom contained, in addition to its hand-sensing squirt-contraptions that produce soap and hand sanitizer upon appropriate requests, a third hand-sensing squirt-contraption that produced mouthwash.
I see this as one of those things that would likely work only in theory.
We crossed over the wide Susquehanna River, saw a number of diners, and crossed through a number of traffic circles, which have been the bane of our existence on this particular trip.
We took US 30 to the outskirts of Gettysburg, where we took US 15 down to Maryland. We spent less than an hour in Maryland before we crossed into Virginia, which is where things really got hilarious, for my dad spun a tale of Colonel Nit-Wit, played by himself, and Major Half-Wit, played by myself, as well as a cavalcade of stars, including:
• Corporal Gilbert, whose lips were attached to his earlobe • Miss Left Foot, who didn't have a right foot • Sergeant Stumpy, who didn't have a left foot (although his right foot was later removed and put onto Miss Left Foot, and Stumpy ended up attached to the back of Corporal Gilbert) • Sergeant Hamster, who looks like a hamster • Lieutenant Claude, a possum in disguise
The interactions and voices of these characters had us in stitches from the state line all the way through to our eventual stop, to the point that my dad had a little bit of trouble snapping out of the aristocratic southern accent that he used to portray Colonel Nit-Wit.
We stopped in Leesburg at a hotel that didn't have any rooms, but, as according to one of the patrons, who came from a room while we were walking out, also didn't have hot water. With enough light to get farther down the road, we did so, and ended up pulling into Warrenton a short while later, procuring one of the last rooms at the hotel we're in now.
After we checked in, we needed something to eat, so we went down the road a little ways and pulled into the first thing that looked decent - an Applebee's. Like earlier, not our first choice for a road-trip meal, but it had to do.
It would have been quite pleasant had the not had the worse karaoke in world history been going on in one corner, including a Conway Twitty song.
I would have preferred listening to the original Conway Twitty.
I would have preferred listening to rap.
I would have preferring listening to the complete works of Anton von Webern.
I was under the impression that my dad was one of the worst singers until I experienced the horror of that karaoke. Compared to them, he sounds like an American Idol winner.
My mom wolfed down her salad, my dad consumed his steak, and I inhaled my interesting quesadilla burger, all in an attempt to get out of the pure and unavoidable torture that was being inflicted on both us and all of the other patrons, coming from other side of the building.
Thankfully, we escaped, unpacking and settling down in our room, my dad talking in his Colonel Nit-Wit voice to himself even while in the shower. (I know the folks in the other rooms can hear him when he does this, but after 26 days on the road, I've stopped caring.)
After rolling through nearby Bard College and looking at some of their freaky architecture, we headed up to the FDR Presidential Library at Hyde Park - but first, we needed some lunch. We stopped at 2:00 at Eveready Diner, a fairly new construction made to look like the ultimate '50s diner.
We later found out that they were on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives - one of the few places to have been featured multiple times. The menu was massive and included some very non-diner-like fair, such as a gyro, which my mom had. My reuben was beyond excellent, and my dad's roast was, to quote him, "succulent."
You know it's good when he talks about it coherently.
Having eaten, we got to the Library. We walked through the visitor's center to the library, where we poked around for a few moments to get a feel for the layout before doubling back to the visitor center, where a tour of the house at Hyde Park began.
The knowledgeable ranger gave a thorough rundown of the house, which has been preserved, and told a few stories that ranged from hilarious to spooky. The funniest was the account of King George on his visit to the house and his encounter with a collection of Revolutionary- and War of 1812-era cartoons that adorned a section of the wall. The King looked at it for about ten minutes, then turned to Roosevelt and said "your collection has some pieces that mine doesn't have."
Another funny story surrounded one of the few pictures that depicts Joseph Stalin smiling. While at the Yalta Conference, ready to pose for pictures, FDR was flanked by Stalin and Churchill. But to FDR, getting the Soviet agelast to break his façade was tantamount to a personal challenge. So the President whispered to Churchill that he was about to make Stalin smile. Leaning over to the mustachioed dictator, FDR whispered "I don't trust Churchill," leading to a rare grin from Stalin.
The spooky story was regarding a sculpture of Roosevelt, portraying him from the waist up only, and in a chair. While both of these could be explained fairly logically, given Roosevelt's handicapped status, the artist sculpted it a full decade before FDR contracted polio, saying then that he saw the future President as "someone who just didn't really have any use for legs."
The furniture in the house is all original, and includes artifacts such as the bed FDR was born in, the cloak he wore in the famous picture from the Yalta Conference, the chair he always sat in to await the results of elections, and one of his original wheelchairs, cobbled together from an old chair and bicycle parts. As a dabbler in architecture, Roosevelt designed parts of the house and its many eventual additions.
Back at the library, we were able to walk through at a rather brisk pace, as we're already all familiar with the history of FDR during the WWII years. However, all the information on his early life was new, as was some of the information regarding his prewar presidency.
The best part of the library was FDR's desk - fully preserved, with all of the artifacts arranged as they'd appeared when he died, and including his collection of ceramic pigs, which only the people close to him knew much about.
We exited the library as it was closing, and then exited through the visitor's center before it closed. With no reservations and a willingness to get as far down the road as we felt was safe, we went a little farther south to the village of Wappingers Falls, home of the Hudson Valley Renegades of the short-season New York-Penn League. Their opening day was last Monday, and we had to park on quite literally the very edge of the parking lot, as the game had started a little earlier and was currently in the fourth inning.
This was after we cobbled together five dollars in quarters to pay for parking, for we had used up our last dollar bills. With the promise that everything in the ballpark took credit, we got some tickets and entered the park.
Of course, our first stop was to acquire a pennant, only to be told that you could not purchase a pennant within the bare-bones confines of the team store, but could find one being sold on one of the carts that were rolling periodically around the concourse.
We looked, but with no description of what the thing looked like, we didn't know what we were looking for in the crowd, so we went up to a young lady also selling a few bits of merchandise behind a long table. While she had pennants, they weren't for sale (for some reason), and then again mentioned the carts ... only this time she pointed and said "there's one over there now."
I wasn't around to hear the last of the conversation, as I bolted through a gap in the crowd, came to a stop in front of the shocked guy that was pushing the cart, and asked, with great urgency, if he sold pennants.
He pulled out one and said that it was five dollars.
We weren't even sure if we had five whole dollars in the car, much less on our person. As we explained the situation, he gave us the pennant and said that we could pay for it inside the team store.
But the story doesn't end there, for the only person who could operate the machine to check out a non-team store item had gone outside. I worked against the grain and quickly explained what was going on, and she came inside. Triumphantly, we thanked them for their time and headed to our seats.
The score was 0-0 when we entered and was 0-0 when we left, mostly due to the idiotic baserunning of one player, who was responsible for two of the three outs in the inning. We left during the seventh-inning stretch in order to get away from the crowd, but not before seeing some of the most sadistic and bizarre between-innings games.
We've experienced games around the country and seen many a crazy promotion, from fans racing to put on a frozen t-shirt in St. Paul to fans rushing to build themselves into a gigantic hamburger ... also in St. Paul. These were for certain the weirdest games, which featured a spiteful host berating a woman for not knowing the lines from famous female movie characters, the same spiteful host moderating a bizarrely morphed game of blackjack where the loser ended up getting a pie tossed in his face, and a race wherein three teams of teenagers put disks between their legs, waddled over to a bucket, sat down, and tried to work the disks up and into the bucket without the use of their hands.
It was exactly as bizarre at it sounds like.
With all of that out of the way, we rolled on up the road and pulled into a gas station to call the hotline to find out where rooms were available. Once we had one, we hit the road ... but the road we were on was a toll road. Without an accurate way of assessing the coins we've lugged four thousand miles, we could only estimate what we could see, which was about six dollars. With no way of knowing what the cost would be at our eventual exit, we hoped for the best ... although a line from C.W. McCall's "Convoy" undoubtedly rang through our heads: "We crashed the gate doing ninety-eight/Sayin 'Let them truckers roll'."
Fortunately there was no need to do ninety-eight or crash any gates, as we were able to pay the toll using the change we had, with plenty to spare. We approached New York City but peeled off about twenty miles out, getting into New Jersey ... somewhere. Unlike most states, they don't put up "welcome to New Jersey" signs. We knew we were in New Jersey nonetheless, and we got to our hotel a little after 9:00.
While none of us were particularly hungry, we also knew that we'd done a lot of walking around and we hadn't eaten since 2:00, so we ate at the hotel. It was average food, and the real fun was with the waitress, who brought out a pitcher of lemonade after we'd all been through a refill or two. Faced with this challenge, we all pitched in. I, for one, was more thirsty than hungry, and I preferred the lemonade over the quasi-calamari, which was about 86% breading when all was said and done.
Our key lime pie dessert was augmented by a second, on-the-house slice - a surprise from our bubbly waitress. This marks the third time on this trip that we've gotten a free dessert augmentation.
Tomorrow: we try to get as far south as possible. It's too long of a drive to get home, but our plan is to make our final day as short as possible.
We left the hotel at 11:14 after amusing the valet staff with our rudimentary French, heading for Stade Municipal, looking forward to what we were sure would be a strange pennant collection from the stadium of the independent-league Québec Capitales. After circling around the hotel and working through downtown Québec, we pulled into the parking lot. Armed with a cheat-sheet for the sentences we'd need in order to purchase a pennant exclusively in French, we headed in.
Fortunately for us, the lady at the front desk knew a little more English than we know of French, and so we were able to purchase a pennant and hat.
We left the stadium around noon and exited the city as we'd entered it, then headed southwest across the St. Lawrence Seaway and headed out more into the countryside. The rain was constant, and got worse the longer we stayed in Québec. The Québécois drivers never had their rear lights on, passed at incredible speeds on wet pavement, and generally just drove like crazy people.
Around 1:00 we got drinks, snacks, and gas at a service station, using up the last of our Canadian cash. We were well into Québec farmland at this point, and we got even further into it as we meandered our way southeast along provincial routes, including the infernally infested paved drainage ditch that was QC-235, a busy two-lane road through the middle of nowhere where more than one Québec driver passed farm equipment on blind hills.
The rain increased. Standing water was visible in the fields next to us, and every truck that was going north left behind a great plume of mist. We still got across Québec, and the rains eventually abated as we passed through the small communities of Bedford and Pike River.
The strangest thing about the region of southern Québec we traversed was the random two mountains that rose up out of the flat farmland, visible for miles around even through the mist.
It took fifteen minutes to get across the border. We accessed the trip odometer when we were stopped, switching away from the Metric system and writing down our current mileage: 3590 miles, or 5777.7 kilometers.
We then entered Vermont, completing my personal collection of the contiguous 48 states. The sun broke through the clouds and we could catch more glimpses of Lake Champlain. The rain turned to mist and finally stopped altogether as we reached the town of St. Albans, which has an interesting bit of history behind it - a raid on the town in 1864 by Confederates who came down from Montreal to rob banks and send supplies back south. Despite meticulous planning, their raid wasn't as much of a success as they'd originally thought, and the men who carried it out were eventually acquitted under the logic that the raid was an act of war.
There's not much now when it comes to the raid, but we still stopped in St. Albans. The adorable downtown was scouted for historical markers and food, and we found both - right across the street from each other. We ate at a little Italian restaurant called Mimmo's, where the service was slowed due to a change in shift and some sort of refrigerator problem in the kitchen, but was delicious. We later found out that they'd won some local awards for excellence, and we could see why - my baked ziti was excellent, and I got similar reports about the pizza and meatball spaghetti.
Afterwards, we walked around across the street, where we saw the second Sherman tank in two days as well as a series of monuments dedicated to veterans of conflicts scattered around a picturesque little park.
At 5:00 we got back on the Interstate and at 5:20 we got to our hotel, where, once we settled down, loads of laundry were put into the washer.
Around 6:30 we left for the stadium of the Vermont Lake Monsters, a single-A team who shares their historic ballpark with the University of Vermont. We went down the road five minutes to the stadium. Their season won't start until next Monday, but three or four guys were there, preparing for Opening Day. A fellow let us in to purchase a pennant and hat, as well as point out some bits of their quaint little ballpark.
We then drove out of there, saw the grave of Ethan Allen, then continued into downtown Winooski, where we parked and walked around towards the Winooski River, where, to our surprise, a boardwalk overlooked the rapids below. We followed this boardwalk up the river, where it petered out into a dirt trail paralleling the river, narrowing considerably the farther we got. We saw interesting plant life and about a dozen slugs on a downed tree - all of them burnt orange, very small, and squiggling around.
The trail continued on, but we turned back - there was nothing else to see under the bridge, and deep in the woods we wanted to have plenty of light to get out, which we did. We walked around a few blocks of Winooski and then headed back to the hotel, which is full of screaming kids. Thankfully it has died down, but it was a full-on racket there for a while.
Tomorrow: continuing southbound to Fort Ticonderoga and Saratoga Springs.
We ate breakfast on the top floor. I modified my coffee with six or seven sugar packets, and it was still quite bitter. My dad drank it nearly straight, though I'm not entirely sure how. After this, we headed out into Old Québec again, just as we'd done yesterday.
But before we headed into the heart of Old Québec, we headed slightly south towards the Québec Citadel, a nearly impenetrable fortification that, like the Halifax Citadel, had served many different purposes over the years, and various structures on the site - the highest point in Québec City on this side of the St. Lawrence Seaway - have kept out invading forces for centuries. Today, it's still a military base, but serves more as a living history museum.
The Royal 22nd Regiment is still stationed there, continuing its long and gloried tradition as the only French-speaking regiment in Canada, and for its bravery in battle - specifically at Vimy Ridge during World War I.
We got a tour around the Citadel, seeing museums, the old jail, and general bits of historical interest. They had a full Sherman on display outside the old munitions building, and a large collection of bayonets in the jail - including a serrated one that looked to be a cross between a machete and a bread knife. Our guide had a thick accent but was understandable.
After exiting the Citadel (and avoiding the loud school groups that infest the historical areas) we walked down into Old Québec, where the European streets were not nearly as crowded as yesterday due to the rain that came down steadily throughout the day. We walked towards the St. Lawrence Seaway and took the funicular down.
The funicular is basically a box that's put on a inclined railway. While the box stays level, it descends on an exceptionally steep angle. The stairs are an option, but the nominal fee we paid to descend in the funicular was well worth it.
Our previous excursions had taken us around the upper city, but we were now down in the lower city, the oldest part of Old Québec. It was filled with tourists - mostly Asian - and featured shops. The architecture was not all that different from the upper city. We stopped in at a chocolate shop, where we each got two delectable morsels - I had a fairly large praline shaped like a large seashell and a much smaller bite of orange-flavored caramel, which I later found out was made from Grand Marnier - albeit without the alcohol.
Dad and I got some delicious, sweet gelato, then we went around the lower city, seeing the old town square and looking inside a very old church, which was not quite as grand as the one we saw in Chéticamp (or even the Old North Church in Boston, for that matter), but it was still serene and grand.
We walked around a little more of the old city, but the rain was getting progressively worse, the fog was rolling in, and our feet were getting sore from the sheer amount of walking that we'd done. We took the funicular back up - after some concern over maximum capacity after a bunch of Japanese tourists crammed into an already sardine-can-like environment - and walked back through Old Québec and out to our hotel.
From the topmost floors, we saw the fog get even worse. Despite the constant rain, we saw everything we really wanted to see in Québec City. In fact, the rain kept most of the large school groups off the streets, making getting around much easier on the whole. With no more towels and another night to spend in Québec City, my dad called the front desk to get six towels. Two people showed up no more than five minutes apart, each bringing six towels ... and then later, even more folks showed up with three more towels. As I write this, we have no less than fifteen sets of towels stacked around our room.
I've never seen this many towels.
With sore legs and continuously miserable weather, we nibbled upstairs, but our previous lack of food caught up to us and thus we headed downstairs for food. My dad had a flank steak with vegetables and a salad, I had a flat-iron steak, juicy and tender, with potato skins adorned with delicious and über-pungent blue cheese bits, and my mom got a small pizza, of which she ate two-thirds. Everything was flavorful and delicious. We all split a chocolate dessert and then went back up to the top floor. As I printed out directions in the business center, we entertained ourselves by trying to remember every trip meal we've eaten in the past three years.
Tomorrow: we get back to the United States, beginning the last leg of the trip.
We slept in today a little bit and ate our last meal at Hometown Kitchen, where we said our goodbyes to the waitresses. Dad went down the street a few times to check on the status of the part. James, the man at the service station, said that the part was in Sydney, the largest city on Cape Breton Island. However, there was a serious breakdown in communication between dealerships elsewhere in the Maritimes, and by midday we learned that the Sydney dealership didn't even have it.
After deliberation and debate in the room, and considering the fact that we hadn't heard or felt the brakes since James initially worked with them a few days prior, we decided to try to get back on the road. While we hated to leave Chéticamp without the part, since we'd extended our stay to get the part, James told us that if there was going to be a brake issue, we would have experienced it while driving around Chéticamp, and that we should have no trouble if we wanted to get on the road. He apologized immensely for snafus that were not his own, and insisted that we not pay him since he wasn't planning on paying for the part - one that, most likely, will never show.
With no guarantee that the part would get here tomorrow - or even any time in the coming week - we weighed the options and decided that there would be no harm in at least trying to leave Chéticamp, so we did so a little after 3:00, waving goodbye to the motel owner, a fellow named Ron, who came out of his office to bid us adieu.
Part of me will miss our little Acadian pied-à-terre, but we were all anxious to get back on the road. We'd seen all there was to see Chéticamp, all 3,000 people and no stoplights, beautiful sunsets and the sweetest folks this side of the Andy Griffith Show.
Nevertheless, much of our time on the road today was spent paying attention to that pesky back right wheel. We rolled all the way down the remaining portion of the Cabot Trail, re-linking with the Trans-Canada Highway along the Bras d'Or Lake. The same route we took from New Brunswick to Cape Breton was taken, only this time in reverse.
While the scenery was still beautiful, it was little compared to the vistas we saw in Cape Breton. We saw a bald eagle flying along the side of the road, then made it back over the Canso Causeway onto the Nova Scotia mainland - and this time, we didn't have to stop to let the bridge turn back around.
We used the brake as little as possible and hit whatever potholes we could, as James told us that hitting potholes could help to un-stick a stuck brake. Though it hasn't stuck since we stopped using the emergency brake, my dad maneuvered us into smaller potholes. He avoided the bigger ones, but it left him muttering "I'm trying to hit all the potholes ..." on multiple occasions, much to my amusement and mild whiplash.
Coming to the highlands of Cape Breton meant that we had to come up, and so too we had to come down. We rolled through Antigonish, and with everything nominal in the brake, we kept going through New Glasgow and Truro. The hills were immense, which led to another road-trip first: topping out the speedometer. With a speed limit of 110 km/h, it didn't take too much acceleration down the hill to top out the gauge at 140 before deceleration began.
We went back through the toll section and arrived in Amherst a little before 8:00. We exited and coasted into the town, stopping at the first place we saw - the very same Subway that we ate at when we were here a little over a week ago.
We used the opportunity to feel the brakes after five hours of highway driving. Not only was the offending brake not hot, it was actually - according to my dad - ever so slightly cooler than the other three, which were cool to the touch themselves. Sparing use of the brakes helped in this, but I'm beginning to think that it has much more to do with the emergency brake. My dad is now officially out of the habit of hitting it whenever we stop somewhere.
After a quick gas stop and some Mountain Dews for my dad and myself, we got back on the road bound for Prince Edward Island. While the sunsets are late in the Maritimes, they're still not places where one would want to drive at night if one could help it.
We crossed back over into New Brunswick and took the first exit - Trans-Canada Route 16, two deserted lanes filled with a pantheon of small potholes. I got jostled around a little bit, but it made my dad feel better about the brake situation.
It was then that we saw our first glimpse of the epic monstrosity known as the Confederation Bridge, the only road link to Prince Edward Island.
It's like a regular bridge, except eight miles long and terrifying.
It took about ten minutes to cross this bridge, and every one was a little nerve-wracking. Not for the bridge, but for the car - but we crossed over without incident, arriving in Prince Edward Island, the smallest province, at exactly 9:00 Atlantic time. Sunset had not yet ended.
But our journey was not yet over. Navigating the confusing signs in the rapidly decreasing sunlight was difficult enough, we still had another half an hour of driving ahead of us before getting to Charlottetown, the capital and largest city of PEI.
The scenery looks like North Carolina - eerily so, in fact. In addition to Charlottetown, we passed through a community called Tryon, saw a sign for a community with the same name as the street we used to live on, and pulled off for another brake check (everything was still good) on a road with the same name as the one we live on now. Factor in the scenery, which is like North Carolinian farmland with a little more redness in the dirt, and we felt strangely at home.
We pulled into the hotel at 9:41 and got a room. After over six hours of hard driving, the brakes still felt completely normal. The only difference was that the offending brake, when sniffed, smelled just a little bit different due to its re-greasing in Chéticamp.
Tomorrow: we explore the picturesque province of Prince Edward Island before heading back over the bridge to decrease our drive time to Québec in two days.
We slept in and ate some brunch at the place that's become our local favorite - Hometown Kitchen. All the waitresses know us now, and they brought a whole butterscotch pie to the table to show us, with a promise that they'd save a slice for my dad. We ate well, and my dad enjoyed his pie. For the first time, I sampled a bite. It was alright, but compared to my beloved turtle cheesecake it was actually rather bland. Regardless of my opinion, it's their most popular dessert.
We did a little more of our French back at the room, then took some short naps. Upon awakening, we decided to do one the one thing left in Chéticamp we have not yet done - walk on the boardwalk, Quai Matheu, that runs along the water, paralleling the road, from roughly our hotel down to Wabo's Pizza, which we ate a few days ago.
The wind was brisk, but it was a nice walk, and surprisingly short. Upon our return, we did even more French - we're now 5/8ths through! - and then went back down to Hometown Kitchen for our sixth and penultimate time. We got pictures of Yoder with our two waitresses, saw a beautiful sunset, and ate more delicious crab legs. I got ten legs this time, and even though the last three or so cooled off by the time I got around to it, it was still excellent - and that is the sign of really good crab.
After saying our goodbyes to our friends there who won't be there tomorrow when we go there for breakfast, we headed back to the room to do more French and get ready for tomorrow.
Tomorrow: we hit the road again to Prince Edward Island, almost completing our collection of provinces that one can drive to without going on a ferry or unpaved road.
We went out to have lunch at the same place we had lunch for the past two days. My dad got Steak on a Stick (with rice!) and my mom and I got two different kinds of fish and chips. For dessert, I had the turtle cheesecake again, while my dad fell in love with a butterscotch pie topped with a massive amount of meringue.
The weather was nasty today - all wind and rain and fog and chill. We spent most of our time indoors as possible.
After doing some Rosetta Stone French back in the room, we went back to the National Park side of Chéticamp to visit the Hooked Rug Museum. Hooked rugs, made by slipping yarn through stretched burlap in patterns not dissimilar to a gigantic cross-stitch, are a Chéticamp specialty, and most of the examples in the museum were stunning. Considered works of art as opposed to items to walk on, many were amazingly intricate, using miles of yarn hand-died in up to 400 different colors just for one rug. The time-consuming nature of this meant that the largest rugs - such as ones depicting the Crucifixion and the Resurrection - took a year of work to make each.
Mural-esque rugs depicted a collage of scenery from U.S. and Canadian history, including one that featured the heads of every Canadian Prime Minister (until about 1960) and every U.S. President (until about 1960). The artist of much of the rugs in the museum hand-made them up until her death, and her work has been featured in the White House, the Vatican, and Buckingham Palace.
I found the Prime Minister with the best name - a fellow named Diefenbaker, who has a lake in Saskatchewan named after him - and took a picture with Yoder the Duck next to his immense forehead.
After engrossing ourselves in the beauty of these rugs for about an hour, talking to the Acadians who staffed the place, and getting an ornament for my mom's Collection, we went back, did a little more French, then went back out for dinner - again at the same place. This time, I got some crab legs - and they were some of the most juicy things ever. If crabs had bones, this meat would have fallen right off them.
I had another slice of my beloved Turtle Cheesecake, but my dad was out of luck - the place had ran out of butterscotch pie for the day. Saddened, he drowned his disappointment in sugar-packet-laden coffee.
(Side note: I think my mom is tired, as she's been scattered for most of the day. While in the car, she thought that it was in the shop, and called out to it ... while she was sitting in the back seat as we rolled down the main street. After repeated spastic moments during our French sessions, we decided to keep her from messing with the laptop controls. She also dropped a whole sugar packet - paper and all! - into her then-black coffee.)
We finished up our French, so we're now halfway done with the course (and we know some basic parts of a conversation before we hit Québec).
Tomorrow: our last full day in Chéticamp as our unexpected stay begins to draw to a close.
We got up groggily. My dad got up to see if the service station had a part from Sydney. They did not, but we were cleared to drive around the greater Chéticamp area from the edge of Cape Breton Highlands National Park down to a little beyond the edge of Chéticamp. Our brakes sounded no different than they had previously on the trip. Without using the emergency brake, we were initially pretty confident that we could limp along back to the States ... but if we broke down on what remains of the Cabot Trail and back off Cape Breton Island, we don't have a towing option - even less so on the weekend.
All of Chéticamp's businesses and half of the houses are on one road - the Cabot Trail - that acts as its main street. Everyone knows everyone else, and while nearly everyone communicates in French as the default, everyone is also bilingual. English speakers are initially regarded with a slight air of contempt, but we endear ourselves to them with our attempts at trying to speak their language.
With the car cleared for local excursions, we drove south from Chéticamp and drove over onto Chéticamp Island, which parallels the town. We went as far as the pavement did before turning around, but we could see the entirety of Chéticamp.
We turned back and ate some massive sandwiches at All Aboard Restaurant, sampling the local custom of putting vinegar on their fries (which made my dad's eyes cross because he put a little too much vinegar on a tiny fry). We split their strawberry shortcake and got some advice from the waitress, who told us of a lighthouse on the other side of Chéticamp Island. While she said that it was a dirt road, she also said that it was in good condition.
My parents took a nap in the room, waking up around 4:00 or so and ready for the lighthouse. We took the same road over to Chéticamp Island and turned onto the dirt road.
At first, the road wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but one could see well-wore tracks with less gravel. But as we passed over a small cattle crossing, the road conditions worsened considerably. Potholes filled up with muddy water, huge rocks shook the car back and forth, and gravel made up the rest of the slanted road - all not but a few feet higher than the water that was a little too close for comfort.
We had to turn back, but not before going up and then back down a hill - which wasn't fun for anyone involved.
You have no idea how much of a relief pavement feels after that.
With a newfound awareness that the Chéticamp folks' idea of a dirt road differs significantly from our idea of a dirt road, we doubled back towards the town, stopping for some supplies at a small convenience store/music shop, a local institution. The man who ran it had heard of us, saying "so you're the folks with the black car ..."
We're becoming famous in Chéticamp.
We purchased some more water, a can opener so my dad can get into the Coca-Cola bottles he got yesterday, and a cream soda, purchased on the advice of the tow truck driver, who remarked that the blueberry soda tasted like "blueberries mixed with cream soda." I'm drinking it now, and it tastes like liquid cookie dough. It's delicious.
This also marked the first time in my life that I've seen bagged milk. I'd heard stories about Canadians purchasing their milk in bags, and it's just as ridiculously impractical in person. I cannot for the life of me understand how bagged milk is of any advantage to the consumer.
Back on the road up Chéticamp, we stopped at the church, which we'd heard had a gorgeous interior but kept weird times. The steeple is visible throughout the area, and the inside didn't disappoint.
It looked much more like a church interior from a large and affluent city, not the Acadian Mayberry of Chéticamp. Gold leaf was everywhere and everything was extraordinarily intricate. We walked around, then went up to the balcony to see a bird's-eye view of the stunning chapel and to look at the organ, which appears to still use a hand-cranked bellows system. Lifelike statues of saints look down from alcoves, massive murals adorn available spaces, and everything just feels so vast and grand.
After ogling sufficiently at this architectural marvel - built stone-by-stone in the 1890s - we went back through Chéticamp and through to the other side, back into Cape Breton Highlands National Park. We stopped right before the great big mountain that was the site of the beginning of our problems. We went down to the ocean and dipped our hands into the waves. I was surprised at how warm this portion of the north Atlantic is, as I'd always envisioned it as cold almost year-round.
We hiked up the short but steep trail to the overlook at the top of a large rock, but we couldn't see too much from the top - especially compared to the vistas we could see on the Skyline trail yesterday.
We headed back to the car and double-backed into town, stopping at Hometown Restaurant, where we had our 4:00, post-Skyline lunch yesterday. We ate light, with individual salads (their Caesar is one of the best I've ever had - croutons that aren't bread-rocks and just the right amount of garlic), a lobster dip, and a slice of turtle cheesecake. All three are worth a third trip on their own.
(My dad and I ordered tea, since they had decent sweet tea before. Unfortunately, we're used to iced tea being the default, and so we were rather shocked when our waitress brought out steaming pitchers. We rectified this, but it was quite the faux pas on our part.)
We ended up talking to the owner/chef a while about various things. My dad's still trying to rope me into playing the piano at one of these restaurants - there are a surprising number of them here! - to help pay for our time in Chéticamp (although, amazingly, our Cape Breton experience will come out significantly under budget). We also learned that the reason the fellow earlier knew about our car is because one of the folks at the repair shop is quite the gossip and tells stories about folks who had come through to most anyone who will listen.
At the conclusion of this light supper, we got a second dessert just a little ways down the street at a place called Mr. Chicken, which has - according to the Hometown owner/chef - the best ice cream in Canada. Coming from a woman who has been all across Canada, we decided to give it a whirl.
My dad had a milkshake, but my mom and I got the maple walnut. Though we got the smallest size - a "baby bite," as they were called - they were easily a half-pint each. When they said "baby bite," I thought they meant a bite for a baby, not one the size of a baby.
With the days' adventures concluded, we headed back to our room.
The brakes didn't act up. We probably could make it at least as far as Antigonish, perhaps all the way home. But it's a long rural drive from here in Chéticamp all the way to the Prince Edward Island ferry, and tow trucks don't operate on the weekends. Though the thought that we could make it is still there, we know it's best not to push our luck.
If the part doesn't get here by Monday, though, we're going to get out of Chéticamp. As nice as this little place is, we still have a schedule to keep.
We left our hotel at 11:00 and topped off the gas tank before going back downtown as we accidentally did yesterday, this time entering the now-open Halifax Citadel. Used from colonial times up until WWII for various purposes, the Citadel is now refurbished and acts as a living history museum, with folks dressed up in period costume, marching around, playing bagpipes, firing off cannon, etc.
After going down a blind one-way ramp (and hoping that people would be following the stoplight at the bottom), we parked and entered the Citadel. We walked around quite a bit of it, asking the folks in costume any questions we could think of. The re-enactors and other costumed men were from the 78th Highlanders, and we saw them fire off the noon cannon, which could be heard echoing off of every building in Halifax. It was quite an explosion.
We wandered up and down, checking out the cannon, the magazine, holding cells, and other things. We visited the schoolhouse, where the poor and illiterate soldiers could get a high-school level of education in order to advance up the ranks. In the schoolhouse area, we saw an old-timey Magic Lantern (an early kind of color image projector), a primer book which listed the seventh planet - later to be known as Uranus - as "Herschel," after its discoverer.
Further walking around the place, we stopped by a room where we could try on replica uniforms of the 78th Highlanders. I ended up with the uniform of the lead piper, while my dad got the officers' uniform. We posed with the agreeable fellow who helped us put the thick wool jackets and kilts over our clothing and with Yoder.
After walking around most of the Citadel, we backtracked along the road up to Truro, where we had split off to go to Halifax yesterday. When we got to Truro we turned east, heading along Nova Scotia bound for Cape Breton Island.
I started driving for a bit around the town of Pictou ... which is where the fun began, road-wise. The speed limit was constantly changing, the road kept changing from an Interstate-quality limited-access corridor to a thin two-or-three-lane one, and the locals went 150 km/h in a 100 km/h zone on the two-lane sections with trucks oncoming way too close for comfort.
Civilization was few and far between already, but somehow everything got even more desolate around Canso Causeway, where we got a quick bite at a nearby Subway before almost every scrap of civilization ran out.
In the ostentatiously-named Municipality of the District of Guysborough, we had to stop for a bridge that was rotated to let a ship through the causeway. It didn't take too long, and it was interesting seeing the bridge twist around before us. At around 5:00 we officially crossed over Canso Causeway and onto Cape Breton Island.
Most of the communities we passed were inhabited by Native Americans, but we did pass through a number of signs and place names indicating the region's living Celtic heritage. A few signs were in Gaelic and the only Gaelic college in North America is here - somewhere along the Cabot Trail. We'll be seeing it some time in the coming days.
A little before 6:00 we arrived in Baddeck and checked into our quaint little motel, overlooking the gorgeous Bras d'Or Lake. We're not too far from the site of the first flight in the British Empire - in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that our room overlooks it ...
We ate at the adjoining restaurant. Unsure of what we wanted, we ordered the Thai Nachos - spicy won-ton chips covered in cheese, chicken, and a spicy sauce. I also had this for an entrée. My dad had the fish and chips, my mom had the salmon, and we all sampled around. I found the sampler dessert rather gross (not a fan of carrot cake, bread pudding, or mint brownies), and we entertained ourselves and our waiter, who had about as pronounced a Canadian accent as one can have.
Tomorrow: we begin the drive on the scenic Cabot Trail around Cape Breton Island.
