Combo Weekend: Tuckahoe and Rehoboth

In the era of COVID, we're not getting away from home much (no one is) and so it felt pretty amazing to take a trip that lasted FOUR whole nights and took us two states away from Virginia (three, if you count DC).

Valerie and I had a goal of visiting our friends Gail and Chris, who moved a few years ago to their dream retirement home in Rehoboth Beach. We figured that as long as we stayed away from the busy parts of the beachfront, the COVID risk was OK. Meanwhile, some of my kayak friends were planning a socially distant camping trip to Tuckahoe State Park on the Eastern Shore - a location which is pretty much right along the route to Rehoboth. Through some miracle we were able to influence these two trips to align in a way that allowed us to make one big combined trip out of it.

After I spent some significant time Friday morning cramming two bicycles, a kayak, cycling gear, camping gear, kayaking gear, and vacation gear into my car, we set off and made it to Rehoboth (really Lewes, but who's counting?) in record time. Let me tell you, light traffic is the silver lining in this whole coronavirus thing. I unloaded the bikes and Valerie's things, hung out for lunch, then headed an hour back west to Tuckahoe. The state park is quite lovely. The campsites are quite big, so it was easy to feel safe in terms of social distancing. Rob arrived just as I did, followed not long after by Tom and Suzanne. We all had adjacent sites; Bela and Leigh brought their camper and so stayed in a different part of the park (we were in the tent loop).

As always, it's interesting to see what every brings to set up their camp. I went on the minimal end, since I had to be conservative with space in the car. Small tent (the one I take kayak camping), and minimalist kitchen gear (I had planned meals that didn't require much cooking). I did bring my folding table, a full size chair and my 9 ft Kelty tarp. These came in handy when it sprinkled during dinner one night. Rob had a slightly more sophisticated setup with a full pop-up shelter. Suzanne managed rain protection with some impressive campcraft origami, erecting a tarp over the picnic table at the campsite. This gave her shelter for cooking and eating. I wish I had taken a picture of what she set up - it was a masterpiece of tent poles and guy lines. She also went with a more complete kitchen than I did. I didn't see much of Tom's campsite - he was at the far end and I never made it over there, and I never made it over to Bela's. 

My campsite

One new-to-coronavirus-times thing most of us brought was our own alternative bathroom facilities so that we didn't have to enter the campground restrooms if we didn't want to. These included variants on the old "groover" concept. For my part, I bought a toilet seat that snaps onto a five gallon bucket, which I paired with a Home Depot bucket that had a big "Let's Do This!" slogan on the side - an amusing combo. My toilet seat came as a cheapo combo with a really minimal privacy tent - but it did the trick. Or I imagine it would have - due to the vagaries of my digestive system (sorry, TMI) I never wound up testing it.

Let's do this! 

Unfortunately, we couldn't share meals but we did do socially distant hanging out after dinner then turned in early. The weather had been hot and sticky, so the cool temperatures overnight on Friday a were a very pleasant surprise. 

Saturday morning we rolled early to get on the water ahead of the heat. We launched onto Tuckahoe Creek from Covey's Landing (not COVID's Landing) and headed upriver through water lined with spatterdock and wild rice. Our original goal was to paddle to the town of Hillsborough and back, but when we got there we all felt we had some energy left in us and so we decided to continue on to see a cool old railroad bridge a bit further upriver. I expected that we would turn around at that point, but Tom and Suzanne took off continuing upriver. I got hung up on some submerged trees and had to back out and go through a different span of the bridge. Rob was hanging back to get some pictures, and Bela was near the back too. 

Approaching the 19th century railroad bridge

The Paddler from the Black Lagoon

At this point, the whole nature of the trip changed for me. What had been a group traveling and making decisions together now split, with Tom and Suzanne pushing ahead up front - how far, no one knew - while the rest of us, with no control over the matter, were reduced to chasing after them for as long as they continued to paddle upriver. Those who know me know I like to have a plan and stick with it, so this unexpected open-ended leg of the trip put me into a bad frame of mind for a little while. Fortunately, after not too long the river became too narrow and full of deadfalls to navigate and we all turned around and headed back together - once more as a unified group. I felt better again. We made a lunch stop at a nice quiet landing, which included taking a dip in the river to cool off, as it had gotten quite hot.

By the time we got back to camp we were all a little worn out from 15 miles / five hours of paddling in the hot sun. Rob, a little dazed, I guess, backed his car into a tree - twice! - while trying to back into his campsite. I joined in the post-paddling hanging out but after a little while was abruptly overwhelmed with tiredness and slinked off to my tent for a nap. Only Suzanne came back full of energy - while the rest of us collapsed in one way or another she went on a hike.

It could have been worse - he could have dented his kayak

We each prepared and ate our separate dinners then met up at Rob's site to chat. We had the idea of making a fire (Bela even brought wood) but it was too darn hot to do so.

Sunday we rose early again after a hotter, stickier overnight. We wanted to beat the heat again and also wanted to be back in time to break camp before "checkout time" of 1 PM. Tom managed to get up, break camp and pack all his gear before we rolled to go kayaking; the rest of us packed some things but left others for afterwards. We went to the same launch and did a six mile, 2 1/2 hour paddle in the opposite direction from the day before. It was once again quite hot, so we took a nice break for splashing and rolling practice. When we got back Tom headed straight home, while the rest of us headed back to the campground to clean up and take down the rest of our stuff. I took the time to repack some things to be ready for the next phase of my trip. Rob, Suzanne and Bela headed for home, and I headed back east to Rehoboth.

Splash break

Suzanne and Bela

Gail and Chris were, as always, the perfect hosts. They always seem really happy to host guests and to prepare little niceties (like home-baked scones) and I feel totally at home in their house. We didn't really go out Sunday afternoon. For dinner we grilled salmon and corn and then went over to the Hopkins Farm Creamery for dessert. The Creamery is within walking distance of the house, but again, in the COVID era they've done away with ordering at the window and milling about waiting for your order. Instead, everything is done via drive-through. You drive over and join a long line of cars. As you get towards the front someone comes over and takes your order, and by the time you reach the front your order is ready. Not as much fun (and you can't go look at the cows - though you can still smell them), but it is what it is.

While I was off camping, Valerie and Gail watched the sun rise at the beach

Monday Gail, Chris and I went for a 28 mile bike ride through pretty and surprisingly varied terrain - paved bike trails, sandy beach trails at Cape Henlopen, down into Rehoboth beach, and through some stunning neighborhoods (Henlopen Acres) back to the house. Chris and I had been talking Friday night about the latest cycling buzz about how we've all been running our tires at too high a pressure and that the new orthodoxy was becoming to ride at lower pressure. When we got back from our ride Chris told me that before our ride, while I was inside getting ready, as an experiment he had let some air out of my tires, reducing the pressure by about 10 psi. Not his tires, my tires. To tell you the truth I didn't notice and so no harm done, and Chris is an adorable puppy-dog of a person so it's hard to be mad at him, but part of me was angry - it really wasn't his place to mess with my bike without asking me. Perhaps on our next ride I should loosen the cables on his brakes - y'know, just as an experiment. Grrr. I felt violated.

Biking through Cape Henlopen

Monday afternoon we all went over to a quiet, bay side beach. It's hard to believe this place exists - no crowds, easy on street parking. It's just a little neighborhood beach that's apparently not popular with the tourists because it has no waves and no honkytonk boardwalk. Well, let me tell you, going in the water was wonderful! And then, as if we hadn't done enough activities, Valerie and Gail did a short bike ride while Chris and I hung out back at the house.

Monday evening was an exercise in flightiness. We were going to order dinner in; however, despite deciding the previous day that we would have to order food early because of the crowds we did no such thing and sure enough, the restaurant we had targeted had a super-long wait for orders. We would up having to call around to find a place we could get food without a crazy wait - but we did, and all was well.

Tuesday morning I once again played the game of loading the car with all our stuff, and Valerie and I headed home, happy to have had a great trip and sad to see it come to an end.

Georgian Bay, Part 4: Up Into Collins Inlet

Day 8 (Thurs): Readers of this adventure already know that wind is the defining element of paddling on Georgian Bay. The forecast for Thursday through Saturday was unsettling enough to catch the attention of even a non-worrier like me. I thought it might be prudent to return to the put-in early ahead of the weather; however that idea was dead on arrival when presented to the larger group. So, off we went into a few more days of wind and rain.

Thursday was our biggest move of the trip, from the southern side of Phillip Edward Island around the east side, up Beaverstone Bay and then around the top of the island into Collins Inlet. I apologize to readers of this blog that there are a confusingly large number of bays to remember. All along we were in Georgian Bay (big), but were paddling through many smaller bays formed by Phillip Edward Island. The best I can suggest is that the curious reader peruse the map.

We packed the boats and said goodbye to our sweet "Limerick" campsite on Crume Island and headed out. We initially found ourselves paddling calm water, shielded as we were from the wind, which was blowing from the northeast (we had the landmass of the island protecting us from the wind). The first miles were familiar territory, as we had paddled them the day before. Once we turned the corner into Beaverstone Bay, however, it was a different story as we found ourselves kayaking straight into a fairly strong wind. Paddling into the wind is less nerve-wracking than any other direction, as waves coming at you head-on don’t do nasty things like try to knock you over or spin you off course. Rather, paddling into a headwind is just tiring, like paddling though molasses. Everyone handled it well, but we definitely appreciated a snack break we took in a cove of a small private island, which allowed us to stop paddling for a few minutes without losing ground by being pushed backwards. The cove was home to a private home, complete with totem pole (note to self: in next life, arrange to own a private island).

Around the corner into Beaverstone Bay

About two thirds of the way up Beaverstone Bay we started looking for a place for a lunch break. Unfortunately, the islands in the area had pretty steep shorelines making landing impossible and we had to hunt for a while before finding a small hunk of rock on which to perch - just about big enough for five of us to pull our kayaks out of the water and perch for lunch, and on the other side of a boulder there was privacy for bathroom needs. Eating lunch on a rock, as we did several times on this trip, is something I enjoy, though I understand that it's not everyone's idea of a dream vacation. I think I've passed this kind of sense of adventure on to Ted, as he recently wrote in his own travel blog about having happily eaten tortellini from a Ziploc bag while crouched in a Porta-potty (freshly cleaned, fortunately) taking shelter from a rainstorm during his hike on the C&O and GAP trails. Both tuna on a rock and tortellini in a toilet are the kind of crazy stuff that make you smile but which bring looks of horror to your friends' faces when you tell them about it.

Into Collins Inlet

Paddling in the confines of Collins Inlet

Me

After lunch the going got a little easier, as the wind seemed to let up a little bit. Or maybe it was just my drug-fueled perception of it, as at lunch break I had ingested a miraculous performance enhancer known as caffeine. Since my surgery I've kicked the daily maintenance caffeine habit and instead use it only as needed as a performance-boosting stimulant. About 70 miles into the 100 mile bike ride I did last year a café latte gave me a boost which took me through the rest of the miles, and during lunch on the rock I popped a caffeinated GU gel packet which I had stashed in my PFD for just such purposes. Man, a good shot of caffeine has a Popeye eats-spinach kind of effect on me. Woo Hoo! Bring on the miles!

Energy gel packets such as the one I had stashed in my PFD are popular in the cycling world. In preparation for this trip I bought a few at the Laughing Lizard bike shop and cafe in Herndon (incidentally, the same place I got my latte on my century bike ride). I went in, ordered a decaf latte, making my usual fuss to ensure they make it decaf: “Make sure it’s decaf.” “This is decaf, right?” You should have seen the puzzled look on the guy’s face when I asked him to ring up my decaf “this coffee is decaf, right?” decaf latte and then threw a couple of high caffeine energy packs on the counter as part of the purchase.

Beaverstone Bay offered some lovely scenery in the form of typical Georgian Bay pink glacial pink granite islands and northern woods. Three quarters of the way up the bay we were all pretty tired but our spirits were buoyed when we started to hit channel markers, which confirmed that we were approaching Collins Inlet. We were happy to be getting near the end of our slog into the wind, and indeed when we rounded the corner into the inlet conditions calmed down quite a bit and the scene changed from open water to a narrow body of water lined by high rock cliffs.

Our next challenge was finding a campsite. The paddler’s map has campsites marked, but there’s no indication of which are big enough for a group of five kayakers. We rejected the first one outright as being to small, vertical and exposed, which meant paddling another mile or two to the next one in Mill Lake. We rejected that one for the same reasons. The third campsite showed some promise, but from the water seemed small as well, though the following day we stopped to talk to a group that had come in behind us and camped there. They fit eight people on the site, and while they said it was a tight fit I guess the campsite was bigger than it looked from the water. By this point the water bladder on the back of my PFD was empty and my other bladder was achingly full. We were also running out of sites so even though I'm not generally one to worry, I was starting to get a little anxious to about finding a campsite. Fortunately, Suzanne “had a good feeling” about the site on Archers Island. The site had a tight landing spot, but we got out and found it to be a lovely campsite. We subsequently realized that, as with our previous site, this was one of the sites marked in the Hodnett Canoe Guide. Clearly the Hodnett people had selected the best sites in the area.

Third campsite

We made camp, taking care to set things up carefully. Rain and wind were once again in the forecast for Friday and we wanted to be well battened down in advance of the storm.

I don't remember, but I think it might have been Thursday that I finally took a shower. Tom loves a shower while camping and he loves the "camp craft" of rigging up camping devices. Over the years he's progressed from a solar sun shower to a handheld electric shower (not exactly this one but similar). We set up a collapsible bucket, which gets filled with a combination of lake water and heated water. You dip the hose into the shower bucket and click a button on the nozzle and presto, ... a somewhat warm shower! I had demurred on using the shower when he set it up at the previous campsite because I hate being cold and would rather be stinky than stand naked in a cold breeze, my shivering relieved only by an occasional blast of lukewarm water. However, by Thursday I had gotten to the point where I could no longer control my stench with wipes and so finally broke down and used the shower. Despite the chilliness of the experience it felt really good to get clean. I will say that some group members are happy to bathe themselves in the cold water of the lakes when we travel. The amount of screaming that goes on when they do this usually reconfirms my choice to remain stinky rather than cold. The only time I'll dip myself into a cold lake is if we get a really nice warm, sunny day - of which we had none on this trip.

Can you spot Béla in the water? He's doing something I'll never do - immersing himself in the cold water of Georgian Bay (this is back at campsite #2)

We had Jen’s Gado Gado for dinner while we sat on the point of the island, the sunset to our left and the nearly full moonrise to our right. I drank the last of my bourbon. My food bags were getting pretty light. Must be nearing the end.

Sunset to our left ...

... moonrise to our right

Day 9 (Fri): Our last full day! Well, full day in terms of hours, in that there are still 24 of them, but half day in terms of activities. We knew that bad weather was going to roll in once again and that we would be forced to spend the afternoon tent-bound. We got on the water early to give us time to have a decent outing before the weather rolled in around noon. On our way through Collins Inlet we had passed the abandoned logging town (also known as Collins Inlet) but we were on a hunt for a campsite and didn't stop. We paddled back over to that area where we saw the remnants of the old logging town, which was abandoned in the early 20th century once the area was logged out, and the more recently closed Mahzenazing River Lodge, which appears to only recently have been abandoned - as of 2017, when my paddling of the area map was printed, it was apparently still a going concern (Mill Lake Lodge on the south side of Collins Inlet is still an active business - the only commercial business we saw the whole trip). Along the north side of the inlet you can spot various remnants of the logging days: iron rings anchored in rocks which once were used to hold logging booms in place (Jen guessed the purpose of the rings - later confirmed from the paddling map), remains of pilings from the logging camp’s loading docks, etc. We toured Sawdust Bay, once no doubt aptly named but now returned to a seemingly untouched natural state.

On the way back the wind picked up pretty fiercely, occasionally attempting to spin our boats around. Bela, who in general is the best navigator of the bunch of us, somehow managed to almost get us lost on the way back - not easy to do when you’re paddling a 1/4 mile wide channel. But cooler heads and GPS prevailed and we found our way back with no issues. We timed our trip about right: it was starting to rain as we returned to camp 11ish. All of us except Tom ultimately hunkered down under the tarp for a while and had lunch together. For me it was the rare treat of turkey jerky (not a lot of fat, but I still avoid it because it's loaded with sodium - it was a nice change from my usual choices of tuna and peanut butter), along with a squeeze pouch of fruit mush, week-old tortillas, and a fruit bar. Plus some chickpeas and dried “imperfect” mangoes provided by Suzanne and Béla respectively. Fine dining!

Remnants of logging days

Abandoned logging camp building

Beaver lodge 

Suzanne paddles past abandoned buildings

This tractor isn't going anywhere

After lunch it was another afternoon stuck in the tent in the rain. Here’s a little snippet of the fun things I did while stuck in a roughly 3 x 6 ft. space all afternoon: took my phone off airplane mode to see if it would connect. Spent a few minutes in that frustrating state where the phone says “3G” but really isn’t connecting at all (there was only one specific spot on the island where you could stand and really get connectivity). Put the phone back into airplane mode. Took my headphones out so I could watch some downloaded Netflix. Noticed that the ear buds were kind of gross. Figured out how to gently remove the squishy ear bud tips. Blew the crud out of them by blowing on them, transferring the ear crud first to the screen of my phone, then ultimately to the tent floor. Wondered if I had accomplished anything in terms of increased cleanliness by transferring my earwax from earbuds to tent floor. Switched out of airplane mode to see if connectivity had miraculously improved while I was cleaning my headphones. Spent more time in zombie 3G mode. Put the phone back into airplane mode. Watched Netflix. Read a book. Peed into a bottle to avoid going out into the rain. Noticed that the tent had begun to take on a little bit of that public restroom smell. Vowed to go outside the next time I had to pee. Took pictures of myself making faces. Watched a caterpillar crawl up the outside of my tent. Thought about how I could be showered and halfway home by now. [Note: this paragraph was written in my tent on Friday. As it reflects my frustration with being stuck in the tent in the rain, I have left it pretty much as initially drafted].

After a few hours of rainy solitary confinement in a tent, caterpillars become pretty interesting entertainment

If you are bored enough, making faces into the phone is almost as entertaining as watching caterpillars

I did have the thought that the rainy days gave me a chance to experience how normal people spend their vacations. I mean, if I told people I had spent my vacation reading, catching up on Netflix and napping by a beautiful lake they would have thought it sounded like perfectly normal, relaxing downtime. As long as I left out the peeing into a bottle part. And the pooping into a bag part. And the sleeping and eating on a rock part ...

This entry covers 2nd campsite to 3rd campsite and other explorations in Collins Inlet (the channel across the top of the island).

Costa Rica Part VI - Through the Canal

A man, a plan, a canal. Panama. I've heard this palindrome many times, but it had never occurred to me to think about exactly who the "man" was. I certainly didn't know that he was a fellow Brooklynite and that I was in fact very familiar with his name. George Washington Goethals was a U.S. Army general and civil engineer who served as the administrator and supervisor for the construction of the canal. The French spent decades in a bungled attempt to build a canal, and after they surrendered (so to speak) the U.S. took over and, under  Goethals' leadership, successfully completed the canal. Today, Goethals is memorialized by a bridge bearing his name connecting Staten Island to New Jersey. I have traversed this bridge (both the old one and the much superior replacement) many, many times without giving its name a single thought. In contrast, while we're on the subject of New York bridge trivia, I do know who Thaddeus Kosciuszko, he of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway bridge over Newton Creek (both the old one and the much superior replacement), was. Go figure.

Anyway, the Panama Canal was completed in 1914 and today is both a key component in the world's trade economy (some 15,000 ships pass through the canal each year) and something of an antique. It also appears to be something of a make-work program for Panamanians (as well as a big money-maker for the country). As I've already mentioned, when you want to pass through the canal the first thing you do is wait. And wait. Eventually, it's your turn and if you're a small ship like us you get paired up with another ship and pass through the locks together.

The Panama Canal is not a single long ditch like the C&O Canal. Rather, from the ocean a series of locks raise ships up into Gatun Lake, an artificial lake created for this purpose, which sits about 85 feet above sea level. Gatun Lake is large - it spans half a continent (OK, the continent is only 30 miles wide at that part of Panama). At the other end of the lake, ships are lowered by another set of locks into the other ocean. So, you go through locks at both ends but most of the passage through the "canal" is actually a traversal of a large, man-made lake. And the 2016 expansion of the canal just added new, larger locks in parallel with the original locks (like adding more lanes at the toll booth) - the rest of the traversal is the same no matter which locks you went through.

Here's an interesting factoid - the Pacific has a much greater tidal variation than the Atlantic, so "sea level" can vary by tens of feet from one side of the canal to the other. I always thought "sea level" was one particular elevation, but I guess it's not.

Line handlers come aboard

So, the process is as follows: as soon as you enter the canal area a pilot comes on board. He directs the ship through the initial approach to the canal. Then fourteen line-handlers come on board. I cannot imagine why a ship our size would need seven people forward and seven people aft to handle the lines, but like I said - I think this is a little bit of make-work for Panamanians. Oh, and the fourteen people don't all come on one boat. Our guys came on about five different boats (each easily big enough to hold fourteen passengers).

As you approach the canal you see the sophisticated signalling system - a big illuminated arrow pointing to the lane you're supposed to head to. They physically rotate the arrow and the angle of the arrow signifies what the ship is supposed to do (more on the arrows on p.80 of this document). As the ship approaches the lock two guys in a rowboat come out and toss over a line. Really, 15,000 times per year these two guys row out to toss a line to the incoming ship. This lightweight line is used by the line handlers to pull aboard the mooring lines, which are then used to tie the ship to the little electric locomotives (referred to as "mules") used  to guide the ship through the locks. Occasionally, as in our case, the line handlers (all fourteen of them) goof up - they dropped one of our lines and a tugboat had to come along and nudge us into place so they could re-do the lines.

The illuminated arrow

The rowboat guys

"Mule" locomotive

Once you are moored into place the locks close and fill with water. The locks fill in under ten minutes, which is surprisingly fast considering that they hold 26 million gallons of water. Then, under the command of the pilot, you start to move forward out of the lock. The ship moves under a combination of its own power and pull from the locomotives. Interestingly, there is only a one-way communication system between the pilot and the locomotives. The pilot gives commands over a radio, and the locomotive operators ring their bells to acknowledge receipt. Remember, this is not some small potatoes operation - 15,000 ships per year carrying 7 million TEUs (equivalent of a shipping container) of cargo, $2 million cost per locomotive, and their only communication method is to ring a bell, like the Trolley on Mr. Rogers. Do they not have Facetime in the canal zone? Skype? Voxer, even?

Anyway, we started our traversal of the canal at about 7 PM. Everyone was out on deck. A bunch of us were on the foredeck at first, where we stayed until they kicked us out to make room for the line handlers. Then we all went out on a top deck normally open only to the crew. It was exciting to watch as we passed all the container ports, saw the other ships going to and fro (Panama has seen a boom in shipping, not just from larger container ships but also from an unexpected growth in the shipping of LPG and LNG - yay, fracking!), pass under the Rt. 1 bridge, and then traverse the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks. Then, as I had said, we were in for hours of cruising through the darkness of Gatun Lake, so we all went to bed. A subset of us who were totally into the canal experience set our alarms for 3 AM to be awake for our passage through the Gatun Locks. It's funny - the canal transit hadn't been a big excitement or "bucket list" item for me in advance of the trip, but I really got into it.

The lock doors close

Miraflores Locks building

It's a tight fit

Gatun Locks. Note how the mules go uphill with the locks.

After traversing the Gatun Locks I tried to get back to sleep but it was 4 AM and I was kind of wired. I went up to the lounge and made myself a decaf latte which I spiked with a healthy dose of Kahlua snagged from the bar (which they don't lock up at night). This did the trick and after tossing and turning in bed for a bit sleep finally came and I was able to get a few hours of rest before having to get up to get our bags out the door and show up for breakfast at 7:30 AM.

McGruff, the crime dog

Visiting the new locks

After disembarking from the ship (which was delayed a little while they had dogs sniff our suitcases - for drug or bombs I don't know) we made a quick visit to see the new locks and then drove back to Panama City. Panama City was unexpectedly modern. A little foreign, to be sure, but a big city feel familiar to city dwellers from anywhere. True, some third-world legacy seeps through, like the "red devils". Apparently, until recently Panama's public bus fleet consisted of end-of-service school buses shipped from the U.S. Individual Panamanian bus operators would paint the buses in wild color schemes and (my favorite part) put gigantic hot-rod style exhaust pipes on them. Today Panama has a more standard and subdued public transit fleet, but you still see red devils here and there.

A "red devil" in Panama City

We were dropped at a hotel downtown - typical, modern upscale hotel, where the cruise company had reserved some meeting rooms for both those of us ending our trip and the next group coming on board to hang out. We had about five hours to kill. This would have been enough time to go out and see a little bit of the city, but once Valerie hit the hotel I think she decided her adventure was over. Familiar-feeling surroundings, snacks, air conditioning, WiFi - she was staying put. I went down and strolled around the immediate area - shopped for a Panama hat but didn't buy one, poked my head into McDonald's (even though Panama uses the metric system they still sell Quarter Pounders), even found a Chinese restaurant. Since it was lunchtime I thought I could lure Valerie to the Chinese place so I went back to the hotel, but she wasn't budging. Instead, we sat. Slowly, our fellow travelers went on their way - to the airport or their next destinations. The new passengers headed for the ship. Eventually it was just us. When the hotel staff began to clear the room I suggested that we just head to the airport, which we did. That gave us a lot of time to kill at the airport, which unfortunately offered surprisingly little food (but lots of duty free shopping). We wound up eating sandwiches from Subway, then it was off into the skies, headed for home.

Montreal Trip Part 2: Days 4-7

Day 4 (Sunday)

I wanted to make sure to get some exercise during the trip (above and beyond the walking we’re doing) and so on Sunday I started my day with a run. I screwed up in planning my route – not realizing that Google Maps was already showing me distances using metric units (since I was in Canada, it defaulted to km) I measured a route that was 3.1 km, thinking I was mapping out 3.1 miles (which would be 5 km). So, I did my run and felt pretty good at the end until I checked my phone. “What, only 2 miles?!” So, I continued my run in the other direction, then back, then a little bit more while watching the phone until I just hit the 5K mark. According to Strava, despite my confused route I clocked in at 39:33, which put a smile on my face – getting back under 40 mins has been a goal since I started being able to run (really jog) again. My run ended right near a Café Starbucks, but I Resisted. The. Urge. To. Get. Coffee. As it was, thanks to Philippe’s readily available high end espresso machine I was already drinking way too much caffeine. At this point I’m not worried about atrial fibrillation (a problem I had had in the hospital the first time I had had coffee after my surgery); it’s more that as long as I’ve broken the caffeine habit I’d rather not get back into it. Philippe insists that espresso has much less caffeine than regular coffee since the water isn’t in contact with the beans for long, but my research says the only reason you get less caffeine from an espresso than from a regular coffee is volume – you drink a few ounces of espresso vs. a full cup (or more) or coffee. I will tell you that on a day when I had a few cups of espresso it felt like I could feel the caffeine tingle permeating throughout my body, all the way out to the fingertips. Best not to let a junkie feel the pleasure of the drug too often, or he’ll be hooked again before you know it.

Beyond that, having had three pretty busy days, we started more slowly on Sunday. Leisurely breakfast. Today’s breakfast was crepes, served with instructions from Philippe on how to spread jam on our crepes (pick up the bowl of jam. Spoon the jam onto your crepe, but do not use the spoon from the bowl to spread the jam.). After breakfast (I must admit, I repeatedly screwed up the instructions and spread the jam with the spoon) Valerie went back and slept for a while. When we finally got moving we headed over to the Jean-Talon market. Montreal has two major markets: Atwater (the English market) and Jean Talon (the French market). Actually, there’s a legacy of there being two of everything in Montreal, since historically the French Catholics and English Protestants did not mix – they occupied two separate worlds demarcated by Saint Laurent Street. The legacy of that tension lingers even today – when Philippe (who is French, not French Canadian) first described the city to us he said the Eastern end is French, and added with some bitterness, “and poor” while the Western end is English (“and rich”). Anyway, the market is a cool place – basically a permanent farmer’s market – with an indoor area selling food products (e.g., honey, meats, spices) and a covered outdoor area which is mostly fruits, vegetables and flowers. We saw some things which never appear at farmer’s markets near us – some fruits we didn’t even recognize. I also played another of Montreal's street pianos.

Jean-Talon Market

The produce!

Things I cannot eat :(

Street piano

Once again, the recipe for a “light lunch” is eliminate all the courses except dessert. Knowing we were going to have a heavy dinner, Valerie had just a chocolate croissant for lunch. As usual I tried not to fall too far off the heart-healthy wagon and had a decaf cappuccino and a hunk of baguette.  

Upon our return from the market we napped to prepare ourselves for dinner at Poutineville. Poutine is is a Quebecois dish made with French fries and cheese curds topped with a brown gravy. It’s become such a signature dish of this part of Canada that even McDonald’s sells it. It’s really better suited to wintertime, and really appropriate only if you’ve been burning off a lot of calories working as a lumberjack or mushing sled dogs all day, but it’s become a year-round thing, even among city dwellers. Poutineville offers a design-your-own approach, with choices of gravies, meats, cheeses and other toppings. While the only truly heart-healthy poutine is no poutine at all, I did my best with a vegetarian version: potatoes, cheese curds, eggplant, pepper and mushroom topped with vegetarian brown gravy, all washed down with a pint of beer. Valerie went for a more traditional version with a heap of beef on top of her potatoes and cheese (but the gravy on the side!). Which may have been her mistake.

Poutine

We waddled back to Philippe’s and settled in for a quiet evening after two fairly late nights.

Day 5 (Monday)

Alas, we had not been able to book our room at Philippe’s for the entire duration of our stay, so Monday morning (yogurt/croissants, BTW) we said au revoir to the shabby chic charm (and I mean that in a good way) and warm hospitality of Le Saint André des Arts B&B and moved to the corporate blandness of the Embassy Suites. Philippe had been horrified at the idea that we might take Uber (“modern slavery”, in his opinion) and so we used his recommended cab service instead. We knew we’d be at the hotel too early to check in. I figured we’d leave our bags and go see some sight – perhaps the basilica, which is right nearby. Unfortunately, it had started raining and so we instead chose to explore the underground city. Mostly the underground city is a set of passageways designed to let people get around downtown without going outside – useful in the cold Canadian winters. But Valerie had read that there was shopping in parts of the underground city and set out on a quest to find the mythical underground mall with a fervor not seen since Ponce de León searched for the fountain of youth.

Valerie wasn’t hungry because he tummy was a little upset, which meant I was not allowed to stop for food. Relentlessly on and on we went through the tunnels, like a loop of the opening credits of Get Smart. At around noon we made a temporary encampment at a food court where I was able to grab a cup of coffee and eat a bit of leftover baguette from our visit to the Jean Talon market, but we soon broke camp and continued. At around 1:30 we sighted another underground food court on the horizon and Valerie finally declared it was OK to get lunch. I got the heart-healthiest thing I could find there, an Asian salad with chicken; Valerie, still not feeling right, had a muffin.

Soon after lunch we reached the end of the underground maze. Making our way back to the planet’s surface, we walked to our hotel - our room was ready. Tired from the exertions involved in wasting an entire day of our vacation walking through underground tunnels, we napped. In the evening we went out for dinner at an Indian restaurant in Old Montreal where they obliged our request to prepare the dishes extra bland – so, like picture on the box from a frozen Indian food dinner, it looked like Indian food but tasted like cardboard.

After dinner we strolled the Old City again, then returned to our room. And then the fun began. The slight stomach upset Valerie had been feeling all day turned into a raging, awful, terrible case of food poisoning. Up all night, running to the bathroom sort of food poisoning. Neither of us slept much. At about 4 AM I moved to the sofa in the Living Room area where I was able to catch a little sleep, but when morning came Valerie was wiped and I was exhausted.

Day 6 (Tuesday)

But it was our vacation, so I plunged onward. We had planned to do a load of laundry once we got to the Embassy Suites. It turned out the Philippe had a washing machine and dryer in the kitchen, but guests weren’t allowed to use it – if you put your laundry into the machine he would do it for you. I thought this was a little weird and didn’t have him do my laundry, but Valerie did. So, most of the dirty laundry we still had at this point was mine. I started my day on Tuesday by putting in a load of laundry but I was so tired that I forgot half the things I had meant to wash. Once the laundry was done I walked over to the nearby supermarket to buy some supplies for Valerie – clear broth, Gatorade, that sort of thing – for when she felt like eating a little bit.

Valerie was not up for even getting out of bed, but (with her blessing) I carried on with what had been our plans for the day, a walking tour of Jewish Montreal. There is a Jewish Museum in Montreal, but until recently it didn’t even have a physical space. It existed only as an archive (physical and virtual) of Jewish items and history, and a set of walking tours. Now they have a small storefront with a restaurant, a small gift shop and a little exhibit space, but it’s still mostly walking tours. Much has been made of the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of all sorts of adversity – the variety of strategies I’ve seen for how these small Jewish museums operate is in itself evidence of that characteristic. Montreal has a virtual Jewish Museum. Last summer we visited the Maine Jewish Museum, which shared space with a synagogue – the combination of the two being just enough to allow both to eke out an existence.

A former synagogue, now being restored as a historic building

Montreal's former Jewish tenements

Montreal is a city of many murals

Another mural

While better known as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson played for the Expos at the end of his career

Anyway, I had figured out how to get up to the museum by bus, but since it was just me I hopped on a Bixi bike and  rode up (and I do mean up – Montreal is one big hill) there. The tour itself was quite good. The Montreal Jewish story is similar to the American one: the tenements, the same waves of immigration, and so on. There are some distinct quirks, though. Jews arriving in Montreal found a city already divided between English Protestants and French Catholics. In a sense this made it easier, since they were just one more small faction added into a pre-existing religious war. The English and French were too busy hating each other to focus on hating the Jews. On the other hand, the Jews had to create yet a third set of infrastructure: Jewish schools, Jewish hospitals, and so on. On the other hand, employment options seemed more limited than in the U.S.: 75% of the late 19^th century immigrants wound up working in the garment business.

The only active Jewish congregation left in Mile End

As with New York’s Lower East Side, most of Montreal’s Jews migrated over the generations to better neighborhoods. At one time there were 90 small synagogues operating in the neighborhood. Now there’s one. Here and there you find Jewish restaurants, remnants of the past, but the neighborhood is now multi-cultural and funky – again, like the Lower East Side. Another tidbit: the founder of the Canadian Jewish Congress, an organization that represented and lobbied for the interests of Canadian Jews for many decades, was founded by the grandfather of singer Leonard Cohen.

Yet another street piano (this one was in bad shape)

After the tour was done I continued up St. Laurent Street into the Mile End neighborhood, which has the feel of Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood – funkiness fully gentrified. My destination was Fairmount Bagel, the most famous of Montreal’s bagel shops. Montreal has its own style of bagel, just as Chicago has what it calls pizza. Both are only vaguely edible and are far, far inferior to true bagels and pizza (that is, New York style). My friend Francois had once given me a Montreal bagel to try, but it was a freezer-burned, dried-out version. I had to try fresh ones. The verdict: Fairmount has the feel of an authentic, old school urban bagel shop, but the bagels are way too brioche-like: light and sweet. Non, merci.

Fairmount Bagel

I augmented my inferior bagel with a Kind bar and a soda, all eaten in a little urban park, and that was my lunch. I then Bixi biked home (dowwwnhilll! Wheee!), stopping back near the Jewish Museum to check out a second-hand clothing store. I’m always on the lookout for funky clothes to wear onstage. Then I returned to the hotel to check on Valerie, who was doing a little bit better but was still quite weak.

In the evening, after having a complimentary beer at the Embassy Suites happy hour, I wandered over to the Africa D’Nuit World Music Festival, where I saw an excellent Senegalese (now living in Quebec) singer named ILAM, and Las Cafetras, a Chicano band playing sort of Afro-Latin, hip-hop-inspired music. I also grabbed dinner (a falafel sandwich) at a stand in a big food area that serviced the various festivals going on in the city.

ILAM

Food area

Day 7 (Wednesday)

By Wednesday Valerie was feeling a little better. She went down and had a little breakfast, then we went back to the supermarket. We actually like to browse supermarkets when we travel to spot the little differences – the package of frogs legs in the freezer case, the unfamiliar herbal tea, and so on. We got lunch in Chinatown (hand-pulled noodles – which is apparently a big deal – the food was good) and then hung out back at the room.

Frogs legs in the freezer case

In the evening Valerie stayed back in the room and I went back to Africa D’Nuit festival. I saw Joaquin Diaz, a merengue accordionist from the Dominican Republic. He was a pretty amazing player – fingers moving too fast to see, but after a while a lot of the music started to sound the same. He was followed by Kobo Town, an excellent modern calypso band. Kobo Town showed the true universal spirit of music: the lead singer was an expat Trinidadian living in Montreal, the bass player and guitarist were Trinidadians, the horn section was from Guyana and the drummer was from Croatia! And they rocked. The evening was somewhat rainy and I hadn’t brought my raincoat, so I had to strategically dodge the rain. When it sprinkled during Joaquin Diaz’s set I took shelter under a canopy. It rained again while I was on my way to the food area, and I ducked into a building. There was a tremendous downpour while I was eating, but fortunately I had found a seat under cover. I stayed mostly dry (except for my back) while I ate my seitan wrap. Fortunately, the rain was gone by the time Kobo Town came on and so the crowd was up and dancing. It was a good finale for the trip.

Joaquin Diaz

Kobo Town

Day 7 (Wednesday)

On Thursday we packed up and flew home. Because of Valerie’s illness and the weather we never made it to the Basilica, despite staying just a few blocks away. I never made it to the top of Mount Royal, and I never kayaked the Lachine Canal. But we had lots of fun, and I had lots of adventures I hadn’t expected, with my Bixi bike explorations, a couple more festivals than we had anticipated, and the walking tour. A good trip overall. Except for Valerie’s illness. And the bagels.