Last Holiday, Sans Peanut

As promised, I'll be posting a wee travelogue about my recent holiday. We travelled from Kingston, Ontario to Murray Corner, New Brunswick, to a cottage overlooking the Northumberland Strait, and stayed there for three weeks in July. If you're wondering about the title, it refers to our last holiday before the baby comes (I love that expression, by the way ... as if I'm going to meet the baby at the airport). Above: cigar-tin story #35.

Day 1

We leave Kingston by nine a.m. -- goal achieved -- feeling more or less organized ... the lists and packing have been hurried but only slightly haphazard. Goodbye stinky cats. That part of the day driving through eastern Ontario is a microcosm of the month of June -- spotty, cloudy, dubious -- with disinterested rain showers honing in for effect. We drive in and out of it. The overall impression is still boringly humid. We survive the decayed jetscape of Montreal's overpasses and underpasses and multi-laned tunnels (arrays of lights in the kind of diminishing perspective you'd expect from a music video, in 1989), the speed-and-squeeze artists, the hurtlers from one stop to the next, and emerge into Quebec proper, which has turned into a giant francophone car wash. We take a full five hours of it, right in the face, traffic bunching up in awkward stops whenever someone decides they simply can't see anymore. Twice I have to pull over to fix a windshield wiper (passenger side, thankfully) that wants to fly off into space on the highest setting. The second time I get fully soaked. Thus miserable, we pull into Riviere du Loup for the evening. Most helpfully, it is absolutely freezing. I can see my breath. The 'new' motel (I liked the one we stayed at last year but C wanted something 'new') is ghostly and deserted and the room smells like old soup cans. The bed is a double, which C assured me would be fine, so I spend the night hanging over the edge. No matter, I think, I only have to drive for eight or nine hours tomorrow. I can feel the collective craziness ramping up.

Randomness:

x} My 1997 Buick runs fine ... except in the cold and rain, at which point it turns into a fog machine from the inside out.

x} At a certain starving point we had to pass up three good rest stops in a row because someone was still upset over a squished ground hog she saw by the side of the road. No really.