The Great Ontario Moosehunt

So Himself and I have traversed Atlantic Canada and Quebec and are now in Ontario.

We're only in the south-eastern part of Ontario, but I still feel like I'm a long way away from home.

#1. Canada is very big. Very very very big. Particularly if you come from a little island on the west coast of Europe.

#2. There are a lot of trees in Canada. And most of them are varying shades of gold, red and orange right now, which makes for a very pretty drive. New Brunswick is just a big Irving tree farm, with the occasional strip of farmland along the St. John river. Himself's ancestor, Daniel, was one of the Loyalist soldiers that helped settle Loyalist refugees along that river in the mid-seventeen hundreds, so we spent most of the hours driving through New Brunswick imagining what it must have been like to fetch up there with a few hand tools and some supplies for the winter.

Not good.

Personally, if I had to live in interior New Brunswick, I would not be a happy camper. The coastal areas are much more interesting.

Having said that, we are on our Great Ontario Moosehunt (I have never seen a moose) and we saw one in New Brunswick.

A lady moose.

But not up close.

#3. For a country with as many trees and swamps and Danger, Moose Ahead signs as I've seen in the last few months, there aren't the dozens of moose lining the roads to ram the Beast as I expected.

The Danger, Moose Ahead signs are particularly funny.

In New Brunswick, the moose on the signs are just standing there, looking at the oncoming cars (note these are yellow road signs with black outlines of moose).

In Quebec, the moose has charged a car side on and squashed the car. Which is unusual because moose generally just loom out of the darkness and stand there while you hit them with your car. (they then fall off their spindly legs and fall through your window). This is a very aggressive and angry moose - perhaps he has lost his cultural funding and is looking for the Tory tour bus to ram?

Speaking of elections, the Liberals have just accused Stephen Harper of copying his homework from John Howard. Highly amusing pre-election mud-slinging stuff. I pity both the poor Liberal staffer who obviously has no life, other than searching the Net for right wing idealogue fuckups, and who stumbled onto the 2003 plagiarism, and the poor Tory staffer who obviously has no job now, who actually lifted the speech and put it into Harper's set-piece on Iraq.

The Great Game continues in the hearts and minds of the Canadian people.

The Great Ontario Moosehunt continues, unabated, in Ontario.

We made it through Montreal and drove to Ottawa in about two hours through flat farmland. Not so many trees. Many many cows and lots of slurry spreaders. As we headed west on the 60, the land became a little more rocky and the trees reappeared.

# 4. The 60 is a very nice highway. I recommend it as a way through Ontario, if you have time to meander along it.

We fetched up in Arnprior, near Ottawa on Sunday night, as our former neighbours seem to have disappeared.

Generally, there's a lot of Jesus worshipping going on in this part of Ontario. I'm not sure if this is the part of Ontario that Alice Munro wrote about, I have a feeling I'm pretty close to it.

Arnprior boasted thirteen churches, one of which has a big lit up-at-night cross on a hill.

We stayed in the Comfort Inn, which was the only hotel, and ate in the Elgin Restaurant, which handily enough was in the hotel.

The special was ribs.

They were so big that we didn't speak for twenty minutes while we ate them.

(I swear I am getting more like a Canadian/ like my paternal relations in my growing inability to eat and talk at the same time. Talking only slows down the eating, doesn't it, and the enjoyment of the food).

Then we staggered back upstairs and lay on the bed which was really not big enough for two people who are used to a king-sized and not used to eating that many ribs in one go.

Then it was 7am and time to get on the road again.

Thankfully, Monday was only a four hour hop through the Ottawa Valley and Algonquin Park to Huntsville where our hotel, sorry resort, is.

Algonquin Park is Canada's oldest provincial park and has been around for about 110 years. It was originally set aside so that logging barons such as JR Booth could log in peace without worrying about prospectors, settlers and the like either moving in, or just plain old setting fire to the trees they had bought at auction.

JR Booth, who was one of the richest men in North America at the time, owned the rights to most of the park. He built a railway through it which is totally overgrown now. In fact, we walked on a trail along the old railway and it was incomprehensible to us that it used to be a railway line.

Then we found an old sleeper under the moss.

Algonquin was lovely and the weather was great, so the railway track trail was a wonderful trek through maple stands and around lakes and more importantly hills (so the seniors couldn't get around it).

No, I'm not being ageist, it's just that having had to walk at funeral pace on a previous trek that promised black spruce bog and moose and gave us bog and moose tracks only, due to the plethora of seniors trundling along the track, we really needed to just stretch out leg muscles that had been in a car for four days.

However, in the Canadian version of the game Himself and I play when driving around Nova Scotia: Spot the Young Person, it would appear that NB, QUE and Ontario are as chock-a-block with seniors and as devoid of young people - apart from in crappy service jobs - as Nova Scotia seems to be.

Maybe rural depopulation is not a NS thing, maybe it's a Canada thing.

There are some lovely little towns in this part of Ontario though; it would be a real shame if they were to die off and people kept drifting towards the GTA.

Anyways, after about 10kms of walking, we still hadn't seen any moose or bear, so we headed back to the car and drove the rest of the way to Deerhurst Resort, near Huntsville.

Typical resort hotel. Overpriced, lots of airs and graces, vast quantities of add-on costs, and when you really get down to it, cheap towels.

I hate cheap towels.

Having said that, we have a lovely room overlooking the lake and the autumn colours are as vivid and bright as you can get here.

Today it has been raining, so we went into Huntsville for food and found the liquor store, which was much better than any Nova Scotia liquor store I have seen yet. It had a massive wine section, with rows of tetra pack wine (for camping) and a great South American section.

It also has a great International Bottled Beer selection - with beer from England, Belgium, Holland, Greece, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Jamaica, US and many many other countries, some of which I've never seen before.

So we added to Himself's beer bottle collection.

I think it's stopped raining, so maybe we should drag ourselves back out to the car and head off on our moose hunt again this afternoon.