So I'm in the EconoLodge in Port Hawkesbury, whiling away a February evening.
A February evening in Inverness County, Cape Breton is a pretty bleak affair to while.
Snow everywhere. Not much else. If things are not shut down due to arrival of the global meltdown, they're closed until the spring melt arrives.
The car is parked at a jaunty angle outside my motel room door, because I got the room at the corner where the snow drifts.
The room is cold, no matter how much I crank the heat.
The bathroom is not conducive to bathing.
I'm not seeing any extra blankets.
The whole thing is a little Bates Motel for me.
I drove up through the mainland of the province in the damp cold afternoon grey of a Nova Scotia day after the day after a twenty hour snow and ice storm. The roads were finally clear, but the landscape is starkly white on black. The only depth in the view is the chiaroscuro of the sky.
Up over Mount Thom, that depth flattens to a couple of feet in front of the car.
I do my usual thing and don't want to stop for fuel because it's too cold. Then I drive twenty kilometres on fumes searching for an exit with a gas station.
I stop at the Dragonfly in Antigonish for a latte and some chocolate cake. The break was warming inside and out, but it meant I drove the last fifty kms in the dark, spitting snow, facing the glare of the oncoming lights.
Driving up to Cape Breton on a snowy Thursday in February puts me in the kind of grumpy mood it takes me days to get out of.
Hopefully, the sunshine forecast for tommorrow will make the drive home bearable and I will be home by seven at the latest.
I still don't know what to blog about... February numbs my brain.
Maybe tomorrow.
