Waterfalls, Capitals, Speaking "en francais", Anne and a gaelic Island...

Phew...here I am to write this blog...finally. I've been trying to write this for the past week, it seems, with little success...it is difficult to find Internet access on the East Coast, it seems. Anyway, we've been a long way since the last post...all the way to the Atlantic. Yay!

We went to Niagara Falls on our second day in the Guelph area. Joanne's sister Miriam lives in the area and she and her daughter Melodie met up with us at Niagara falls along with some of the little guys (Mel's kids and her sister Naomi's kids). We had a picnic lunch with them (Thank-you Auntie Miriam!) and then Melodie took the three littlest kids home, while the rest of us went to take a self-guided tour of the tunnels behind the falls. Scott had to leave us to make a phone call, so he didn't come on the tour...but he had been on it before when he came with his family as a teenager. At that time they actually wore yellow raincoats...but that was in 1975. We in 2010 had to wear what are essentially yellow plastic bags with arm holes, head holes and a hood in an attempt to keep sort of dry, but once we were out on the viewing area close to the falls, the wind was enough to blow the hoods off...our hair, therefore, was pretty wet by the time we had been on the viewing deck twice and down the tunnels to see behind the falls (which was very cool...an opaque watery sheet of white, spray and a dull roar) When we returned from our adventure to meet up with Scott, we came out of the gift shop to see a beautiful double rainbow beside the falls...Joanne got some good pictures of it with her nice new D-SLR (did you know she can take as many pictures as she wants without running out of film? She's very excited about that! Her daughter doesn't fully understand the novelty, as I never really used film...)

We had dinner with Miriam, Melodie, Naomi and the kids and then headed back to our hotel, after a quick tour of Miriam's house and Melodie's house. Although we didn't get to see everyone in Auntie Miriam and Uncle Ken's clan, we're planning on heading through the area on the way back to see everybody again!

The next day saw us heading to Toronto to pick of Fredi's dad, Bernd, at the airport. After he rented a car, we all drove to Ottawa. We spent the next day touring around Canada's capital. Byward Market, Sussex Drive, the Parliament buildings (well, the outside anyway...we never did make it inside. Sad. I want to go back that way...I have a very blurry memory of the ceiling in the Peace Tower and would very much like to see it again.) We ended our day with a dinner at the Keg, so that Fredi could have mud pie...along with the fact that the Keg makes yummy food. :)

We said good-bye to the Sontags the next morning and headed off to Quebec City...absolutely one of the most beautiful cities in North America. It was very, very European...it reminded all of us of places we've been on tours of that continent. Scott was very pleased that we were all there. After having been to Quebec City so many times without us, if was very nice for him to have us there. We spend the next day there, touring the town, exploring unique little shops, visiting tourist attractions like the Plains of Abraham and the Montmorency Falls...the falls are definitely worth seeing, they aren't far from the city and they're really pretty...you can walk on a bridge across the top of them...but you have to climb about a thousand (exaggeration, probably) stairs to get to the bridge from the base of the falls, unless you want to take the gondola...which is ridiculously expensive. Kelsey and Joanne were not fond of the climb up the stairs...I am ashamed to say that I was grumpy all the way up the stairs. However, you might be grouchy too if you were convinced you were going to pass out from lack of air. Thank-you asthma...you know how much I adore your visits. Not. I was wishing all the way up the stairs that I had been climbing stairs before the trip the way I did before the Europe trip...the climb would have been so much easier! The view from the bridge however, turned out to be worth the nasty climb. Very pretty!

After Quebec City we drove along the Gaspe...apparently the drive is labelled one of the "premier" drives in Canada and we think that this is true. It is beautiful, with all sorts of little towns along the water, and forested hills...lovely.

Joanne has decided that when we get home, she's going have to learn french because we did have some communication issues a few time, since we speak only a very little french and the people we were talking to spoke only some English...at one grocery store, Kelsey asked the cashier "Parlez-vous anglais?" and she chuckled and said "non."

We left Quebec last Thursday, stayed overnight in New Brunswick and then crossed the very long and impressive Confederation Bridge into Anne of Green Gables country- Prince Edward Island! Kelsey was excited to be so close to one of her favourite stories and both she and Craig immediately fell in love with the red dirt. I think that if BC had red dirt it would be perfect. It has everything else...mountains, valley, ocean...but no red dirt that I know of. Sigh.

We ended up spending two and a half days in PEI. We stayed in a great little B&B in Cavendish on Friday night. On Saturday Joanne and the kids toured Green Gables and the site of LM Montgomery's house in Cavendish (It's just a foundation now, but still neat) in the morning while Scott tried to catch up on some work...he spend most of the time trying to get Internet on his laptop. Like I said, Internet is hard to find! He joined us at lunchtime. We had lunch at the PEI Preserve Co. (The raspberry pie was delicious!) and then spent two hours on a red beach. Kelsey collected a bottle of red sand, and later on that evening, Joanne took us to another beach to collect some red dirt. So we have both...sand and dirt, I mean. :) On Sunday we went to Avonlea village and toured around, watching as Anne smashed the infamous slate over Gilbert Blythe's head (at that point she swore she would despise him forever)...and then we went to Anne & Gilbert: The Musical in Summerside to watch her fall in love with him (so much for that promise of hating him forever, huh?) The musical was amazing...snatches of the songs are still in my head...I wish I'd bought the CD...I hope it's on Itunes! My only complaint is that they changed the ending from how it is in the books (the musical is a combination of Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island...due to time constraints and all that, but still! The ending is my favourite part!) Nevertheless, I loved the musical. A lot.

We drove to the Souris area after the musical to visit Joanne's cousins who have a place in PEI where they come in the summers and then we headed to our hotel in Charlottetown. Joanne and the kids toured Charlottetown on Monday morning while Scott did some work in the hotel...finally, Internet! We went to Province House, where the Charlottetown Conference took place (the first of three meetings that would result in Confederation) and then we walked up to Founder's Hall, which was supposed to be a museum of Confederation...it could have been really good, but it wasn't, unfortunately. It was awful because of the way it was done...there were random video clips that really didn't connect very well and weren't very well explained and sometimes it was almost as though they were making fun of history...it didn't work in our brains. We ended up confused, even me, although I'd recently studied the history of confederation...we do not recommend Founder's Hall. We do highly recommend Province House though! There was a great video there about confederation which made us very proud to be Canadians. (This whole trip is making us proud to be Canadian!)

Monday afternoon we left PEI and ended up in Sydney, Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island very late at night.

We saw the giant fiddle yesterday morning (well, Joanne and Kelsey did, while Scott did some work at the hotel and Craig did...stuff...not sure what, really. He just hung out, I guess.) Then we went to the Fortress of Louisbourg and spent the rest of the day there touring the national historic sight...it was very well done, with people dressed up as people of the time period, giving demonstrations and talking about life in Louisbourg.

Today we drove the Cabot trail, stopping in St. Ann's at the Gaelic College there to tour the Hall of the Clans museum...after all, we are Macphersons. It was very fascinating to learn a bit more about our history...and it was our own history, which made it all the more interesting.
The museum dealt almost exclusively with the Highland clans, from their ancient origins to their immigration to Canada during the clearances right up to present day in Canada, particularly here in Cape Breton Island. The Cabot trail was absolutely beautiful and there were mountains! I've discovered that you don't realize how big a part of you the mountains are until you are away from them. I was so very happy to see mountains. I think I might even have gotten a little homesick for the coastal mountains of BC!

Tomorrow it is on to Halifax...we were supposed to be going to Newfoundland next, but now we're not sure how we're getting to Newfoundland, as all the ferries are fully booked until the sixth of August, which is too late for us. We're doing our best to find a way to get there, though! In the meantime, we're going to Halifax.

I've decided that this event-blogging thing is a new sort of writing for me. I've never done anything like this before. I do hope its not too boring or confusing or anything! I'm new at this you know! I apologize if there are any run-on sentences, boring bits, or if it's confusing with my switching back and forth between third person and first person...its weird for me to write about myself in the third person or to write about my parents as Scott and Joanne! Hopefully, I'm doing an OK job of this though, and I hope that I can update this blog sooner than later so that I don't have to write another of these mega-posts...I got tired of writing this about half-way through! It is LONG!

Oh, and I hope there aren't too many typos!

From home to Guelph: an overview...

We have now officially been gone for a week...this first on-the-road post will be an overview of what we've done so far...the funny stories and the pictures will come later...we left home early last Thursday morning and drove directly across the mountains...we stopped at the Hope Family Drive-In and Restaurant for breakfast and then continued on our way across the Coastal mountains and into the Rockies. We stopped at Craigellachie so that Fredi could see the place where the last spike was driven into the railway, connecting eastern and western Canada. We continued on into Banff, where Scott went to find internet in order to book a hotel, while everyone else walked up to the Banff Springs Hotel.
We ended up in Calgary around 9:30 pm or so, where we stayed overnight.

We left the next morning to leave Alberta behind, stopping for antihistamines for Kelsey, who had been hoping to leave her alergies behind in BC. She ended up leaving them behind in Saskatchewan instead. We drove to Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan to visit some friends who were camping there and then went to stay in their home in Shaunavon overnight.

Day three on the road took us into Manitoba, where we stayed in Portage La Prairie in a hotel that, while nice, was absolutely FREEZING! Fredi got up in the middle of the night to put on her sweater, socks and scarf because it was so cold!

We headed off to Ontario the next day, making several stops along the way before arriving in Sault Ste Marie. We stayed overnight and then we crossed the border into Michigan because Scott had a business call to make there.

Yesterday saw us return to Canada and drive to Guelph, which is where we are now...in a very nice hotel in the middle of the industrial area...no restaurants, stores or places of interest in sight...we were stranded up until about ten minutes ago, when Scott returned from making business calls. All in all a nice place to be stranded...there's a pool, and a gymn and a place to do laundry...hallelujah! :)