10)8(05 its 1142pm

Its late in Ottawa, and the degrees celsius is dropping. We’re holed up in a cheap motel for the night, resting and preparing for the next leg of the trip.

This last week and a few since leaving Sandwich have been amazing.

We headed up to Dover, New Hampshire for a couple of days, where I enlisted my dad to help me track down some details on our family’s ancestry there. It turns out there is a direct line from my bloodline to the Knox family, some of the first settlers in America. Thomas Knox landed in 1633, and the Knox family stayed right around the area for 5 generations. I’ve never done genealogy before, and believe me this was amateur stuff, but it was like I was in an action movie with no crucial tragedy awaiting me sifting through the piles of information, trying to find the keys to some secret. I found enough information to be able to visit the graveyard where the first settlers were buried, the first church site, some of the buildings in town that Knox relatives owned, and the patch of land that used to be the Knox’, Knox Marsh Rd.

Dover was charming and very pretty. The weather held up nicely, and all too soon we were heading out on the road, due west for the first time in a long time, on our way to Kate’s aunt and uncle Cacki and Pete’s place.

Pete and Cacki built the home that they live in on gorgeous land that they bought back in the 60’s. There life there is ideal in many ways, close to the pretty town of Woodsbury, which is quiet but full of community minded folks. Their garden was in full swing and we ate delicious meals every night from home grown vegetables. We watched PBS in the evening and I started to read “All The Pretty Horses”, which is a new good thing in my life.

I can’t begin to talk about how beautiful our time there was. The leaves were starting to change radiant colors and slowly falling from the trees. The air was crisp and clean, the weather beautiful and it felt like we were living life as it was meant to be lived.

I’m most proud and thankful for the work that we were able to do there. Peter had just recently built this amazing house on the property and sold it, and there was a bit of painting left to do. The design and feel of the house is fantastic, I was jealous of the new owners. It has this really neat feeling of being thoroughly modern, with vast high slanting ceilings and full views across to the gorgeous hills, with skylights lining the uppermost walls, very open and spacious. It also blends somehow perfectly into the landscape, with its wood tones and its layout feeling just right for the space it was in, like it was meant to be out there in the woods, in other words, it will be a timeless house, as impressive 30 years from now as it is now, brand new. Kate and I spent our days on the interior, painting and painting the primer and final coat, listening to music, talking a little, and having plenty of time to think. It felt so rewarding to be able to work that way and actually get something done. Meanwhile Peter and Cacki worked all day every day in this natural pace of life that was inspiring. They do what they need to do to be happy and survive and they put everything into it and they are content. It was very inspiring.

It was hard to leave, the country was so beautiful and our hosts so welcoming. The last night we were there we all feasted and drank Vermont brewed beer from Alex and with Cacki’s brother, in from Seattle. It was the kind of scene you want to have a lot in your life.

But the truck was calling and the road was waiting and believe me we are aware of the potential of the weather to turn the trip short on us. We cleaned it out and backed out of the driveway and headed north to Burlington.

We only got a glance at Burlington before the sun beginning to wane led us north of town about a half hour. We found a nice little spot on the shores of Lake Champlain, and sat with a big fire and a few beers that night while the waves calmly repeated themselves over and over.

So we headed out the next day bound for the glorious unknown that was Canada. We approached the border crossing unprepared for what was to come.

We rolled up to the window and the Canadian customs guard asked us

“where are you headed?”

“oh, we don’t know, up to Montreal and then around for a little while”

“where do you live?”

“oh, we don’t really have a home right now, we’re just out and about”

“what’s in the back of the truck?”

“just all our stuff, camping gear, guitars, everything we own”

“where do you work”

“we don’t have a job, we’re just on the road”

“I’m afraid you can’t cross this border.”

It came as a shock. Here we were just being honest and the pride of Canada thought, and reasonably in retrospect, that we intended to move to Montreal and take advantage of all that Canadia has to offer.

It was a major frustration as well, the idea of heading south back through New York, past Baldwinsville where we had already been was not only depressing but impractical. Going around the Great Lakes from the South was a big detour, and would take us days off course.

We were shagrinned. We camped for the night outside of Plattsburgh, NY, had some pizza in a dingy joint and played scrabble into the night. We were still on the shores of Lake Champlain, on the other side but nowhere near where we thought we’d be.

The next day we resigned ourselves to our long journey south, but decided to try one more time at the border. This time we told them we had a regular job and loved America and had to be back at work on Monday. They passed us right through without another word.

I felt light. It was great. The signs were in french, the speed limit in Kilometers per Hour, and Montreal was on the horizon.

We rolled into the city in the afternoon, and found that most of the reasonably priced motels and hostels were booked due to Canadian Thanksgiving. So we did what every reasonable person would do and parked the truck and had a few beers in the lively nightlife that is Montreal. The streets of Montreal open up late, even with the freezing rain that we had, the bars were empty until 11:30 and then they just packed full. Montrealians stay out on the weekends until 3 or 4 am like their french speaking counterparts. We didn’t last that long. We walked back the pretty old tree lined streets to the truck and slid in the back, warm and comfy in our sleeping bags.

In the morning we woke up to the sounds of Canadians shuffling by the truck, and stumbled out into the day. We chose breakfast from a picture menu in a cheap cafe and headed into Old Montreal, a quaint and neat touristy area of town. The architecture is old and the streets are cobbled and the Notre Dame was closed for the day. We had a good time.

And then we drove to Ottawa. The landscape up here is flat and agricultural, the farms huge, and the sky vast.

We haven’t seen much of the town, just dinner in an Indian restaurant while Kate fends off a cold.

The months have rolled by on the trip and it feels better than ever. We will be back in the states in a few days, heading headlong to Colorado and Yellowstone, just to see what happens there.

From Ottawa, signing off.