Yes, I admit finding seven things I love about Canada is a pretty wimpy excuse for a blog. It’s a bit like listing the seven things I love about babies or puppies. After all, who doesn’t love Canada? The country gave us Michael Bublé, for goodness sakes, and Michael J. Fox and Trivial Pursuit. The people are lovely and it doesn’t even seem to be a strain for them, they’re just honestly nice. Even the border crossing guy wanted to be annoyed at my stupid reply to his question about carrying $10,000 dollars or more—that I wish I had that much cash to carry–but he couldn’t keep it up and he sent us off finally with a friendly warning about the bears around Jasper and a “Have a nice trip, Eh.” But we have 4,000 miles of Canada behind us and some of those miles got stuck in our happy place. Some of the images wiggled deep into my bucket of Zen.
Seven of them to be precise.
1) Can I get a Gosh, please? I could in Canada. Lots of them. There was the gal at the Husky gas station in Edmonton who gave me a dragged out “Gosh” when she couldn’t
3) Mellow Fields of Yellow. We thought it was clover, great fields of it lining the highways through Alberta and Saskatchewan, but that was crazy talk. Lo and behold, it was canola, a crop which, according to the Government of Saskatchewan website, didn’t even exist 30 years ago. I’d say it’s taken off nicely.
4) Kilometers. Ask me if 27 degrees Centigrade is hot. Ask any U.S. American if 27 degrees is hot. The answer is, we don’t know and we don’t care, because we’re never going to learn the metric system. Except when it comes to highway distances. Somehow 100 kilometers magically comes out roughly the distance you’ll drive in an hour at a 60 mph speed limit. And since that’s the safe and legal speed on many Canadian highways, for once the metric system makes sense. A town is 300 kilometers away? Just drop the last two digits and I know I’ll be there in three hours. A 700 kilometer driving day? Seven hours. When a nation makes math easier for me, I bow to their wiser thinking.
5) Midnight Twilight. Sure, you have to go pretty far north to watch the light die away while the clock ticks into tomorrow, but summer in the Yukon isn’t made for sleeping. Who wouldn’t want a vacation day that just won’t end?
6) Bears. My first glimpse of something roundish and black on the hillside came and went so quickly that I wasn’t even sure of what I’d seen. Maybe it was a boulder, maybe it wasn’t, but I was convinced I’d missed my one chance to see a bear. Oh, me of little faith. Soon bears were ambling into culverts. Eating berries at the forest’s edge. Loping out into traffic. Apparently bears are to British Columbia as squirrels are to urban parks, and I became less afraid of missing a sighting and more concerned about missing the bears. Of course that didn’t stop me from taking their picture every chance I got.
7) Water, Water Everywhere. Ducks paddle in it just off the highway. Prairie flowers drink from it. Rivers rage with it. This is the same fluid we take in and out of our bodies every day, a fact that should remove any mystic illusions we might have about the stuff. It’s H2O, for gosh sakes, just one oxygen and a couple of hydrogen atoms that buddied up. But in Canada? When the light is right? If you ever doubt God’s existence, simply gaze on the emerald goodness He has given us and know that He is love.
Peace.
Loved your blog – I’m about to make a roadtrip myself – east from Colorado to North Carolina and then north to Long Island. I will follow your lead in thinking of seven things that I like about roadtrips. In particular, I liked “a Mayberry sounding word,” the family outhouse photo, the we are never going to learn metric, and maybe it was a bear… maybe a boulder. I travelled with you. You made me smile.
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Have fun on your road trip, but we may pass you on the highway. Are the Aspens still colorful in Westcliffe? We hope to see them this weekend and my fingers are crossed for some lucky timing.
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