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| Glenore, Cape Breton |
9/8/10
It’s Wed. and I know I’m several days behind so I’ll just tap on a few highlights, though at the moment they are not shoving themselves to move forward. It must be the weather. It has been raining all the time here in Cape Breton. We are at the Baddeck Campgrounds - start of the Cabot Trail, home of Alexander Graham Bell, and the birthplace of Canadian aviation. What does that all mean !! Well the Cabot Trail is about a 300 k waterfront circle tour of the tip of Cape Breton and said to be , by Nat. Geo. & The Lonely Planet, the most spectacular road trip in Canada. That’s a tall claim after driving the IceFields Parkway of Banff twice.
The other saddle burr, for this week that is, is the rain. We can’t see anything.
On the other hand its no fun hanging out in a 25 ‘ trailer all day listening to the rain and thinking I should be doing the tourist thing, any tourist thing, go carting, put put golf, water slides! All right , we’ll go into town its only 9 clicks and finally get that lobster dinner. We did it though we said we would wait for Maine.
But I’m thinking about this lobster brouhaha, being a NorthWester, and I ask you is there anything as sweet as a fresh 2 1/2 lb. Dungeness crab? It think not. I think our Dungeness Crabs are more tender and sweeter than most of the lobsters I have ever had so far. There was that one Eastern Costa Rican lobster that must have been 3 lbs. at Parcacito’s on the beach that Juan caught for us 15 minutes ago and prepared it Caribbean style with spicy rice and beans and lots of lemons. I know it was a warm water one and not as sweet but it was damn close. However, our big pacific NW Dungeness crab is the sweetest meat in the sea.
I don’t want to be snobby about food and I know I’ve ragged on for any years about English/Canadian cuisine. Have you noticed that there has never been an episode on the travel/food channels about food in Canada? The food snobs are like the wine drinkers whose vocabulary of nonsensical and unctuous adjectives pretentiously describe the impertinence of the aftertaste. What the Hell? Do you like it? No, please don’t try to describe it. Like it? Drink it. Someone else just as pretentious will think it tastes like piss. Now I do like a limited pallet of wines. I say limited because the whole “nose,” “hints of oak and berries and spices,” and sucking 6 mm loudly through clenched teeth, swirling it about your gums, gargling it, swallowing with great movement of one’s adam’s apple and looking pensively upwards or off to the side with a studied twist of the head while all breathlessly await the verdict is just all too much. Is there any wonder at the dismay toward the elite wannabes? Of course the wine industry is a trillion dollar industry, Jesus Christ himself served it so its been around for a thousand years, but its basic nature of pleasure and sacrament have long been eclipsed by the economics and the need to tell us how and what to think in inexplicable phantom descriptors. Like advertising with its “permissible lies.”
Whew...
Must be trailer fever.
I gotta get out.
RV Park Rant
Two nights ago I took a shower in one of the camp facilities. Normally 96% of these facilities have no planning and slap dash construction with more spiders than nails, with the worst plumbing, pipes, valves, countertops, available probably acquired at demolition or garage sales. I saw one set of sinks where the faucets were so cheap and installed so badly that the end of the spouts ended 1 inch away from the inner surface of the bowl. They had to add a swivel filter to the end just so the water could spray into the sink. And even then you still could not get your hands under the stream! You had to divert the water from the faucet end with your hand into your other hand! And the toilets! Toilets with the bowls the size of a child’s hospital bed pan. You know the ones that when you sit cut off the circulation to your “Johnsons” and crush your genitals so that you either wet yourself or wet your ankles! Let’s face it we Americans need the wide open spaces! I have lost count of the number of shower stalls that had walls of sheet linoleum flooring stapled (Stapled!) to the walls. Shower curtains as thin as saran wrap and foggy with old soap scum that whipped about with the spray and kept sticking to your body. The RV Park in PEI had stall partitions that were dry/wet rotted at the floor. Stalls dividers supposed to shield you from your sitting neighbor were ready to collapse from rot. “Say, mind holding up that wall friend,? I’m just about done over here.”
I could go on and on there’s so much more. But back to the Shower here. The showers were clean, of one piece fiberglass, partitions were solid and secure, tiles and mirrors cleaned several times a day. So what’s wrong you ask? The shower heads, unadjustable of course, were running a fine needle hard spray at about 120psi. You did not need to scrub your back, it just jetted you down car wash style and peeled off the first layer of epidermis. It hurt damn it!! I went to rinse my face and it felt like my lips got torn off. I actually reached up to feel for them! One corner of my left eye caught a spray and it soon thereafter hemorrhaged into a bloodshot mess that made JoAnn gasp and put her hand to her mouth in worried horror. Really. I felt like Quasimoto. “Stop looking at me!” Since she could not help staring at it on and off I forced myself to look in the mirror. I saw, to my horror, I had no whites of my left eye next to my nose, only black/red. With out the whites I looked permanently cross eyed! I did not like this.
The next morning I went into town at 7:30AM to be first in line before the only optometrist (3 days a week only) in town opened and waited with a cup of coffee outside her door. It was only bruised, not bleeding. She said it would return back to normal after about a week. But like all bruises it would probably change colors until it fully healed. It should be interesting to see what I look like as a yellow eyed jaundiced RVer. I got a taste of what it was like for people’s gaze upon meeting to drift toward one’s facial infirmities. Very disconcerting. It began to affect how I would look or face others today. Very disconcerting.
Ah well, we at least got the obligatory lobster out of the way and I can now fix upon more important things like other people. Meanwhile I’m stuck in the trailer while it pours and now thunders great claps over Cape Breton. Cape Breton...it sounds like a rainy thundery name doesn’t it. I think it’s why the Scottish inhabit this region. The lakes and hills and highlands are very much like the blustery landscape of Scotland.
Right now I’m wondering about the thunder and lightning and how wise it is to be inside this metal can of ours. Hm? Perhaps I’ll be around to see you in the morning? If it’s raining this hard then.....you may be stuck with me ranting off again..sorry.
I have no soggy rain pictures to post. I’ve been watching Camp store videos on the computer when I should have been posting.
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| Baddeck Camp, Cape Breton NS |
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