Smitten by Canada!: Another %!@^! Travel Memoir

By Bob Braithwaite

Told with humor and a true travelers fascination with new places and adventure, this book provides a country wide glimpse of Canada and its bounty of travel opportunities and experiences. Based on the author's observations and his daughters journal transcripts of their journey together, a vibrant and personal description is provided of the uniqueness that is Canada.

The travel partners begin their journey at the eastern-most edge of the North American continent, on the Island of Newfoundland and traverse the entire country in a series of trips devised to most appeal to, and yet still educate, a twelve year old girl. Their travels take them to Viking ruins, historic North American battlegrounds essentially untaught in American history, arctic wildlife areas, museums, mountain scenery, and widely varied cities from major modern metropolises to habitations on the rim of the Arctic Circle.

The reader is also left with the understanding that these lessons are also taught, with love, to Hope by her Dad. The book is a unique travel guide that not only suggests to the reader the places and sites worth seeing, but it also provides a wonderful personal perspective of Canada and its culture, by viewing the trips through the eyes of the young girl, Hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450254946

Bob Braithwaite

BOB BRAITHWAITE was born in Ithaca, New York. He is a retired state trial judge and presently a part-time U.S. Magistrate judge, with a passion for travel, sports, family and history. He lives in Cedar City, Utah where he and his wife raised four children, including Hope, who collaborated with him on this, and an earlier book: With Hope Across America: A Father-Daughter Journey.

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Copyright © 2010 by Bob Braithwaite

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-5495-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-5494-6 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 09/30/2010

Cover photo: Maman, the thirty foot spider standing guard in front of the National Gallery of Canada, does her duty, repelling the American invader.

(At the time, the author thought the pose was a stroke of genius. He later reflected that probably every other twelve year old visitor had the same revelation. But screw that. One of the consolation prizes of self-published books is that you can put any damn thing you want on the cover.)

Contents

Prologue

A Thwarted Kidnapping

Part I

Eastern Canada

EXPLORING NORSE AMERICA

Newfoundland

WHERE IN THE FOG ARE THE MARITIMES?

Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick

GRANDKIDS IN ANY LANGUAGE

Quebec

Part II

Northern Canada

POLAR (BEAR) EXPRESS

Churchill, Manitoba

Part III

Central Canada

WHALES AND TEA

Vancouver and Victoria

THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE

British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario

GOVERNMENT AND SPIDERS

Ontario

Part IV

Western Canada

HAPPINESS IS…IN THE DETAILS

Vancouver Island

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH, IN COLORAD—OH—MAKE THAT CANADA!

British Columbia and Alberta

HOME

About the Author

Prologue

A Thwarted Kidnapping

Do you have a note from the child’s mother allowing you to take the child out of the country? says a grim-faced airline agent.

No. I’m her father, I say, putting the matter to rest.

That wasn’t the question, the agent snaps. You have to have written permission from the other parent if you’re traveling alone. I stare back at her, speechless. Otherwise we have no proof that you are the custodial parent, she continues. We can’t issue boarding passes for you to fly to Canada. Canada is an international flight.

I’m becoming nervous. She’s becoming suspicious. I blink first.

She turns to the child next to me, and asks, What is your name?

The child stares back at her, smiles, and says nothing. Seconds drag by.

Exasperated, I turn to the child and say, Tell her your name is Hope.

My name is Hope, she says.

As I turn toward the agent, it dawns on me that I shouldn’t have told the child what name to say. The look on the agent’s face confirms my fear. Let me get my supervisor, she says.

The child and I are standing in a crowded Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts. Wind-driven rain is pelting the international terminal’s windows—the northern edge of a hurricane presently battering North Carolina, and moving north. There are all kinds of storm warning alerts. If airports have rush hours, this one is at full tilt, with travelers purposefully striding every direction pulling wheeled luggage. Lots of set jaws and steely straight-ahead gazing going on. Everyone wants to get off the ground here and on the ground somewhere else, before flights are cancelled. Those who speak do so loudly and with authority. At ticket counters, there is a lot of speaking and a lot of authority, so the decibel level is high, with everyone insisting on being heard. Kind of like a party where people have had too much to drink so they raise their voices to be heard over the idiots next to them who don’t have things nearly as important to say. At best, I’m one of the idiots, and at worst, I’m apparently a potential felon.

The agent takes a step away from the counter as the supervisor approaches and briefs him. They are only a few feet away, but the agent has purposefully turned her back to me so that she can’t be heard over the din.

I take the opportunity to talk to the child, who is my twelve-year-old daughter. She is a bright kid, so, confused, I say, Why did you act like you didn’t know what your own name was?

I was so scared my mind went blank. So I just smiled.

My grilling with the agent had felt like a dialogue between a novice who showed up for an audition without reading a line, and a veteran actor who had memorized the script. I’m still worried about missing flights and losing non-refundable deposits in Newfoundland, but that’s secondary now to the growing fear of being separated from Hope in this convention of strangers in order to answer some cop’s questions in separate rooms.

The supervisor cuts our whispering short. Why haven’t you brought any paperwork with you?

I didn’t know I had to. The two of us drove across the border at Niagara Falls last year with no documents.

Border crossings are different.

How was I supposed to know that? This morning they let me check my bags all the way to Halifax and nothing was said about paperwork.

It’s your job to comply with the rules. It’s not our job to explain them to you.

What’s the big deal? I’m her father.

That’s what you say, but how do we know if that’s true or not? We’ve had kidnappings and violations of custody orders.

Okay. I understand that. I’m a judge.

You are? He seems to soften a little, but then says, Do you have ID proving that?

Yes, but not with me. I’ve never needed it before for anything.

Again—how do I know that? The I’m dealing with an idiot look returns to his eyes and I can’t say I blame him.

You don’t. How about you call my wife and see if this is all okay, or—better yet—go off with Hope where I can see her, but can’t hear your conversation. You’ve changed the rules on me.

The agent jumps back in. No, we haven’t; let me show you something. She picks my ticket off the counter, flips to the back side and reads the fine print I’ve never looked at: Delta Airlines recommends that ‘a written notarized statement from a second parent be provided.

The lawyer part of my brain kicks in, and I say, "So it’s discretionary. It doesn’t say the statement shall be provided, it says ‘recommended.’ The statement isn’t mandatory."

They’ve heard enough though. They have louder fish to fry—the lady at the counter right by me—I don’t know the cause—is yelling and demanding to speak to security about who knows what. The agents tell me there’s nothing they can do. As I walk away, I wonder which works better, being ornery like the lady or an insistent wuss like me. I hear the agent tell my back, It’s not our fault, it’s the government’s. The only saving grace is that I’ve convinced them that rather than being a criminal, I’m just someone who is just too damn dumb to leave the house.

Even though I don’t know if it’s feasible to do such a thing, I turn to Hope and say, Okay, we’ll rent a car and drive through the night to Halifax so that we can catch our morning flight. I use a courtesy phone to call every rental company listed on a display. None has a single car to rent.

My calm starts melting and I call Delta’s 800 number, talk to a ticket salesman, explain the situation and am put on hold. I watch the battery indicator on the cell phone I forgot to re-charge last night recede to one bar and wonder at my own ineptness. The 800-guy comes back eventually and surprises me by saying he has talked to a supervisor up the chain of command and that if I can get someone back home to fax our birth certificates, they will let us board. His final comment is, We’re bending the rules on this because we let you board your first flight. If customs grills you, you better interview well or we’ll be fined. I thank him profusely.

I call home, and my nineteen year-old son, Nic, saves the day by finding the certificates and faxing them to Boston.

For the first time in my life I thank God for a four-hour layover and we board the plane with ten minutes to spare.

We sit back and begin to unclench as the steward begins the decidedly Canadian ritual that we will come to hear so often: stating information in English, and then in French. The flight is delayed ten minutes, so connecting flight passengers can get on since this is the last boat to Halifax–you’d want us to wait too if you were them, the pilot explains over the intercom. No problem—we’re oozing empathy.

A passenger in the front row tells the steward, Your identification tag has expired. The steward looks at the tag for a few seconds and then says, No—I still have a little while to get it renewed—see it’s okay because it’s U.S., where they list the month first and then the day.

The passenger says, Okay, but you’ll expire when you arrive in Canada! They all have a good laugh. (Everything’s hilarious when you think you might be grounded indefinitely!)

We play card games and relax as we settle in to the flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Far from being a child custody situation, we’re traveling with the support of my wife, Arlene. We finished an extensive road trip around the U.S. the summer before, and had such a great time that we wanted to replicate the experience in a new country—Canada. My biology attracted me to an appropriate mate, who didn’t mind my taking our offspring on road trips. My two goals for our trips were simple; (1) to see the scenery and learn as much as we could about Canada, and (2), spend time with Hope, the youngest child in the family, at twelve years old, before she spreads her wings and moves on.

As with our U.S. travels, Hope brings her journal and records her thoughts and feelings as we go along. It’s my practice to never edit her entries, nor to read them until after our traveling is over. (I’ve provided her entry at the end of this prologue as a sample.) The rest of the time, I blend her entries into the book’s dialogue.

After finishing a card game, I read a paperback and Hope pulls out her journal and flips through it. She nudges my elbow and I turn. In her upheld palm is a tulip tree petal from the Ben Hur museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a Tennessee Aquarium ticket stub, and a Larry Bird bookmark from the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. She smiles and I feel good.

June 22, 2004

Hey!

Sheshcubobs, today was looong! I was really scared (at the end of the day) that we wouldn’t come to Canada. They said, We need your birth certificates and a parent note thing. They asked me my name. I was so nervous/anxious that I actually forgot for a second. I felt like it was some kind of big test that would decide if we got to go to Canada or not. (Even though that’s absurd! Well, not really but…) I fumbled and said Hope twice; the second time was just to make sure he heard. I felt like such a dumby. Well, now I’m actually (yaaa) on the plane heading for Halifax, I just hope they don’t stop the plane and say: she doesn’t know her name, take her back to the US!"

Bye!

Hope

p.s. Colo’s on the trip too! [Her stuffed animal that has accompanied her on all trips since acquired in Ouray, Colorado when she was in first grade.] At first I thought it was too dangerous to take him but, I mean—he’s part of our trips!

Part I

Eastern Canada

EXPLORING NORSE AMERICA

Newfoundland

missing image file

Approaching Quirpon Island.

It takes a bit of doing to get from the western U.S. to Newfoundland. Early in the morning, we were back in a Halifax taxi on the way to the airport, half asleep, with a now gentle rain drizzling against the window.

It was the same taxi driver as the night before—I enjoyed talking with him and he’d given us his card. He was of Middle Eastern descent, and Hope had a little trouble understanding him, leading her the night before to comment, I wonder if there’s a class I can take for understanding accents. I am serious, I stink!

The motel we’d stayed in had a gift-pack for kids that included a SpongeBob SquarePants organizer (calculator, clock, calendar, and notebook). This is for little kids! she’d said disdainfully when she opened it, but the technology aspect proved irresistible and she couldn’t stop herself from inputting information and checking out the functions as the taxi driver and I visited. She continued the process in the taxi until she finally mumbled, the ‘save’ and ‘delete’ don’t work, set it aside, and listened in to the driver and me.

Where are you going today? he asked.

Newfoundland.

Have you been there before?

No, but we’re ending our trip in Montreal, where I have been before. It seemed pretty friendly for a big city.

No. Montreal is not friendly.

It’s not?

No! I moved from my country to Ontario to live with my in-laws. In Ontario, they converted my driver’s license to theirs. Then I drove taxi. When I moved to Montreal and tried to change my Ontario license to Quebec they said ‘no,’ because I had to pass a language test. I don’t speak French first.

What is ‘your’ country?

Pakistan. In Montreal, they said I could have converted my license from Pakistan, but not from Ontario. The man at the license bureau only spoke French to me. He wouldn’t speak English to me even though he could.

The driver was pretty wound up, continuing, I moved here (Halifax) and people are friendly. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, people are friendly. I wanted to take computer science in Montreal. When I signed up, they had me take eight hours of French. I said, No, I want computer science, maybe one or two hours French and the rest computer science. They said ‘no,’ so now I’m going to take fast-track courses in nursing in the fall. Canada needs nurses–just like the U.S. where there is a shortage.

Will you still drive taxi?

Yes. On weekends, I work a lot. My child is nineteen months old. When I go to work, he brings me his shoes and socks and says, ‘Take me outside too, papa,’ but I can’t bring him.

We were silent for a while, listening to the taxi tires hiss along the wet asphalt and watching the windshield wipers barely keeping ahead of the tiny raindrops gathering on the windshield, and then he asked, How old are you?

Surprised at the question, I answered, Fifty-four.

You look young for fifty-four. In Pakistan and India, people my age look a lot older because they have so much pollution. If you go to a big city, you have a pollution-covered face by the end of the day–almost blackened. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to move here, he concluded.

At the airport terminal we picked up our boarding passes—no problem now that we had the birth certificates—and a Canadian history book that I’d read was good for kids.

Sitting next to us on the flight to Deer Lake was a stout man with a sunburned face. He stared out the window and didn’t seem to want to talk but I needed information on Newfoundland if he had any to give. Also, I knew I could blame Hope if he got irked at me—like an adult seeking autographs (It’s not for me—it’s for my kid!)

I didn’t need to worry—he went from a glower to a warm smile with the first question, something I wanted to get clear from the start. How do you say ‘Newfoundland?