What actually happened on my summer vacation
When co-workers come back from vacation, they generally either say, “It was great!” and nothing else, or they go too deeply into detail about things you don’t care about, like the ingredients of the cocktail they had at the swim-up bar.
Having just completed a two-week road trip through Eastern Canada, I know I won’t be able to not talk about it: but I will tell the unflattering, terrifying, and bizarre details that you might actually want to hear about. Here we go!
Meet the beetles
The first leg of our trip involved three days camping at Sandbanks Provincial Park. After getting lost a few times, we arrived at around twilight to find our camping spot was actually a sand dune a few steps from the beach. Not a problem, right? Beach views!
As we pulled our gear from the car to set up camp, my kid let out a yell: his flashlight shone on dozens of black beetles the size of Sous Vide Egg Bites from Starbucks—which, at that very moment, decided to burrow out of the sand to greet us.
While my spouse and I stood still in shock and horror, screaming silent screams, my kid announced that he’d step on one, which I immediately halted not out of some love of wildlife, but out of self-preservation: I had no idea what the beetles would do if they sensed the murder of one of their own. Fuelled by adrenaline, we set camp up quickly and retired to bed, but none of us slept.
The next morning, skittish and tired, we climbed out of our tent to find the beetles gone, and the beach quiet and gorgeous.
This lasted until about 9 a.m. when, suddenly, the entire park descended upon us, and the beach became as crowded as the one in Jaws. Men driving camping trailers glared at us jealously while looking for parking spots, families dumped out their beach bags and repacked them at our camp, dogs wearing bandanas ran wild… for 12 hours, hundreds of people ambled past, and our spot was less a campsite and more a beach prison panopticon cell. It was like camping in a Costco parking lot.
By sunset, and the return of the beetles, we decided to cut our losses and move to the next leg of the trip early. We packed up and left the next morning for Montreal.
Leave the gun, take the bagels
We had been in Montreal for less than two hours when my kid turned to me and asked, quite seriously, not to say any more French words out loud while we were there. It was the first time that he’d suggested that he was embarrassed to be in public with me, but he had a legitimate point. Walking around the city, my eleven 11-year-old seemed to be in his element: finally, six years of French Immersion he had endured was paying off.
I was charmed by the city but, as per the custom of tourists from Toronto, the city politely tolerated me:
We watched the fireworks display from the roof of our Airbnb, purchased and devoured a countless number of Fairmount Bagels, and rode the underground buses that the city attempts to pass off as a subway. Montreal also tried to passive-aggressively maim me. I think it was because I passed on the ubiquitous cole slaw and the dressed hotdogs. At any rate, it had a legitimate point.
After four days of being surrounded by beautiful, casual French-language apathy, we packed up for the long drive to Fundy National Park.
It was a Fundy
As the sun set, we crossed into New Brunswick from Quebec. And if you’ve never driven through New Brunswick before, let me assure you: this is the worst possible time.
The signs that warn of crossing moose become more and more frequent and larger, until they are the only signs you see for kilometres as the world plunges into darkness.
Then you hear the sound of rain, but it isn’t rain: it’s bugs. Hundreds upon hundreds of flying bugs crashing into your vehicle, their death splatters and corpses so thick against the windshield that the wipers are rendered useless. You wonder if they’re just attracted to your high beams, or if the province itself is encased in a swarm of vermin every nightfall.
You forget for a brief minute about the moose, but a sign half the size of your car—of a moose gleefully throwing back its head and laughing as it swallows your family whole—comes into view and reminds you. Your heart rate only slows when you get off the highway, and the next morning you discover the front of your car looks like it’s covered in bug tempura.
Having reached our gross-bug limit, and our tents as thin as Dollarama pantyhose, we decided to get serious:
This structure is actually called an oTENTik, which is a terrible name. Where they fail in marketing, though, they succeed everywhere else. It makes camping comfortable and accessible. Also, unlike Sandbanks, Fundy was private, quiet, and perfect. The trees were tall and slender and dripping with lichen, the forest floors soft like sponges, the squirrels small and red and in constant battle with chipmunks for dominance.
Every night we slept well. Every morning we woke up refreshed, ready to explore.
After hitting the usual tourist hot spots, we did the most important thing. We got to see my family:
I mentioned to Aunt Cathy how delighted I was to see the Hillsborough Grocery Community Message Board. It’s the closest thing to an analog version of Twitter:
As I enthusiastically described my daydream to move to Hillsborough in full Delia Deetz mode, Aunt Cathy laughed and told me I had already been to that town and made an impression before: in sixth grade, when I lived with her for a few months.
I was a “city kid more interested in reading books than running around,” who shied away from farm chores whenever I could. One spring morning, we piled into the truck and went to the sawmill in Hillsborough. Sawdust is a useful substance on a farm, and we needed lots of it for the season ahead. Bagging sawdust is a dirty, tiring, boring chore, made easier by many hands.
At the mill was a giant mountain of the sawdust: a dangerous one that you couldn’t climb up too far, or you could get swallowed up by it like quicksand—or so my teenage cousins told me. I was fascinated by the concept. To my family’s shock, I put down the paperback in my hand, and threw myself into the work, doing more than my fair share as I scaled the mountain and getting absolutely breaded with sawdust in the process.
This was such a deviation from my usual self that, nearly 30 years later, my aunt still thinks of the sawmill as the spot where her big-city niece earned her country-kid stripes. (I’m still proud of those stripes.)
We spent the rest of our time in N.B. breathing in the fresh air, marvelling at our surroundings, and enjoying the roller coaster roads. As we left, we realized there was one last thing we had to do:
Old money, new world
My spouse called Quebec City the “Ottawa of Quebec.” While I can see his reasoning, I also found it very offensive. Quebec City is stately and gorgeous and self-assured, aware of its faults but not neurotic because of them: it’s what lip-chewing Ottawa aspires to be.
For the night we were there, we wandered the old city, tried dipped soft-serve and, once again, my son used his French-language skills to distinguish himself from his hopelessly anglophone parents.
The grandmothers from Ohio were quite impressed with him, even more so when we told them he was the only one of us who spoke French.
“So he takes French in school all day, and speaks English at home?”
“Most of the day, yes.”
“And you two only speak English?”
“Yes.”
“And where are you from?,” another grandma asked. We answered in unison, a little too enthusiastically—perhaps because this was the only time in the province that our tween allowed us to speak to other adults. Together, we made a sound like a Canada goose getting hit by a car.
“TRAWNA.”
“What?!,” replied the scared and confused American nanas. We realized our mistake, and elucidated “Toronto” in a manner they could decipher. Perhaps it was for the best that we finally returned home to the Centre of the Universe the following day. We cheered in the car when the CN Tower came into view.
I hope you enjoyed this little look into my private life. Next week, The Jumpstack returns to the usual day and format. If you liked this post, or would like to leave a comment, please feel free to do so, and thanks for reading!
— Jump