Early in the trip, especially in the first few days after my sciatic pinch had really taken hold, Leslie and our travelling companions were being nothing less than incredibly helpful in making it as easy as it could be made for me to get around.

As we were preparing to disembark the train in Florence after our quick rail trip from Venice, Leslie had already had my suitcase seized from behind by a helpful young woman who – we figured later – must have boarded the train the moment it came to a stop.

Stepping down onto the platform, cane firmly in hand, I saw our travel-mates with our remaining suitcase – Leslie’s – along with their own, amid a trio of young women of similar age to the one now bringing my suitcase down off the train.

In short order, one of our co-travellers had made it clear that they would proceed on foot to our hotel, a ten-to-15-minute walk away, but that Leslie and I were definitely going to need a taxi.

(No doubt you can see what’s coming, but it’s a good cautionary tale to get on the record anyway.)

So with me hobbling along on my cane, Leslie and I were trailed by two of the girls, each one towing one of our wheeled carry-on suitcases, while their two companions (I really want to use the word “confederates” but that would be an insult to Robert E Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia) preceded our little convoy and helped clear a path through the station crowd to get us to the line of people queuing for the taxis that were already arriving in a stream at the taxi stand.

It felt like about a kilometre and a half but, in reality, the distance we covered across the station floor was probably no more than about a hundred metres or so. And without a whit of embarrassment or hesitation, our quartet of porters and blockers simply brought us to the front of the taxi line in which about 30 people were already gathered. Spotting my cane, they generously parted like the waters of the Red Sea under Moses’ staff.

At this point one of our accompanying quartet, who had managed one of the bags, approached me and with a very demure expression on her face held out her hand. Quickly motioning to her three companions, she said, “five, five, five and (touching her own arm) five... 20 Euros per favore”.

“Wait, what?” I said aloud... “20 Euros???” (At the time about $26.) Again she smiled ever so sweetly and mimed her four-count... “Five for each.”

Now I really need to make it clear that I was not going to pay nothing, because being at the front of the taxi line felt damned good, but neither was I in a mood to be hosed that badly. So in my turn, I did a quick finger point to the two rolling carry-ons and held up two fingers, “10 Euros.” Her smile vanished but she was not done yet.

Reaching into her pocket, she extracted a crumpled piece of paper, smoothed it out and gave it to me. (Photo)

At this point, I think a little more detail is required to give you, dear readers, more of a sense of just who had helped us through the crowd. They were four young, healthy women, probably no more than about 21 or 22 years old each, with features suggesting Central American birth complimented by very well-deployed make-up. Without exception, they were fashionably dressed in form-fitting hole-free various colours of denim pants with equally fashionable blouses, fully accessorized with co-ordinated belts, scarves and shoes. If this is the face of homelessness in Florence, I thought, it could obviously be a heck of a lot worse. My other thought was if the young woman who handed me the note was indeed the mother of three hungry children, either they were triplets or she had been a child bride.

At this point, I simply stepped to the first cab in line, repeated “10” and pulled out my wallet. And of course Mr Murphy had to step in with one of his damned laws. All I had were 20-Euro notes.

I wavered a second, but must have muttered something like “No...” to myself because I pushed it at the taxi driver who had already loaded our bags into his trunk. “You have two tens?” I asked. It took him a second but I think he looked behind me and knew immediately what was happening. He smiled, took my 20 and gave me two tens. I turned and passed one to the 21-year old Guatemalan supermodel with the three starving waifs at home, said “Mille Grazie; thank you” and clambered into the open rear door nearest to me.

“Benevenuto a Firenze,” I said to Leslie, and we were off to the hotel.

And yes, their help was worth ten Euros to my now-throbbing hip and leg. Just not 20.

= = = = =

When I was growing up pre-internet, I remember just revelling in stories and “gladiator”-style or religious-themed movies in which the Roman Army was featured prominently. A seemingly unstoppable force at the height of the Empire’s power and reach, the Roman Army established itself during a run of almost 2,000 years in outposts ranging from Hadrian’s Wall in the northern UK (“Britannia”) through a ring of power that completely encircled the Mediterranean, spilling as far south as present-day Syria and as far east as the present day Black Sea ports.

As the symbol of Roman authority and might, the army and its leaders were both feared as conquerors and respected as police who kept ruthless order in the lands they subjugated.

And always they were depicted – whether in ancient art or in modern Hollywood treatments of their stories – marching under red and golden banners and insignia displaying the four-letter notation, “SPQR”. The standard is even a staple when the Roman Army is a modern-day recreation by military buffs and re-enactors.

SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus (the “Q” being nestled within “Populusque”) – translates as “The Senate and the People of Rome” and its appearance at the very vanguard of Rome’s legions was simply a way to inform the conquerees, “Hi, we represent SPQR and we own you people as of right now. Wanna argue? Talk to the large, armoured legionnaire over there with the sharpened Roman short sword at the end of his exceedingly powerful arm.”

Well how the mighty are fallen.

Throughout the parts of Rome we saw, it didn’t take me long to notice that the covers of sewers and storm drains with very few exceptions include a cast of “SPQR” somewhere in their design. (Look up AND look down is always excellent advice when you’re on local walking tours in a city. You see the darndest things!)

Turns out that several modern sources note that its use in waterworks-related devices is simply a tribute to the millennia of Rome’s innovations in both bringing water in (their famed aqueducts) and using it as a medium of carrying waste out.

Although I also found a couple hilarious sidebar notes: its use in present-day London open-air markets is a tongue-in-cheek expression of the stall owners’ business philosophy: “Small Profits; Quick Returns”, while another source said that the motto’s abbreviated display by some conquered peoples was actually a message from them that “Sono Porci Questi Romani” – “These Romans Are Pigs”. (That second story is certainly out there but it may also be more fable than fact. Seems the internet is not yet universally acknowledged as the final authoritative citation in serious academic research.)

TriumphAnt: You may be a lot of things here, but you’ll never be bored. Now WAKE UP! Here’s one more postcard for this post.

= = = = =

Thanks to the soaring popularity of “foodie” television, it’s no longer a surprise to foreigners to discover that a traditional Italian meal actually consists of three separate courses (four if you count some form of sweet for dessert). But while perhaps no longer a surprise, the sheer volume of what makes up a course can still come as a shock.

Leslie and I had gotten to Italy a full day ahead of our travelling companions, whom we were scheduled to meet (and did) the next day at Rome’s rail station.

So that first night we opted for a dinner choice through the simple expedient of walking along a few nearby streets and reading some restaurant menus. We found a wonderful little walk-down called the Taverna Barberini and, over a pre-dinner drink, we thought an antipasto would be nice so we ordered one. Five minutes later, this separate trolley arrived tableside with the cheery message from our waitress, “Your antipasto”.

My first thought was that this was the entire antipasto buffet and we were to select a couple spoonfuls from a few of the items. But no, this entire array of 13 separate dishes on a trolley that could comfortably seat four people around it was intended solely for the two of us! As an appetizer.

“Antipasto”, incidentally, literally means “before the pasta” and pasta in a traditional Italian dinner is actually only the official first course, or “Primo piatti”. After that, you’re expected to order a “secundo piatti”, the main course consisting of a meat or fish entree with a side of some sort of veggie. Then you’re handed a pheasant feather and steered to the “vomitorium” to make room for dessert.

(That last sentence is a complete fabrication, but what is not is that pasta in fact is not considered to be a main course in and of itself the way it is in a dinner served at a Canadian kitchen table.)

I did opt for a pasta course as well, with a carbonara sauce – a lush combination of eggs, cream, bacon and cheese that gave a wonderful smokiness to the whole dish.

We had some other amazing dinners while in Italy. In a coastal city like Venice or Rome, you really can’t go wrong by ordering a fish entree (and they are universally brilliant at cooking and serving sea bass, something I tried to grill once at home only to see it vanish in flaking pieces between the bars of my barbecue’s grilltop. Pan frying or cedar planking from now on. In Florence, a more centrally-located city, I had one of the best-cooked, tenderest and most flavourful steaks (a massive tenderloin filet bathed in a wild blueberry sauce!) I have ever had in my life at an incredible restaurant called the Taverna del Bronzino.

Package recommendation: A very nice three-star hotel called the Orto de Medici is centrally located in Florence; the Taverna del Bronzino is two blocks away. A head of Chianti-induced mellowness to help anaesthetize an aching hip while on a gentle flagstone sidewalk stroll back to your hotel after it has been washed by a light late summer rainfall is the stuff that can give a screenwriter inspiration, I tells ya! Highly recommended – except the “aching hip” part. I don’t recommend that to anyone.

As we exited the Bronzino we passed a glass case displaying the fruits of a nearby upholsterer’s hobby passion – a huge and intricately detailed scale model of British Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory.

We still don’t know why that model was on display in that restaurant in that city in Italy, a country that wasn’t even involved in Nelson’s most famous battle in “Victory” – against a combined French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, but clearly it was an incredible labour of love by the builder and, as a Michelin Guide might say, well worth a diversion if you’re ever in the neighbourhood.

(Photo: www.historicships.com)

The Bronzino “Victory” was pretty close to the dimensions indicated for this model and was certainly at least as meticulously detailed, if not more so. One of our travelling companions has made Nelson a personal passion and he was completely delighted by our serendipitous find of the model.

Random factoid: Shortly after you sit down in any Italian restaurant – ANY Italian restaurant – you will be asked if you want water. When you say “Yes please”, you will then be asked immediately, “Still, or gas?” In hindsight, of course, it is blindingly obvious what the question means but the very first time we were asked, I wasn’t even sure I had heard the brief question correctly. Fortunately, Leslie has had more extensive Italian travel experience than me and answered immediately, “Still”. And a bottle of NON-carbonated mineral water was brought to our table. Oh.

As I sat outside Florence’s Uffizi Gallery while our travelling companions secured the pre-reserved tickets by which we would be admitted, I glanced upwards at the statues and exhibit posters lining the street outside the main entrance. Reading names like Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo, I am profoundly embarrassed to admit that what first came to mind was, “Hey! All of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!” There were also a couple of forgettables like Cellini and Giambologna but the awesome display of artistic firepower outside certainly forecast the profound experience awaiting inside the Gallery’s walls.

I am especially lucky to be married to someone who studied art history in university. I didn’t, and had I not met Leslie I likely never would have seen so many of the original artworks I have seen in my life under her direction. Case in point: while we were in Rome, she was looking at the map of the streets around our hotel and suddenly said, “Omigosh! We’re really close to Santa Maria della Vittoria!”

Next morning, we were standing in a small basilica only because it is home to a sculpture that has been on Leslie’s want-to-see list ever since she’d studied it: Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”. Coincidentally, our hotel desk clerk had already told us it was one of the three most important churches in Rome and seemed pleased that we were interested in seeing it.

You probably don’t need to be told that Italian religious art is pretty much where any study of Christian artworks the world over begins, but it is only while standing in the centre of a church like Santa Maria della Vittoria that you really come to appreciate the density of Italian religious art. There was not one square centimetre of floor, wall or ceiling space that wasn’t beautifully decorated with representations of the Divine, whether with paintings, sculpture, tile mosaics, tomb inlays and even objects like the badges of office worn by the countless bishops who presided over services held in the basilica over the centuries. You could devote quite literally a lifetime to studying the works in this one comparatively small space.

And the Bernini piece is indeed incredible. It is a statue of Saint Teresa in the company of an angel. She is looking heavenward while, from above, a stream of sculpted golden rays paints the entire piece with the heavenly presence that is infusing her with the emotion named in the work’s title.

I have a minor bug about places like this. Despite easily understood universal graphic signs urging silence and the forbidding of photography, there were small bands of jabbering visitors happily snapping away. We were not, however, which is why this Bernini illustration comes not from either of our cameras, but rather from a website.

There’s no smugness or holier-than-Thou intended with that statement. Frankly, in my case I was just so taken with the interior of this Church – helped along I suspect by a huge awareness of how much Dad’s Catholicism meant to him up to the moment he died – that I would have found it crass to turn the visit into a photo-op. But sometimes I just find it annoying to encounter people who seem to think the warnings are meant for everyone else – like the one idiot on an aircraft pre-departure who somehow fails to hear the eight-times-repeated instruction from the cockpit to turn off ALL electronic devices until the aircraft seatbelt sign is turned off once airborne. You just know the flight attendant who has to approach him (and yes, it’s always a “him”) is really wishing for a pointed stick.

(By sharp contrast, I felt no such compulsion in St Peter’s Basilica when I snapped a couple photos of its majestic interior, including Michelangelo’s Pieta – perhaps because it has seen the presence of TV cameras so often, it simply seemed more natural to be more of a tourist and less of a pilgrim within its walls. But I did notice that that basilica also displays no such warnings, so it seems the officials have yielded to the desires of the travelling shutterbugs.)

But Santa Maria Della Vittoria, as I mentioned, is less widely known, and we were among the first visitors this day. In the absence of crowds, it simply overpowers you into silent respect from the moment you enter its walls until the moment you re-engage with the busy streets immediately outside its doors.

I guess I digressed. Back to the Uffizi.

The Gallery’s best-known work of art is Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” but, among serious art lovers, apparently the more attractive of the artist’s major works in this same Gallery is another painting entitled “Primavera” (both easily found via online searches).

There are two highlights that especially stand out for me. The Gallery houses a central small exhibit hall called la Tribuna that has an interesting sub-text all its own. The oldest part of the Uffizi, the octagonal room is a gallery within a gallery whose interior decoration was purposely crafted to represent the four basic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Depending on either the politics or morals of the day, the room was used for the exhibit of pieces not normally viewed by the public in private showings arranged by the Medicis and, later, by the Government of Florence to visiting dignitaries and “supertourists”.

The Medicis deserve (and have) a wholly separate history – several in fact – devoted exclusively to them. An incredibly wealthy family that became a dynasty dating from the late 14th Century, their family tree includes such instantly recognizable names as Catherine de Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent.

(One story with which our guide regaled us – with only a hint of smugness – was how, when Catherine was dispatched for a time to the French Court in Paris, she was so appalled by what she encountered under the label, “food”, that she had a battery of her own chefs transferred from Florence. She ordered them to instruct the French chefs and kitchen staff how to properly prepare meals fit for royalty. “So French ‘haute cuisine’ today?” our guide summarized, “It’s all due to Italy.”)

In 1564, the Grand Duke Cosimo di Medici thought it would be a nice idea to give his son, Francesco, a unique wedding gift. In five months flat, he had an enclosed corridor constructed from what was his palace to the Florentine Government House across the Arno River, incorporating the halls of the Uffizi and crossing the Arno over a mediaeval market bridge called the Ponte Vecchio. At one point, the Corridor opens over the interior of the Santa Felicita Church, essentially offering the Medicis a “skybox” that allowed them to be present at regular services without actually mingling with the common folk.

The Vasari Corridor today (named for its designer, Giorgio Vasari) is an extension of the Uffizi and its long halls (it runs over a kilometre in length) are now home to hundreds of portraits and self portraits by a who’s who of artists through the centuries. At one point our guide gently admonished one of our group to watch his elbow after having just bumped the corner of a frame. Turned out he’d bumped a Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Corridor art is that accessible.

The Corridor tour is available as a private adjunct to a Gallery visit and the well-informed guide is a font of stories about the artists, their subjects and the all-pervasive power of the Medicis through hundreds of years of Italian history.

(Another digression. I never knew him beyond, “I’m Chuck from Princeton”, but halfway down the entrance staircase into the Corridor, he seized the wheelchair from Leslie as I hobbled carefully down with one hand firmly on my cane, the other on the railing. By the time I reached the bottom – about 60 steps away, he had opened out the chair and took it on himself to wheel me along the entire Corridor and made sure I stood up to catch the highlights – the mid-river view from the Ponte Vecchio overlooking the Arno, and the “skybox” view of Santa Felicita’s altar. I just want to repeat my vigorous thanks, Chuck, for the record.)

If you do the Uffizi, plan (you have to reserve and pay in advance – easily accomplished online) to do the Corridor too. It’s worth it. One especially tragic footnote. At the beginning of the tour, we paused by a painting so badly fire-blasted, it was unrecognizable. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation (essentially as told to us by our guide): “The area closest to the Uffizi entrance was heavily damaged by a terrorist attack commissioned by the Italian mafia in 1993. During the night of May 26, 1993 a car full of explosive was set off next to the Torre dei Pulci, located between via Lambertesca and via de' Georgofili, and five people died. Many others were injured and several houses were heavily damaged, including this section of the Uffizi Gallery and the Vasari Corridor. In the Corridor, several artworks were destroyed by the explosion. These paintings, some hopelessly damaged, have been pieced back together and placed back on their original spot to serve as a reminder of the horrible attack.”

The piece at which we paused was a massive Michelangelo from which the explosion had literally blasted the paint from the canvas.

When we got home, I asked Leslie what had been her favourite recollection of our Uffizi visit. Without a second’s hesitation, she said, “The Madonna of the Long Neck”.

See what I mean about the joys of having an art history buff in the family?

Photo: The Ponte Vecchio. The uppermost row of small square windows marks part of the Vasari Corridor. In a moment of hilarity, about the same time as I was taking this picture, a small group of Japanese tourists was standing beside me as their photographer – facing the opposite direction from me – snapped them with a modern highway bridge across the Arno behind them. Given a choice between the ancient Ponte Vecchio and a modern highway bridge over the historic river, I can only assume they were operating under a friend-at-home’s instruction to “Get a picture of yourselves with the bridge”. They probably should have gotten a few more details.

And finally, there’s not a lot about Adolf Hitler that contains a shred of positivity, but in WWII as the German armies retreated across the Arno in the face of the advancing US armies, Hitler ordered every last Florentine bridge over the river blown up... except the Ponte Vecchio. However, he did have buildings at both ends blown to bits to effectively deny the bridge’s use to the American forces.

But Ponte Vecchio stands today because of his direct order.

Ciao for niao.

Einstein once famously said that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. It’s a sentiment that, at its broadest stroke, was summarizing his belief in the rationality of the universe. At its simplest, it can be seen to mean that everything happens according to some logical order and rule set, not the Divine proclivity for reward and punishment around which many of the Bible’s messages are framed.

Maybe.

One thing is for sure, someOne up there has a sense of humour.

The red-shirt in this photo is me. (Oh yes, Star Trek fans; I was indeed wearing a “red shirt”! What the heck was I thinking?)

I look glum and grumpy because (a) I’M IN A FLIPPING WHEELCHAIR! and (b) it’s only about three days into the start of our planned three-week trip to Italy.

It’s the day after Leslie was able to find a wheelchair rental, and the day after I had experienced what at this writing seems – after the first two of what will be several visits to doctors and clinics back here in Ottawa – 99 per cent certain to have been an attack of sciatica. A first for me. Anyone who’s ever suffered one knows exactly what I’m talking about; but for anyone who hasn’t, I’ll spare you the wincing details – Google’s got them all described perfectly – and not wish it upon you... ever.

I’m mentioning this only for information purposes and rest assured I’m not about to go on and on about it once I get into my “Postcards from Italy” posts over the next several weeks that will really begin a few days after this prologue.

So why “someOne up there has a sense of humour”? Well picture this. The attack hit me in a city where no motor traffic travels the few streets that aren’t waterways – Venice, so the only “taxis” are boats and the only regular public transit service is a multi-passenger aquatic “bus” called a vaporetto. Getting back and forth across the canals requires, in pretty much all cases, a climb of several steps to get up to a bridge level, followed by a descent of the same number of steps on the other side. (Oh it may well be a magnificent work of art, but it’s still a footbridge that was not designed to be traversed on wheels.) The dry streets and sidewalks, meanwhile, while not the English-style cobblestone, are made up of large rectangular flagstones that begin to feel like the passage over a level rail crossing – just one that goes on forever.

So what’s not to make you laugh as you try to imagine a sillier set of circumstances in which to be slammed with a sciatic nerve hit?

That’s the whine.

On the upside, even before scoring a wheelchair, Leslie found a pharmacy where she purchased my one and only physical souvenir of Italy: an adjustable tubular steel “bastone da passeggio” (cane) that, even more than the wheelchair, was utterly invaluable in enabling me to get across pedestrian gaps like dock-to-boat; a stairway to the next level where no lift exists, and other such access “hiccups” where wheeling clearly wasn’t going to happen.

On another upside, Italy is insanely helpful and Italians are unbelievably generous and courteous when it comes to assisting people who obviously need assistance. So much so that my travelling companions, after a couple days of sticking close to me as we were let in the exits of busy tourist attractions, ushered around the lines at security scanners and sped to the front of lines waiting for taxis, etc, agreed that they were all going to remember to pack canes and rent wheelchairs the next time they travelled to Italy! (I’m pretty sure they were joking... right guys?)

That said, Leslie and I truncated our trip by a week. After several days at a magnificent Tuscan villa with its much-needed mental recovery time just doing not much of anything (and you will find no better place, short of a mountain-top monastery in Tibet, perhaps, to do nothing than at a villa offering a commanding vista of the Tuscan countryside) I simply was not up for yet another city. So Leslie and I opted for a return home a few days earlier than planned, leaving the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii for a future visit and leaving them, too, to our other two travelling companions to experience and share their stories when they got back.

That said, here’s the list of locations from which the many postcards to come... will come: Rome (pre-sciatica), Venice, Florence, Tuscany. Not bad for two weeks, is it?

And it was fabulous! Despite the limitations on my mobility, we still managed to experience a pretty good range of the tourists’ Italy and I loved it!

Finally (whoops, almost finally), it likely will also be a cold snowy day in high summer before I will say anything negative about Air Canada ever again. Their support services for people with mobility issues are utterly incredible! Thanks to those services and Leslie’s thorough planning, from the moment we arrived at the Rome airport to begin our early trip home, there was not one single travel process-related issue that we had to worry about. Like Disney’s Land or World, Air Canada seems to have a hidden pool of staff support people that spring seemingly out of nowhere to place you entirely into their care and make sure you get precisely where you need to be – on time and in comfort. Golf carts are frequently involved.

So here at the end of the prologue is the only other piece of information you might like to know about my sciatic hit: I’m already on the mend. (I must be. My painkiller and anti-inflammatory ingestion is already way down from what it was even a few days ago.) I’m also retired so I’m not faced with the stress of trying to hasten a recuperation in order to satisfy a need to get back to work.

The coming postcards will not be chronological; they’ll simply be about what and when I feel like rambling or ranting. Hope you enjoy the trip as much as I did.

Here’s a teaser.

See what I meant when I said “mental recovery time”?

Ciao for now!

Cottaging in the New Millennium

We were seven adults during the most populated portion of this year’s annual trip to the cottage on Kennebec Lake – five when these pictures were taken.

Five years ago, I would have been hard-pressed to put a label to a single one of these devices beyond the generic “cellphone”, “battery charger”, etc. But in 2012 I can pretty much recognize the lot.

This is what the five of us decided we needed to complete the 2012 cottage experience.

Digital SLR cameras – three (two on the table and the third to take this picture); e-book readers in the photo include a Kobo Vox, Amazon Kindle and a non-Vox edition of the Kobo; five smart phones are visible, as are a trio of music players, including the one plugged into the centre of the speaker set; one laptop computer; two iPads; a small digital clock and an array of charging devices and cables round out the paraphernalia.

And I can almost hear the “WTF?”s from here. Are you really “getting away from it all” by packing this much technology up to the cottage? Well yes we were, and here’s why. With one exception – my brother-in-law was on call and had to be reachable because he works with natural gas and the technology required to support the business. If something breaks at his workplace, there’s a chance (albeit a small one) that if left unattended, it could become the kind of problem that leads the morning newscasts the next day.

The days of heading up to the cottage to “get away from it all” would seem at first glance at a picture like this – at least in our circle – to have been consigned to the pages of family history.

But when you think of it – not so much. Because that array of devices does not, in fact, represent any sort of quantum shift in our preferred forms of cottage pastime – simply a different way of getting at what we’ve been doing for years.

Run your eyes over all that technology again and relate them to what you typically do at the cottage. Even 30 years ago we were reading, listening to music, taking hikes or canoe jaunts to take pictures or catching up on the news with whatever daily newspaper was available at the nearest campsite’s store.

That’s pretty much what these devices did for us this year. I ploughed through a many-hundred-page long Stephen King novel simply by tapping the right side of the e-reader screen to “turn the page”. Our daily newspapers were actually treeware but I also kept tabs on some favourite columnists in media that weren’t available at the campsite’s store.

And this year my brother-in-law and I – both golf fans – didn’t have to wait until we got home to discover who won the Canadian Open. In fact, had we wanted, we could have followed in real time shot-by-shot updates either of the tournament itself, or whichever player we wanted to follow.

I don’t have a deep message here; but I do have a baby boomer’s sense of awe in the fact that each of those e-readers has the power and the memory capacity to pack hundreds of books internally; the music players house thousands of tunes and the cameras’ memory cards have replaced damn near an infinite number of rolls of film.

My daughter laughs at our stories of the “prehistoric” days when I would link my computer to the phone and start the connection process before supper in the hopes of actually getting a connection by the time I had my after-dinner cup of coffee in hand. (If you’ve seen the John Badham movie with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, “Wargames”, you know what I mean – when “floppy disks” were actually floppy.)

And it wasn’t more than 20-25 odd years ago that I hit Blacks cameras before a trip to buy 24 rolls of 35 mm colour film and lucked into a sale that gave me a free canvas tote bag with every two rolls of film. A few of those twelve bags have since died but we’re still using several of them.

And at that time, we didn’t see any of those photos until after returning from the trip, holding our breath while hoping that Blacks’ processing machines wouldn’t break down while our photo negatives were in the bath. (And yes, it did happen once to Leslie who lost dozens and dozens of photos of a Europe trip. Fortunately, sister Lindsay had been on the same trip and had a second set of prints made from her negatives, which did survive the processing.)

And here’s their sister Mary in multi-task mode, demonstrating the proper way to use pretty much all of this hardware simultaneously. Almost makes it look easy, doesn’t she?

= = =

The little bike (a Piaggio in this case) is one example of what the Ontario Ministry of Transport’s Vehicle Licensing Bureau officially calls a “Limited Speed Motorcycle”(LSM). The theory is that you can’t kick it up to the highway speeds of an actual motorcycle so riders can get away with some privileges (or rule-bending) that are not allowed to non-LSM riders – for example, buzzing along the many cycle paths in the National Capital Region. And theory aside, I actually saw an LSM rider a couple months ago optimistically (suicidally?) steering her machine onto an access ramp for the Queensway – a six-lane speedway where, at least at times other than rush hour, if you’re doing less than 100 km/h, almost everyone else is blowing by you as if you were standing still. (That’s where the song “Blew By You” comes from, by the way. Trust me; I read it on the internet... *cough*...)

The only reason I point that out is to complain about a recent encounter I had with an LSM rider at a busy intersection in Ottawa. As I was waiting at a red light (I was in my car at the time), he approached from the right – as motor traffic – until he got to the intersection. Apparently, he wanted to turn left from his lane – across my nose. And he accomplished this by hitting the pedestrian crossing, yanking his LSM to the left, and crossing in the pedestrian walk. Then he turned 90 degrees right, zipped across in front of me – again in the pedestrian walk – until he was two-thirds of the way across. Then he turned left and barrelled past me going the opposite direction to me – but once more in the motor traffic lane!

I also noticed that he was not wearing a helmet.

Without checking the relevant laws, I _suspect_ he broke at least a half dozen laws in the five seconds it took him to execute that highly dangerous little maneuver. And I also suspect that had I started my roll when my light turned green and smacked into him, he would have been at the head of the line of two-wheeled riders complaining about not being treated with the respect they deserved as a legitimate part of motor traffic.

So this message too is simple: LSM riders or cyclists, it cuts both ways. You want respect and a shared road? Then you observe every last one of the traffic rules applied to the motor traffic you want to be part of. (I can’t tell you how many times I have seen very well-equipped, apparently professional bicyclists, for example, barely slow down at a red light for no more than the time it took to determine nothing was coming and then barrel through the intersection.)

And I hasten to add I have many friends who are avid cyclists and at least one (I’m looking at you, UT!) who rides an LSM. And I’m referring to none of them with this complaint. (At least not that I’ve observed.) I’ve also chatted to my LSM-riding former co-worker and he is fastidious about observing the rules under which he is allowed to ride. If only they all were.

Frankly, when I was bound to rush-hour traffic, I envied him the licence to use the bicycle paths.

= = =

As I write this, Parliament has just resumed after its long summer break; the federal Finance Minister has already made it clear a brand-new omnibus bill is on the way – a nasty piece of legislation that a majority government uses to bury several contentious bills under the broad “budget” label and then sweep them collectively through the House without the debate they deserve.

But you’ll pardon me if I shrug. It’s one of the privileges that come with retirement. To quote the Camp North Star cheer in the movie, “Meatballs”, “It just doesn’t matter!”

Besides, I have more on my mind these days – and brace yourself. We have another trip coming up and I plan to craft a post-trip report on these pages. So for now let’s just say, well... ciao!

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is the title of more than one poster – including an especially evocative one that puts you, the viewer, outside the window of a late night diner. Inside, Elvis is tending the counter while James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart occupy three stools at the far corner. Bogie and Dean look thoughtful; Marilyn and Elvis are cracking up. (Easily findable by searching the title in Google images. But if you’ve had a meal in a pub, roadhouse or diner any time in the past 20 years, chances are you’ve already seen it.)

= = =

It’s that time of year again – when Leslie and sister Lindsay get together and share a two-week cottage rental on Kennebec Lake – the same place they’ve rented for the past 12 years.

Getting to Kennebec Lake is a straight-line run from Ottawa along #7 Highway through Carleton Place, Perth, Maberly, Sharbot Lake to the Henderson Road / Arden junction – not quite as far along as Kaladar.

Over a period of many years, I have driven (or been driven as a kid) along this very scenic stretch of Eastern Ontario highway literally hundreds of times, beginning as far back as 1959 when Mom’s sister and her family lived on Wallbridge Road in Belleville and our family made regular roadtrips to visit them. (Those trips are the source of the Epilogue at the end of this long piece.)

What follows has some factual research behind it. I hunted down a few essential facts where they were findable, but most of the “What happened?”, “What is going to happen?” rambling about these random spots is just me – unless it’s sourced to a person or website.

In 1971, when I started at Ottawa’s Carleton University, #7 Highway (just #7 from this point forward in this entry) was my route home to Perth. But from Perth west, there are sites that have been either constant, or constantly changing (in the same way as the edge of Niagara Falls is changing – by being slowly but inexorably eroded by the thundering flow of the river) for all that time.

In the case of these sites along #7, what’s known is obvious – you can see it. What’s unknown is the subject of my rambling. Do they represent Quixotic dreaming on the part of the owners? Or do they represent the victimization that can happen when “circumstances beyond our control” take hold?

One such circumstance, for example, was the opening of Highway 417. Turning south from Bayshore in Ottawa’s west end, it instantly took a ton of vehicles out of #7’s westbound (to Peterborough and Toronto) traffic stream by providing a fast, direct route to the Trans-Canada Highway (401 where it crosses southeastern Ontario).

That new high-speed route swiftly crushed many #7 businesses whose survival depended on the occasional pull-off by a carload of hungry travellers, especially those with noisy kids, or tired truckers looking for a rest and maybe a cup of coffee served in a porcelain mug with the strength – and heat-conducting ability – of stainless steel.

So while perhaps “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a tad too much hyperbole, you can’t help but feel that more than just a little steady business and more than just a few hopes vanished when 417 lifted its construction barriers. The few places mentioned here – all visibly disappearing (don’t think too much about “visibly disappearing”) – surely have stories to tell. Or maybe not. Maybe the full story is being told exactly as you see it: “We were in business; business stopped coming; we went out of business.”

They’re here because their existence has pretty much always been part of my life – even if in just the very simple way that they have always been there as I drove by them, hundreds of times.

Minute Man Restaurant / Perth

For a time, it seemed to me like The Minute Man was going to be on #7 at Perth forever. Their sign – a graphic showing a “chef-y” looking guy with a pizza box for a body – made it pretty clear what their principal product was meant to be. But it wasn’t just pizza.

It was one of those places in which you knew exactly what you were going to get. Fast food from the grill, or out of the hot oil. If you expected a fresh vegetable, it would come as a slice of tomato and a couple leaves of lettuce on your cheeseburger. Period.

There’s not a whole lot of virtual information about it. I did find one review that characterized it as a “reliable”... “greasy spoon” whose fries in particular were infinitely preferable to the offerings from the McDonald’s right across the road. One online reviewer even added helpfully, “the chick at the counter [is] friendly and hot”.

The Minute Man today appears well on the way to becoming either a vacant lot, or the foundation of some new cookie-cutter roadside franchise, but my gut feeling is that it is unlikely to be revived after its long and honourable service as one of Perth’s early all-purpose greasy spoons on #7.

However, when I described my visit to this site to my brother recently, he said he’d read that it is being renovated. While that might be its future, it certainly is not in evidence at the moment. In fact, judging by the exterior building damage at the back, where it looks like a truck might have bashed into the corner at the roofline, any renovation is going to have to be a significant undertaking.

However, it will live at least so long as music lives, courtesy of a country-and-western flavoured song written a couple of decades back – probably even longer.

Before she was one half of the Ottawa local duet, Ball and Chain, Jodie Benjamin was a vocalist with a local folk band called The Toasted Westerns. As I understand the story, Jodie was returning to Ottawa with the band after playing the annual Open Skies festival just down the highway in Oompah (perhaps even as far back as its incarnation as the “Oompah Stomp”) when she inadvertently left her purse behind after the band stopped briefly at The Minute Man.

Her tune, “Purse in Perth”, laments her forgetfulness as only a country-and-western tune can, but is (so far – by me anyway) unfindable in any virtual form. My internet hunt for it has turned up so far only one brief note, that it was played on the CBC Ottawa radio show, “All in a Day”, between 4 and 5 pm on Thursday, July 28, 2011.

Jodie, incidentally, is the ex-sister-in-law of my present brother-in-law, so the preceding is not the result of a remarkable piece of detective work. It’s one of our extended family’s stories. (And if anyone has an e-copy, I’d love to add it to my iPod!)

I won’t be surprised to hear or see one day that The Minute Man has been levelled to make way for something else – even if only a larger space for extra cars to visit the bustling Dairy Queen right beside it. (Hmm... and that sounds like a good storyline to be framed by the lyrics of a country-and-western tune.)

Patterson’s / Paros Island Restaurant

Just a little farther along at the western end of the Perth portion of #7 are the remains of a restaurant I always knew as Patterson’s. So I was more than a little surprised to see evidence of its having gone through another incarnation before being shuttered – a sign beside the highway that identified it as the Paros Island Restaurant.

At least I knew that it had been closed – that much has been evident for a couple years as the lot on which it stands has become progressively more overgrown and its parking surface succumbs to more and more aggressive weeds.

But I didn’t for how long and didn’t know that there appears to be considerably more of a backstory than is obvious from the exterior.

When I went looking for a little more information, I found a photoblog called “Abandonment Issues” that is part of a larger blog called “Jermalism”, written by a bit of an urban adventurer who seems to find great fun from breaking into closed buildings and photographing their decaying interiors. What he photographed in this one was evidence of a severely damaging fire that appears to be the last major event before its final shutdown.

I had no idea there had even been a fire. Jermalism also notes (below) that the restaurant was forcibly closed for almost a year in 2006 – 2007. That would really have put a severe strain on the owner’s ability to continue to make payments on the renovations he apparently made in converting it from Patterson’s to Paros, and one might be tempted to speculate about the timing of a fire that Jermalism sources to the buffet. (A little too much hot sauce on the fire beef, maybe?)

But here’s what he has to say:

“From outside, there are no obvious signs that fire and smoke damage have ravaged The Paros Island Restaurant in Perth, Ontario. According to an AGCO document, the restaurant had its license revoked and was shut down between November 1, 2006 and July 31, 2007. The infraction stated in the document was ‘Not financially responsible in conducting its business due to Retail Sales Tax Act – did not contest.’ I have not been able to ascertain when exactly the fire happened.”

And here is the Jermalism site with a number of fascinating and sad interior damage shots.

I am not as adventurous as Jermalism and contented myself to wandering around the outside of the crumbling business. Sadly, its rear appears to have become a bit of a dumping ground as someone plainly has been dropping garbage and litter in an obvious effort to get around Perth’s collection rules. (They are surprisingly stringent, and require a homeowner to buy tags and attach one to every single bag he or she tosses out on garbage collection day).

Adding the shoddy state of the exterior with Jermalism’s shots of the interior, and I think demolition is pretty much the only option for this once distinguished fine dining establishment.

McGowan’s Lake campground

McGowan’s Lake is here as the sole exception to the “broken dreams” theme, because it’s not decaying – in fact it seems to be thriving. But this spot at the entrance to the site, specifically the rise in land under the clump of trees to the immediate left of the white building, used to be the campsite’s registration office.

It was a red trailer and one memorable night it was completely destroyed by a fire that burned it down to a trailer skeleton sitting on a pile of black ash. That was its condition for at least a year and, even after the skeleton was removed, the blackened patch where the trailer had stood was a local #7 milestone for a few more years afterward.

Ben Barbary’s / Silver Lake

The demise of Ben Barbary’s Restaurant at Silver Lake clearly did not happen all that long ago. Searching it online yields references as recently as 2005 that cite it as a great place to have a breakfast if you’re touring on one of the many Lanark County by-way road trips.

My memories go back considerably farther than that, back to the days when a weekly news magazine called the Star Weekly was as much a part of a family home’s coffee table as the daily newspaper. The SW – a weekly magazine supplement to the Toronto Star first published in 1903 – gave way in 1968 to its cheaper, shallower bastard offspring, The Canadian. (In fact, one of my first summer jobs was as a Star Weekly delivery boy.)

It was a slick gloss-paper-printed publication, issued in tabloid form before Sun Media made the format routine in Canada. The gloss paper allowed for the printing of colour photos with a surprisingly good quality resolution in an era when newspaper photos were pretty much printed exclusively in black-and-white.

Eventually the SW, no doubt because of cost factors, vanished to be replaced by The Canadian. The readers’ enthusiasm that greeted that last-ditch effort is reflected in the fact that The Canadian died with its final edition just five years later in December 1973, a mere temporal blip in contrast to the SW’s 65 years of life.

I threw that little bit of Canadiana in there simply as background for the fact that Ben Barbary’s one year was named by the widely-read SW as one of the ten best truck stop restaurants in Canada. Special reference was made to its apple pie, always served with a slab of Canadian cheddar (unless you were so gauche as to order it with ice cream instead). And of course, having it warmed before serving was a must.

Today, the stop is nothing but a vast space that was once – other than the restaurant – mostly parking lot, in which typically you would find at least a dozen 18-wheelers and frequently more. A rather hastily thrown together wreck of a store now sits on a piece of that huge parking lot.

Once upon a time, it was a convenience store called The Silver Seven, and its biggest customer base would have come from directly across #7 at the Silver Lake campsite in the form of campers looking for firewood or their Lay’s BBQ potato chip fix.

(There’s a little more regional history in that Silver Seven name, incidentally, than simply the fact that the store existed beside Silver Lake on #7 Highway. Before there was a hockey team called the Ottawa Senators, there was an Ottawa hockey team called the Silver Seven. For four consecutive years from 1903 to 1906 they held the Stanley Cup, something the current franchise can only point wistfully to as part of their legacy. But I digress.)

The store now is one of the least inviting stops on that entire stretch of highway. It’s called the Two Eagles Native Trading Post.

Each of the three gas pumps is decorated with a hand-lettered sign that cautions “NO GAS”. The window has a crudely lettered notice advertising “$15.00 a bag”. For what, I have no idea but speculated that perhaps firewood was at one time available in bundles on the ground under the sign. On another window is a further bit of hand lettering: “CASH ONLY”.

I don’t know about anyone else, but to me, in an era that offers multiple ways to pay electronically, “CASH ONLY” is just as likely to mean “We actually record just a fraction of our sales – it helps keep our business taxes really low.”

So what do they sell, one wonders? The biggest letters of all on the painted highway-side sign – which has been erected beside the now decrepit empty frame where the illuminated “Silver Seven” sign once existed – say “Smoke Shop”, while a smaller sign slapped on it advertises “Worms 4 Sale” and a separate sign staked much lower to the ground advertises “Coffee and Crafts”.

But their real money maker is pretty clear in what the main sign highlights most: cheap cigarettes free of the punishing taxes that everyone pays when they buy them anywhere but a First Nations sales point.

Any remnants of the Ben Barbary restaurant have already vanished utterly; not even a trace of its foundation can be seen anywhere on the badly paved-over patch where it once stood – not even a bent stainless steel pie fork.

The most readily-available product on the blistering hot day that I stopped by was dust.

The [Nameless] Inn Motel

#7 has been through – and is still going through – a pile of improvements over the decades. If you look closely, you can actually see several traces of “Old Highway 7”, short random sections that have been isolated by various construction projects that rounded its corners, widened its lanes and just made it generally faster and more efficient.

But in #7’s earlier days, places like this motel – now just a swift 80 – 90 minute drive from Ottawa – would have been some two-and-a-half to three hours out of the city because cars were slower and #7 was far more “twisty”. And Lord help you if you found yourself trailing a semi-transport. Passing opportunities on #7 were a long time coming as it wound its narrow serpentining course across the lower Canadian Shield.

After being on the road for two – three hours on a darkening Friday evening, I can well imagine the warm neon glow of a “Vacancy” sign might have a certain appeal, with its promised opportunity to start the next day early and refreshed.

Now it’s like the stuff of cheap horror movies. In fact, while I was taking these few shots and standing right beside a screen door at one end of the main building, it was nudged open by a breeze, suddenly throwing one of those trade-marked long ominous creaks into the leaden air hanging over the otherwise silent site. Scared the bejeezuz out of me!

1962 Lincoln Continental yard

For heaven only knows what reason, the owner of this property has had three 1962 Lincoln Continental wrecks sitting on his lot for years. (Don’t carve 1962 in stone. Lincoln ran with subtle variations on this design for several years in a row from 1961 - 69, but wherever websites offer photos, 1962 models seem to resemble the ones on this lot most closely.)

Their common trademark is the front and rear side door hinge arrangement dubbed “suicide doors”. They open like barn doors and in the pre-mandatory seat belt era, it supposedly was a lot easier to tumble out the rear seat if the rear door were accidentally unlatched while the car was in motion, when the airflow would obligingly hold the rear-hinged door open for you.

In fact, it would create such a strong force that it was damned near impossible to close a rear door until the car was brought to a complete stop.

Another source of the “suicide doors” name attributes it to gangster slang, supposedly because it was far easier to dump a body from the gaping opening created when both halves of the door set were opened.

The 1962 Lincoln Continental was pretty much a limousine in its day, and no further confirmation is needed than to know that it was a Lincoln Continental convertible in which, on November 22, 1963, President John F Kennedy was seated when his driver turned under the rifle sights of Lee Harvey Oswald as he sat at a 6th floor window of the Book Depository in Dallas, Texas.

(Photo: carphotos.cardomain.com)

So far as I have been able to tell, these three cars haven’t been moved – nor has even the slightest effort been made to shelter them from the elements – in any season – for the better part of at least a decade, perhaps longer.

Baker’s Valley

Along with the decaying Lincoln Continentals, I think Baker’s Valley probably best represents a “broken dream”. Most times I’ve driven by, there has been a modern car parked outside this house, and most recently I’ve noticed a mailbox with the name “Courneyea” on it. So someone, it seems, has made it a home.

But over the years, it has undergone several efforts to sell itself as, apparently, a cross-country ski resort. They would be comical if they weren’t so sadly pathetic. Until recently, those three little huts to the left of the main building had signs over their doors, labelling each in turn “Chalet 1”, “Chalet 2” and “Chalet 3”.

On the other side of the hill to their left, a second structure existed for years until it either fell or was knocked down. It may have been intended as the owner’s home and the larger structure in this picture seemed to have been styled for a time as a multi-unit accommodation, like a motel. The entrance to the “valley”, about a hundred metres farther along, actually seems to be the gateway to quite a picturesque little setting, but this is all that Baker’s Valley has ever been.

Even on winter drives, I have never seen any sign that anyone ever made any path to cross-country skiing trails. For a time, another slowly deteriorating sign (now gone) identified this gate as the entrance to the Valley. Now, its only signs are a considerably less welcoming pair: “Private Property” and “No Trespassing”.

Astonishingly, I discovered that Baker’s Valley comes with its own airfield, a most surprising find when I Googled the name and came up with this photo on the COPA (Canadian Owners and Pilots Association) website.

Epilogue

On our family drives along this road in the mid 1960s, we always exited at Actinolite, because that was the road that took us south into Belleville. And at the Actinolite corner, there used to be an attraction that today would be classed as unspeakably cruel. But at that time, especially to a wide-eyed young kid, it was always a much-anticipated road stop.

Atop a concrete block was a powerful steel cage whose barred perimeter couldn’t have been more than 12 – 15 feet square. Inside the cage was a small shelter that provided a little shade for its resident – an adult black bear. That was it. Cage, large doghouse, concrete floor and bear.

Beside the cage was a vending machine that sold ice-cold bottles of Coca Cola and someone had discovered that the bear absolutely loved the beverage. So on every trip when we stopped there, we’d get ourselves four bottles of “the pause that refreshes”, and a fifth for the bear.

One of us would hold the bottle up to the cage; the bear would lumber over and place a clawed paw on each side of its neck and the entire bottle would gurgle away in about two seconds flat.

Even as I write that now, I’m shaking my head. I have to marvel at just how far we’ve come in such a relatively short time. The bear lived in conditions that were exceedingly cruel to the poor fellow. His teeth were probably hopelessly ruined by the countless bottles of Coke. Not to mention his likely caffeine addiction. And where were the lawyers in a situation that let kids hold up a bottle of Coke so it could be grabbed by the huge claws of a fully grown black bear by simply reaching between the bars of his cage?!

The cage and its pedestal are both long gone. So not every change along #7, it seems, has been for the bad; and not even steel and concrete can resist the tide of common sense (accompanied with not a little compassion).

Ironically, Coke now routinely features polar bears in its advertising, often clutching a bottle in precisely the same way as their Ontario forest-born cousin would in the long-ago times. One can only wonder where the idea of pairing a bear with the beverage came from – an Actinolite-bulb of inspiration maybe?

Until la prochaine.

Just a brief update. First off... a correction.

In my last note on the subject of T.H.E. Club, I described the possibility of membership for the businesses who foisted the High Expectations on us, as well as for those of us who experienced them.

Well, Leslie set me straight on that – membership in T.H.E. Club is open to us ordinary folks with experience of Too High Expectations – not the commercial businesses, organizations or even less-than-cooperative individuals who create them.

People like TriumphAnthill resident Cathy Victor, who sent me this story after reading my own misadventures with Marks and their “oversize” t-shirts:

“Oh yeah. I heartily concur with your experience of frustration.

Not that long ago I was in our local Sears. My goal was to buy a pair of work pants, that A. Had pockets (to carry keys, cell phone etc) and B. that I did not have to hem.

Did I say that I am on the short side? As well I am not especially svelte.

Sigh. I despise buying pants.

But lo! The perfect pair of pants presented themselves on a sale rack.

I thought, "What can my savior do more?"

So I promptly took the amazing pants to the cashier.

She scanned my item, and lo - the price was more than the sale price.

I then pointed out that these amazing pants were from the sale rack. (Ring a bell?)

And with a slight look of disdain she proceeded to point out that there was a 'W' beside the size number. This number is of no import for this discussion.

I had never noticed such a mysterious 'W' on a size before. Maybe I don't buy enough pants.

I'm not sure.

She seemed to be saying that this 'W' meant something like 'Whoa -you're wider than you should be.' or 'Watch out - Wide load.'

Again - I really despise buying pants.

The higher price was not tremendously more, but they were the same %^*#} pants.

The clerk seemed impatient, and even mystified that I didn't or couldn't grasp the problem here.

Clearly my bottom was bigger than it should be.

I internally heaved a great sigh at being singled out buy some cashier in a size 4 outfit, and paid for the pants. I still like the pants, but I am now a more cautious consumer, knowing that cashiers who are in T.H.E. Club are lurking in the shadows.”

By way of digression, Cathy and I had a brief follow-up exchange during which we Googled the mysterious “W”. The search turned up an immediate answer here. Turned out to be not so mysterious after all:

“Pay attention to whether the size is considered Women's, Misses or Juniors. These sizes are designated with a W, M or J, and provide an important hint about how clothing will fit. Women's clothing often refers to plus sizes, intended for women with fuller figures. The clothes have generous space in the hip and stomach area. Misses sizes, which are evenly numbered, are intended for adult women and have slightly more room in the bust and hip areas. Juniors sizes, reflected by odd numbers, are designed with teenagers in mind. Juniors sizes have a shorter and slimmer cut than clothing designed for misses.”

I want to clarify here and now that I am not one who Googles around in women’s clothing... (Hmmm... maybe I’ll just stop that line of explanation right there.)

And that makes Cathy an official member of T.H.E. Club.

Speaking of which, my continuingly creative daughter has also come up with a graphic that is just so perfect, it took Leslie and I all of ten seconds to agree it is the perfect logo for our fledgling group of disgruntled expectors.

I’m already looking into the creation of official badges for us to sport.

À la prochaine.

Introducing a new occasional feature on the Whine: T.H.E. Club.

Right off the bat, credit where credit’s due. This was Leslie’s idea, and it goes back several years – in fact, it’s already become a wink-and-nod family joke whenever we encounter a worthy example for membership.

T.H.E. Club is open to anyone who thinks with that portion of your brain in which you typically find common sense. It stands for Too High Expectations. However, institutional membership is awarded to businesses, organizations, even individuals who do exactly the opposite... in other words, who treat “common sense” as a train travelling entirely the opposite direction as the train on which the awardee is travelling.

(Photo: Clara Hughes, pedalmag.com)

Now I’m not talking about the kind of expectations that, for example, are shouldered by Canadian athletes in the Olympics – the “whole-country-is-counting-on-you-to-win-gold” type of expectations. I’m talking about simple, ordinary, day-to-day events in which one or more participants appear on a given day to have left common sense at home sitting among the cold toast crusts and half a cup of coffee left over from breakfast, rather than take it to work with them today.

I’m talking about the kind of thing that sometimes seems so opposite to common sense, it leaves you scratching your head and wondering, “What the [obscenity of your choice] were they thinking?!!”

In other words, T.H.E. Club is an absolutely perfect subject for a blog mostly about whining. So to repeat: not earth-shattering or world-changing expectations. Just plain ol’ common sense.

A recent example will illustrate what I mean. (And of course the yarn takes a few paragraphs. After all, I’m still recently ex-Government of Canada Communications. Why use a few words when a few dozen paragraphs will do?)

During a recent visit to one of Ottawa / Gloucester’s Mark’s Work Wear houses – specifically the one at 1940 Innes Road – I was drawn to a large table on which two large signs were posted advertising “All T-shirts on this table: 2 / $20”. Since T-shirts are pretty much my summer casual shirt wear of choice, I selected four and headed for the cash.

As the cashier rang them through, I noticed that each shirt was showing an individual (non-sale) price, ranging from a high of $18.99 to a low of $11.99. When I pointed it out to the cashier, he looked closely at each of the shirts, then informed me, “these are different styles”, as if that fully and satisfactorily explained it.

So I told him that all four came from the table where the special price was openly advertised in-store – and for good measure pointed to the table, which was visible from the cash and which displayed the several “different” styles. He took all four shirts over and checked them and several others on the same table. When he came back to the cash, he entered a special code on the machine and proceeded to start ringing them through again.

Then he informed me that because each of the four I had picked was “oversized”, there would be an additional cost per shirt that effectively added 10 per cent to the cost of each.

There are several things that, to me, are just plain wrong about how this sale was handled.

First, to my perhaps overly-expectant mind, the cash register should have been auto-programmed to accept each and every shirt placed on that sale table at the sale price advertised. (Every time two are checked through, the bill shows $20.)

Secondly, the shirts’ “styles” should never even have been mentioned. Regardless of style, they had all been placed on that sale table. (T-shirts, fer crapssakes – they look like the letter “T” when hanging on your clothesline – hence their name. How many style variations can you have?)

But what especially annoyed me was the added premium on an “oversized” T-shirt – an additional cost mentioned absolutely nowhere on any in-store advertising and which was drawn to my attention only verbally by the cashier.

For the record, I suppose I am “oversized” in Mark’s corporate eyes. Plus I quite deliberately choose casual wear like T-shirts so as to be loose fitting, which adds to their “breathability” and comfort on a hot day. Specifically, I buy XXL in such clothing.

However, regardless of why I choose to wear what Mark’s calls “oversized”, to me the apparently arbitrary addition of an extra cost is inappropriate at best and, at worst, smacks of a “bait and switch” model of retailing whereby a deliberately lower price is advertised to draw a customer in, only to have him find that said price does not apply to what he wished to purchase.

As I see it, if Mark’s – or anyone for that matter – is going to add a premium to “oversized” clothing on sale, then those items should be collected on a separate sales surface with a clearly worded poster or sign advertising that said items are $X.00 extra because they are “oversized”.

Now I like Mark’s products. The labels on almost all my clothing are either Denver Hayes or Wind River and, without exaggeration, this includes outer wear for all seasons, underwear, casual and “business casual” clothing, recreational, sportswear, accessories such as belts, toques, gloves / mittens, rainwear, shoes and heavy-duty winter boots, even LED flashlights and refillable water bottles. At Mark’s, despite apparently now being (who knew?) “oversized”, I still almost always find at least a measure of colour choice in their men’s wear.

At the end of the day, I bought the T-shirts. Even with the “oversized” premium, they were a reasonable price. But it bothered me that I had to argue my way into being charged the in-store advertised sale price because the cash register initially had not been programmed to accept it.

I was also borderline angry – certainly frustrated – at having to be essentially challenged by a sales representative who made me feel slightly less than honest for having claimed to have selected them from a sales table when his machine did not acknowledge the sales price.

And honestly (just to run the whine out completely), this is the first time in any Mark’s store that I have ever run up against an XXL product costing more than an advertised price. On those very few occasions where I have run into an “oversized” premium, it has never been in a Mark’s store, but it has always been advertised in-store and typically it has kicked in at an XXXXL or even XXXXXL size.

(Photo: Kreaser.co.uk)

Needless to say, this only exacerbated my disappointment with this particular transaction.

So Mark’s (or at least 1940 Innes Road, Gloucester, Mark’s) – for failing to meet the basic, but wholly reasonable, expectation of a customer’s thinking that items advertised for a certain price would actually be sold at that price, but most especially for making a long-time customer feel somehow unclean for pursuing that expectation, I am pleased to use you as the inaugural inductee into our Baby Duck all-new T.H.E. Club.

T.H.E. Club: Where did common sense go on any given day at any given time in any given place?

(And if you haven’t figured it out by now, the institutional "T.H.E. Club" label is applied with dripping sarcasm.)

So let me throw open an invitation: if anyone else out there has run up against a perfectly ordinary set of expectations that seemed to slip beyond the wholly reasonable ability of someone to deliver, vent away! The field is yours. Send me an e-mail at mdicola520@rogers.com and I’ll add it in a future whine, with due attribution. Or add a note in the comments. And if one day you see someone sporting a button that says simply “T.H.E.” or “T.H.E. Club”, you’ll know it’s catching on.

After all, we boomers really are a whiny lot, but we do come from a generation of parents who lived and breathed common sense. To our minds, it’s not an unreasonable expectation. But from the way some people / businesses act, you’d think that providing common sense demanded an effort on a par with summiting K-2.

À la prochaine.

It seems an oddly appropriate address for someone whose childhood was so tough. 17 The Bowery. That`s where my mom and her two sisters lived with their parents, until the three girls were 5, 7 and 9 and their mother deserted the family. It was at the height of the Great Depression in the late 1930s and their father was utterly unable to raise three young daughters on his own.

So the girls were parcelled out to Salvation Army foster homes in Picton and it was in one such home, under the firmly authoritarian hand of a Salvation Army Reverend, that Mom grew up. All her life, her childhood was not a subject that was ever discussed in our house.

It was only in her last couple years that she dropped nothing more than a couple of thinly veiled hints of what that life was like. In one case, it was funny – she claimed she knew where every last one of the “dirty bits” could be found in the Bible. But in another case, it was more darkly sinister as she let slip one evening that she never went to sleep without first checking to ensure her bedroom door was locked.

Whatever she experienced, or feared, it entrenched itself in her as a quiet refusal to participate in any form of organized churchgoing. As kids, my brother and I went to Sunday Mass with Dad, and always came home to a generous breakfast that Mom had prepared while we were at church.

In the photo, 17 The Bowery is the unit at the right end of the building.

My mother’s sister, Barb, whom we met at her small apartment in Belleville – a half hour from Picton – and took to lunch, was only too happy to fill in a number of details of the family breakup. She had actually gone so far as to discover only a few years ago that the girls’ mother was living in a nursing home in Kingston under the name she had taken when she remarried. Barb decided that she wanted to confront her and seek some answers as to why she left three girls in the care of a man unable to meet their needs.

But she said that when she did just that, she found an old woman who either did not or would not recall any of her daughters. She did say that she remembered leaving a man who was an “abusive” drunk. But Barb didn’t remember their father that way and, for her, that still didn’t give her the specific answer she said she had wanted when she went into the home. But she told us that when she left, the gnawing ache was gone, and ever since she has been able to put it behind her.

She also told us that she had asked Mom if she wanted to join her for the nursing home visit but that Mom had simply replied that her mother was “dead” to her.

It was hard to listen to, but it was also a fascinating window into a key part of what defined my Mom. And because of that, I’m really grateful for the time Barb was able to spend with us that day.

= = =

I’m still learning things. All my life, I’ve always assumed that the flag of the United Empire Loyalists was the British Union Jack. And with one huge variation, it is. Check out the photo. Notice anything missing?

The Union Jack – the flag of Great Britain – is made up of three elements: the (English) Cross of St George – a red cross on a white field; the (Scottish) Cross of St Andrew, a white “X” on a blue field; and the Irish Cross of St Patrick, a red “X” on a white field. So where you might well ask (I know I did), is the Irish component in the Loyalist flag – the red “X”?

While we were waiting for the Glenora ferry, I found this plaque that explained the elements that are in the Loyalist flag, but not what was NOT in it.

Actually, with a minimal amount of work with Google, the answer is surprisingly simple. The “Loyalists”, as their name implies, were those living in the 13 colonies of the United States after they won the War of Independence, when the First Continental Congress in 1777 adopted its own “Stars and Stripes” national emblem. As their name implies, the “Loyalists” remained loyal to the British Union at the time – which consisted of England and Scotland. It was under that banner that many of the Loyalists fled north, settling all over Prince Edward County. (As a footnote, the first among them landed on the shore just yards from this historic cemetery, which contains many of their graves – now largely unmarked, although a few surviving stones have been embedded in this memorial wall.)

The Cross of St Patrick was not even added to the flag we know today as the Union Jack until 1801, which is why it does not appear in the flag under which they landed in the latter quarter of the 18thC, and that is the banner that marks historical sites and festoons countless private homes throughout the County to this day.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – every day’s a school day, on the Internet at large and on Baby Duck in particular.

Random whine: Why do guys apparently never have a say in the scent of soaps that go into hotels, inns, even public washrooms? Our room at Picton’s Merrill Inn had one common scent for everything: “hand and body wash” (that would be “soap”); shampoo and conditioner, each in a liquid pump bottle. And without exception that scent was lavender.

More recently, on a visit to Perth to continue the ongoing estate settlement processes, I had lunch with my brother at a pretty damned good little restaurant on Gore Street just outside the town centre: “Michael’s Table”. And the soap in the men’s room (The men’s room, for heaven’s sake!) was “Olive”. On a previous visit to the same restaurant, the soap was “Ice Wine” scented.

Now I’m not asking for men’s soap with essence of Harley-Davidson saddle or Michelin snow tires, but surely something a little less... what shall I say – feminine... than lavender, olive or ice wine is not too much to ask, is it? Maybe Eau de fresh-cut lawn, or barley malt. Hell, I’d even settle for hickory smoke and smelling like barbecue sauce over lavender any darned day of the week!

Here endeth the random whine.

= = =

Speaking of Perth, when I prefaced my visit with my brother with a brief stop at the local Timmie’s I was delighted to see one of the extended family business staff doing likewise.

OK, so the family ain’t the Ewings of South Fork. In fact, there are other trucks in my late Uncle’s business designated for “Water Haulage”, and apparently they do a HUGE business in late Spring / early Summer when everyone opens up their swimming pools.

But it’s always a puff to see one’s name in lights, wouldn’t you agree? (Even if the “lights” in this case indicate that the driver has just stepped on the brakes.)

OK... Picton. Where was I?

This is a little jewel of a place to have lunch. It’s just outside town high up on a rise that someone long ago decided merited the label “mountain”. It has an odd geographical quirk. When you reach the top, you find a lake, named with stunning Loyalist practicality, “Lake on the Mountain”.

And this place is called (wait for it) The Inn at Lake on the Mountain. The old brewery truck is parked out front because The Inn is also home to a really fine micro-brewery. Any guesses as to what it might be called? (And if you read the text painted on the side of the truck, you already know.) The Lake on the Mountain Brewing Co.

This is where Leslie and I took mom’s sister, Barb, for a lunch we all greatly enjoyed. Leslie had the tourtière and apparently it is of some considerable local renown, as unlikely a house speciality as I can think of for a restaurant in the absolute heart of United Empire Loyalist country.

For my part, I discovered one of the best draught IPAs (India Pale Ales) I have had in a long, long time. And it’s nothing like the bland, plain stuff that Alexander Keiths says on their bottle’s label is an IPA.* The LoTM brewery’s Traditional IPA is sublime, top-loaded with hits of citrus, floral and the edgy but tastebud-friendly hops in both its aroma and its taste. It’s as perfect an ice-cold hot day’s tipple as you will find anywhere.

* I’m not alone in my thumbing down of Keiths. Here’s what one especially irate reviewer – from among dozens – had to say about Keiths “IPA” on the vast international beer rating internet site, Ratebeer.com: “Ignoring the fact that this is clearly not an IPA, this beer has other problems. Aroma and appearance are acceptable. But the taste... remember what beer (i.e., macro lagers) tasted like when you were really young? That’s what this beer tastes like now. It undoes years of ‘acquiring the taste’ for beer. Metallic and coppery. Not recommended.” (He gave it a 1 out of 10.) But I digress.

This is another example we noted of the Loyalist tradition of cutting right through the bull cookies when it comes to naming a business – in Bloomfield, in this case, just down the road from Picton, and likely named with a little bit of tongue in cheek, but certainly leaving you with no doubt whatsoever about what you can expect to find if you go through their front door.

The Merrill Inn is a fantastic place to stay if you’re looking for something really special. They offer package deals that include breakfast and one dinner in their dining room – which has a richly deserved international reputation for excellence. It’s also located on Picton Main Street, which puts it in the heart of everything in the town. And no, no one paid me to say this... although I was told both my arms would be broken if I said anything negative – you don’t mess with the powerful (but admittedly little-known) United Empire Loyalist mafia.

Given the County’s soaring reputation for small, but high quality wineries, it’s not surprising that the better restaurateurs are only too happy to suggest local wines to pair with whatever entrée you order.

This is, bar none, the best looking winery cat I’ve ever seen – with a face that registers a perfect balance between their whites and reds. She is also the friendliest darned mascot you’ll ever meet, and will happily hop right up on the tasting counter if you show even the slightest interest in her.

The winery in this case is Karlo’s and, besides their uniquely coloured cat, they have two especially outstanding claims to fame. Their first is Vanalstine’s Port – the only white port being produced at the moment in the entire country. Dense, sweet and lush, it is best served cold after dinner – with dessert. (That’s right. I wasn’t kidding by describing it as “sweet”. It echoes ice wine or sauterne which makes it a perfect companion for desserts. But it also stands alone as a superb late-night-with-a-special-someone-on-the-back-porch-sipping glass in the additional aural company of some great jazz or blues.)

Karlo’s other claim to fame isn’t a wine at all, but a signature bridge along one perimeter of their vineyard.

It’s not an antique – it was built in 2007 by an organization called “Dry Stone Walling in Canada” and like all such structures, it is held together without the use of mortar or cement... no nothing. Just careful placement of the stones, gravity and the incredible architectural strength of the arch. Here’s a bit of architectural trivia for you. When the Romans discovered the strength of the arch, someone got the bright idea of making it a 360-degree structure – and presto, the dome was born. Either that, or the Romans observed the incredible strength of Byzantine domes and made it a two dimensional structure in the arch. Kind of a chicken-and-egg thing but both have been around for a heck of a long time.

And finally... there are two things you probably don’t really expect to see on the shores of Lake Ontario – enormous sand dunes that rival some of the California coast’s Pacific Ocean-side terrain. And white swans. We encountered both during a lazy couple hours spent splashing along the shallows of Sandbanks Provincial Park. On a Monday, the place was almost deserted and it felt temptingly, addictively, almost like a private tropical paradise. (The fact that it was swelteringly hot on this particular Monday helped with the illusion.) Just without the rum and endless offers from locals to cornrow Leslie’s hair.

We both agreed we’ll be back for sure. After all, there’s another 40 or 50 wineries we didn’t get to, and Waupoos cider has been recommended by several friends.

And that Lake on the Mountain Traditional Brewing Co's IPA is worth a day trip all by itself!

Until next time.