Dec 27 – Ice Storm

On December 21 an ice storm blew through Southern Ontario moving eastward. During the evening the power flickered off and on quickly several times. A little after midnight it went off and didn't immediately come back on. With no TV, internet or lights we just bundled up and went to bed.

In the morning there was still no power. The outside temperature was around 0C and it had dropped to around 15C in the house.

We have a propane catalytic infrared heater that we use in the RV. It is safe to use indoors at it only produces CO2 and water vapour as its products of combustion. I connected it to the propane tank from the BBQ and it kept us toasty warm as long as we kept close. We spent the day in the solarium, where it was nice and bright, just reading books on our iPads. The temperature in the rest of the house dropped down to about 12C. In the evening we brought the heater to the bedroom and continued our reading until our eyes started to blur.

I don’t like leaving the heater on when we are not watching it so we just piled on the blankets and went to sleep. Around 1am our power came back on. Hallelujah! I got up to check that everything was ok and that the furnace and hot tub had restarted properly. I noticed that the houses behind us were still in the dark.

The next morning we were not quite back to normal. The cable TV and internet was not working so even though we had power the place where our cable was fed from did not. Another day of reading but at least we were warm. We found out that we were very lucky as many other parts of the city are still without power.

In the afternoon we decided to go for a walk around the neighbourhood to see what damage had been done. Since it was still very icy out we put on the crampons we had bought when we were hiking in the mountains on one of our RV trips.

They are just a set of metal springs attached to a rubber frame that goes around your shoes. They worked amazingly well and we didn’t slip once.

If you ignored the damage it caused, the ice looked quite beautiful on the trees.

But the damage was hard to miss. The next two pictures are from one person’s back yard.

Our house got off pretty easy as only one branch of our birch tree got bent over. I doubt it will spring back so we will probably have to cut it off.

Part way through the walk the sun came out and made the trees sparkle.

On Christmas eve Jennie’s family usually gathers at her niece’s large house for a huge pot luck dinner. The problem was that even after three full days they still didn’t have any power. They live in an older neighbourhood with lots of large old trees and above ground power lines.

We all decided to go ahead and have the event there anyway. It actually made the dinner much more memorable. Someone with power cooked the roasts and everyone cooked what they could at home, wrapped it up and brought it over.

They have a gas stove so some food could still be prepared there.

The fireplaces were going and I brought over my propane heater which helped to warm up the kitchen. Lots of flash lights kept the place bright.

Everyone just kept their coats on and a fun time was had by all.

As usual there were huge amounts of food and we all stuffed our faces.

At about 10 pm even their power came back on, to a rousing cheer from everyone.

For what I hear, we got off really easy. Almost a week later there are still some people without power.

Jennie’s niece's brother inlaw had a branch fall on the line into their house. It took out the mast on the side of their house that held the line up. Hydro would not come to fix the line to the house until the mast was fixed because the mast is part of the house and is the home owner’s responsibility to repair. An electrician would not come and fix the mast until all the tree limbs were removed. The tree guys would not come until all the ice was melted and it was safe to go up the tree to prune it. So he waits for warmer weather. To keep fix pipes from freezing he ran an extension cord from his neighbour’s home to power his furnace.

Nov 30 – City Hall Fireworks

I thought I might do a few posts about things I wanted to remember throughout the winter.

The City of Toronto always puts on a concert and fireworks display at city hall to start the Christmas season.

It worked out that our daughters we were both in town and available. We went out to dinner together and then bundled up and headed over to city hall. 

It was pretty busy but not so bad that you couldn’t easily find a place to stand. We had thought about going skating but it was way to busy on the ice.

First we put up with some people we had never heard of trying to sing their version of Christmas carols.

Everyone was really just here for the fireworks.

LASERS!

It was a great display but they never seem to last long enough. I guess nothing can compare to the giant displays that some of the US cities put on.

Maine, PEI 2013 Summary

In the summer of 2013 we explored Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, PEI, Gaspe, Quebec and then wandered around Ontario for a while after spending some time at our family cottage.

Click here for the first post of the trip

The map below marks the major places we visited. If you click on a turquoise marker you will get a link to the first post for that area. If you zoom out you can see our other trips as well.

View Our Travel Map in a larger map

Favourite Days

While almost everyday of the trip was great and I encourage you to look at them all, these are the ones I consider the most memorable.

If you click on the picture you will be taken the post for the day

Mount Washington	Franconia Notch	Pemaquid Point
Monhegan Island	Cadillac Mountain	Hopewell Rocks
West Cape PEI	Cap Gaspe	Niagara Falls

Statistics

4 1/2 months or 134 days since we left home (May 9 – Sep 19).

Together with other years that makes about 540 days we have stayed in the RV.

13000 pictures saved (who know how many taken, at least double). It seems I posted over 2500 to the blog.

Distances

1. 6000 km on the RV
2. 4000 km on the CRV just in day trips.

Money

I didn’t keep track of the money. This year the main expense was the campgrounds as they are much more expensive in the east. The usual price was in the $35 to $40 range but a few times it was over $50.

With the price of gas this year it still hurt to fill up but with the shorter distance we didn’t have to do it nearly as often as last year.

Sep 18 – Rockway Falls and Welland Canal

When we got here yesterday we kept hearing loud popping noises in the distance. The would be somewhat random but occur around every 30 seconds, some close and some far away. At first we thought someone was blasting. We finally realized that it was the vineyards using air cannons to scare away the birds. They are as loud as a real cannon when they are close. It continued on and off all evening. Thankfully it stopped during the night. This morning they started again with a vengeance, with one going off every second or 2. They slacked off again but no matter where you are in the are you will hear then once in a while. I guess people that live here can somehow block them out but they sure annoyed us.

Today was a nice sunny cool day so we first went to Rockland Conservation Are to see the falls. What we ended up seeing were gorges because, here as well, there was no water flowing. We did the short loop trail in the map below.

We parked at the Rockland Community Center. The first “falls” were right next to the parking lot.

It was a tough day for pictures with the bright sunshine and dark shadows. You really have to see it for yourself to appreciate the wide views.

Since there was no water I could easily climb down into the gorge above the falls.

I didn’t get too close to the edge because the rocks were mossy and very slippery. It was a long way down.

Jennie stayed up top.

The trail left from the back of the parking lot. It was only about 1 km in to the lower falls. We never did see the middle falls. I read somewhere that it was obscured by vegetation.

This is the creek that normally feeds the falls.

Here is a close up of what remains of the lower falls.

But the setting was beautiful.

We had our lunch even though we really weren’t hungry yet.

Here is a picture from a web site with the spring flow.

We completed the trail loop but I should have looked closer at the map because most of the rest was walking along a road. We should have just backtracked the way we came in.

Here is what is left of Martin’s Falls (see the map) just across the road.

I wanted to see a ship go through a Welland Canal Lock. I found a website that said the next ship was due through at around 4 pm. It was only about 1:15 so I dropped Jennie off to satisfy her Wal-Mart withdrawal while I went back to the RV. I picked her up later and we headed to the Lock 3 Visitors Center.

The ship was a bit late. It came into sight at about 4:30. Lucky for us it was a large, empty iron ore freighter that just fits in the locks.

They make it look so easy as they glide into the lock with very little room on each side.

I was surprised at how fast they can pump the water to get the ship to rise so quickly.

Being empty it sat a lot higher in the water.

Jennie’s shadow up on the viewing platform.

Big / gigantic things are cool.

And so ends this year’s journey. We are heading home tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed following along and a special thanks to my friend Mike for all the comments.

As usual I will put together a summary post once I get back to the fast internet at home.

The current possibilities for next year are south western Canada and Vancouver Island or the the canyon lands of Utah and Arizona but that could easily change.