Frenchy’s Experience

Going to Frenchy’s is a unique Maritime experience.

When we lived in Nova Scotia many years ago, I was at a ladies event and they were all excited about the finds they had made at Frenchy’s.  It sounded like some high-end fashion place. Turns out it was a second-hand clothing store!

The clothes are all imported from the US so you’re not wearing your neighbours hand-me-downs and are brand names that are not common here. It’s a chain of stores throughout rural Nova Scotia and  New Brunswick. I’ve heard of friends making a weekend road trip around the countryside stopping at all the Frenchy’s stores.   What’s also unique is that the clothes aren’t hung up nicely (except dresses and shirts), but are placed in large bins you dig through like a treasure hunter.

Lucky for me there’s a Frenchy’s in Oromocto.  No trip is complete without a visit to Frenchy’s.
I always come away with a treasure at a bargain price.

We're starting him off young!

 

New Brunswick

June 3

In the morning we were ready to leave before McDonald's at the Walmart was open so we went to a local restaurant where the menu was in French only.  Thankfully, the server was bilingual. New Brunswick is a bilingual province with some parts more French and other parts more English. 

Two summers ago I drove across Canada with Katherine and we stopped at Grand Falls. The falls didn’t look all that grand at the end of July.  Maybe they would be more spectacular now at the beginning of June. Absolutely!  What a contrast from season to season. The falls and gorge were beautiful. 

I’ve been taking hourly pictures and after the prairies almost every picture is rocks and trees.   New Brunswick is no different. Tucked in amongst the forest are potato fields, but it’s still lots of forest.  I once heard a sketch on ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ where everything in NB centers around trees.  Covered bridges:  made from trees.  Houses:  made from trees.  Ships:  made from trees  Maple syrup:  comes from trees.  Campgrounds: usually set in trees.  

We finally arrived at our destination for the next two weeks:  Sunbury-Oromocto Park and campground. It’s about fifteen minutes from the main destination: our grandson, Elliott and his parents, Katherine and Devon.  We’re going to enjoy some family time doing life together. It’s going to be great!   

If we do anything touristy, I’ll have more stories to tell.

Montreal

June 1

Whenever we get together with Marjorie and Martin time slows right down and yet the day is filled with activities.  

It began with a delicious breakfast of French crepes / Mennonite pancakes, a nod to both of their heritages.   

Deux Montange is very near to a variety of farms:  orchards, wineries, and vegetable growers to name a few.  Early in the morning Marjorie went to a vegetable farm to get her weekly basket of fresh produce. This included a delicious tomato, cucumbers and greens which we enjoyed in toasted sandwiches for lunch. 

Marjorie took us on a tour around the countryside which included a visit to a honey farm. Intermiel  has thousands of beehives all over Quebec and produces a large variety of honey products.  We went away with some golden rod honey and a bottle of mead, a honey wine. 

Next we went to a lavender farm, La Maison Lavande.  The lavender plants weren’t blooming yet but I can imagine a field of purple flowers and the smell of lavender in the air.  We could walk around the fields and enjoy the relaxing hammock swings.  What a beautiful place and clever ideas for making shopping for lavender products an experience. 

In the afternoon we took the bus and Metro to the Old Port tourist area in Montreal. It was a bit cool to wander outside too long so we walked through a variety of artisan shops admiring the arts and crafts. We settled on a restaurant for supper, L'Usine de Spaghetti and timed it just right. As we left, the line was out the door.  

In the evening we attended the Concours Montreal International Violin competition semi-finals.  Marjorie and Martin enjoy music and suggested we all attend.  It was wonderful to listen to two incredibly talented young musicians each give an hour long recital in a beautiful old church renovated into a concert hall. I think they were both winners.  I’m glad I wasn’t the judge.  What a beautiful way to end the day.  

June 2

Our time with our cousins ended with them joining us for breakfast at our trailer before we had to pack up and leave. And when we began to pack up the rain began. Dave was completely soaked.  

And so the drive began, in the rain and it rained all day.  The south shore of Quebec is so pretty but it was hidden in the rain and clouds and even fog at times.   As it was not much for camping weather we drove on to Edmunston and camped at Walmart.  We have battery power and a tank full of water so we’re good.  

Ottawa River

May 31

Ontario is big.  It’s huge.  We’ve been driving across this province for days and days.  Ok, maybe we’re slow, but we’ve been putting on the miles.  Today we will get to Quebec.

We drove into Pembroke (still in Ontario) for a coffee break and to see the Ottawa River.  We’d been in this town before so had an idea of what we might find.  But last time we weren’t pulling a long trailer so the question was where to park.  Once that was solved, we wandered around downtown to discover that the coffee shop we’d been to before was no longer there.  We found another place, no, not Tim Horton’s. As for the river, we didn’t have very good access on the one street because of sandbags, and saw that the park we’d gone walking in, several years ago, was under water.  

As we drove through Ottawa, we had a glimpse of the Ottawa River rapids flowing high and hard.  We arrived at the L’Escale campground north of Montreal and set up.  It seemed to have been spared some of the flooding, but saw flooded streets and parks in the area. 

We went for dinner at my cousin’s home, Marjorie and Martin.  It was a wonderful evening of catching up on life as it’s been many years since we’ve visited together.  Tomorrow they will show us the sights of Montreal and area.

Northern Ontario

May 30

We’ve spent the last several days driving through Northern Ontario.  It isn’t ‘north-north’ in latitude.  We’re further north at home in Leduc!  But geographically speaking it’s north.  It’s the Canadian Shield which means it’s a lot of stone, bush and water; rocks and trees, a never-ending-ever-changing forest.  It’s beautiful and remote.  

Cue the Arrogant Worms sound track:

'Cause we've got
Rocks and trees
And trees and rocks
And rocks and trees
And trees and rocks
And rocks and trees
And trees and rocks
And rocks and trees
And trees and rocks
And water

We drove up to Sioux Lookout and just beyond that, at Pickle Lake, the pavement ends.  We drove from Longlac to Hearst, a stretch of about 150 km without any services or communities along the highway.  We drove through logging towns, mining towns, past hunting and fishing camps, yet ended up at a Walmart in Kapusaksing for the night.

It’s the end of May and it’s been cool the whole way.  There have been frost warnings most nights.  We’ve been wimpy and turned on the furnace.  The deciduous trees are just beginning to leaf out, although it varied from region to region.  In some places it's beautiful variations of green.  Imagine the variations of red in the fall.

We’ve now entered the upper end of the Ottawa Valley, the Atlantic watershed.  New Liskeard is a pretty little town along Lake Temiskaming and surprisingly, it’s a farm town.  In the midst of the Canadian Shield is a belt of good farmland.  It was a lovely place for a picnic stop.

Both the Mattawa and Ottawa rivers have been flooding this year. We drove down to one campground only to be turned back because it was still too wet.  That was ok as there were way too many black flies and mosquitoes anyway.  Instead, we camped in the Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park, a beautiful park along the Mattawa River but on higher ground! 

We found what we were looking for

May 29

Do you remember the childhood story of Paddle-to-the-Sea?  It’s a story about a boy who wanted to see the world but wasn’t able to so he carved a little person in a canoe and set it in the snowbank along the river, hoping it would find the sea.  The story then continues of how the little carving makes its way down the river, through the Great Lakes to the sea, averting disasters.  I remember watching the movie as a child and being intrigued by the tale.  In Nipigon, Ontario, where the story begins, there is a children’s park that creatively imagines this story through a variety of very unique play structures.   It had been on my list of things to see when traveling through here two years ago.  This time we found it.

As we were planning this road trip, Dave said he wanted to take the ‘northern’ route through Ontario, not the one around Lake Superior, because he wanted to find where his dad had lived during the first few years of his life in Canada.  Dad’s family was part of a group of Mennonites who had homesteaded around Reesor, Ontario around 1925.  Apparently, the Canadian government had encouraged them to go north and try to farm because if anyone could farm in this marginal land, it would be the Mennonites.  Although Dad was too young to remember any of this, we heard stories of the challenges they encountered.  There was frost every month of the year making farming almost impossible even after clearing the bush off the land. The cattle had to graze along the railway tracks as there wasn’t much grass growing.   The most they could do to make a living was haul logs out of the bush in winter.  Dad’s family moved out to Alberta after a few short years there.  In fact, the community had dissolved completely by the 1960s. 

We wanted to find where Reesor was.  Would there be any evidence of any former settlement? With some internet research to get us on the right track, we found a Reesor Road and next to it, a beautiful park-like setting with a cairn dedicated to these Mennonite pioneers.  At the back of the grounds was a cemetery.  It was a special place as a remembrance of Dad’s roots.  Otherwise there was no evidence along the highway of a community. 

After seeing this, Dave’s mind is full of more questions, wondering what life was like for his grandparents and the other families.  Where did they all go?  Who of the descendants were responsible for maintaining this lovely spot?   Time to do more research when we get home.

Imagine trying to start a farm in this bush.

Ontario

May 28

The others moved too fast for
photos!

To pass the time on road trips I keep a variety of tallies and play a long scavenger hunt game.  One of the tallies is wildlife.  On this trip so far, we’ve seen a few antelope, two moose, a bear and a great horned owl keeping an eye on us from the top of a power pole.  We also saw some bald eagles circling overhead.

Stopping at Kakabeka Falls is a must see for us on every trip through Ontario.  It’s just outside of Thunder Bay.  When the kids were young they christened them as the Pepsi Falls because that was the colour of the water.   There a legend about the falls where an Ojiway princess led Sioux warriors to their deaths over the falls.  

We had hoped to make it to Nipigon but as it was getting on and we still needed a grocery stop, we found ourselves at the KOA campground just outside of Thunder Bay.  It’s a nice place to camp though we didn’t take advantage of all the amenities.