We have been travelling for a week. Hence no blog. The purpose is to pick up our canoe from Patrick’s house in Peterborough. We left Paradise on Tuesday afternoon, after our latest doctor’s appointment and car service. We drove hard to reach Woodstock, New Brunswick, by late evening.
On the second day, we survived the traffic in Montreal and managed to travel Highway #401 to Belleville. This allowed us to cut North to Madoc and then Highway #7 into Peterborough — essentially, 2000 kilometres in twenty hours of driving.
Peterborough has changed significantly since the days we lived there in the 1990s. At that time, we worked for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
In contrast to the Annapolis Valley, Peterborough seemed to have maintained a dynamic economy in the face of COVID. Besides visiting family, we were able to enjoy the MindGame cafe, various second-hand bookstores, and Wild Rock Outfitters.
Our second adventure was to visit my brother and family in Toronto. This required us to head down to Highway #401 and negotiate the suburb of Scarborough. We arrived safely after several hours in Toronto traffic.
A few salient observations …
It was a shock to drive through Montreal on the TransCanada, especially as we did not have a Quebec map. Once we reached the Ontario border (and Highway #401), the biggest surprise was the volume of truck traffic. The goods that are being moved by truck through the industrial heartland of Canada and the expenditure of gasoline to fuel these trucks must be massive.
Of course, we endured changes in the weather: cold rain, ice pellets, and snow. And yet in Toronto, we saw flowering cherry trees, forsythia. In the gardens of Peterborough, were harbingers of Spring: cardinals and robins.
Visiting Patrick, Emily, and Peter, I have accumulated a long reading list. That, I will save for another day.
We plan to return to the Valley by May 1st.
Ernest Blair Experiment 
Glad to see that you are recovering nicely, and back to your old habits. Safe travels!
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