Category: Travel

Disappointing Impressions on my Return to Ottawa from Charlotte, North Carolina

January 5, 2023

Driving along Merivale Road, in Ottawa, my neighborhood looked run down and dirty at the end of December. Yes, the melted snow was dirty gray bordering Merivale. And the road was full of potholes. As well, it was overcast and gray and the designless and helter-skelter development that has sprung up over the years along

Merivale showed its age and need for updates.

I felt depressed and found the contrast with sunny Charlotte with its clean, well-maintained streets and shiny new shopping centers dispiriting. I left Charlotte the day before.

Ottawa’s infrastructure has deteriorated, and maintenance declined over the years. For example, the snowplows cleaned a wide swath of roadbed years ago compared to the narrow lane left today after the snowplows drive by.

Has the quality of my neighborhood gone down? You be the judge. I’ll just describe what has been happening in my neighborhood, along with my biases.

First off, we have “cash marts” stores just around us, stores I consider cater to people who are hard up and must cash cheques to survive on a day-to-day basis. Sure, there are people like that, but I thought my neighborhood was a more stable, middle-income area with expensive homes.

A block from us, a cannabis store opened and there are a few more of them, less than a mile away. Again, there must be a market for such outlets, but I did not think my neighbors were into drugs. Maybe I am getting old and out of phase with today’s reality.

I do not cotton to cash marts and cannabis outlets in my neighborhood, especially when we also have bottom-feeder consumer outlets like “dollaramas” and used clothing establishments like “value village”. Should I go further?

There is nothing wrong with cash marts, cannabis outlets, and hand-me-down clothing stores. There is a market for those. But coming back from well-maintained Charlotte where I did not see any of these (cannabis stores are not allowed in North Carolina), driving along Merivale Road, with the dirty snow along the road and navigating around potholes on a rainy, gray day, was a downer for me.

But wait, are there any bright spots? I drove by a plethora of ethnic food establishments, which I like, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Mexican, and Italian, besides traditional English fare. The neighborhood also boasts two sports pubs and takeout places for pizza and chicken. And we have several food store chains near us, three in walking distance (Walmart, Loblaws, and Food Basics). These are great conveniences, along with a Starbucks and a couple of fast food/hamburger places (A&W and Harveys). None of these outlets are fancy; they are run-of-the commercial chains. Maybe I should not say that these are bright spots, but I cannot complain about the lack of eateries or grocery stores in my neighborhood.

But beyond the food scene and the usual gas stations, banks, and a couple of gyms, there are no upscale retail stores or cultural/entertainment facilities at all. The area just does not, or could not, attract fashion, electronics, furniture, or other upscale stores over the years. I am not sure why.

Is my neighborhood on the downslide? Maybe not. Maybe it is in transition; the low-slung, decaying buildings are probably rented at reasonable rates, therefore many family-run ethnic outlets can thrive.

But we also have a sea of parking lots and with the growth of the city, further development via densification will happen. We’ll be looking at mixed highrise buildings, with commercial establishments on the lower levels topped by residential units above.

Last fall, I joined zoom meetings with developers and Ottawa city planning staff, reviewing development proposals. In this process called “public engagement”, the City attempted to draw out public opinion on private proposals. In the proposals we reviewed, there were thousands of residential units in highrise buildings, within walking distance from my place, all containing commercial uses at the lower levels.

I drove home and after thinking about the planned developments I saw in Charlotte; I decided I much prefer those to the haphazard, aging, and messy character of my neighborhood. Unfortunately, my area will change, and I am not sure it will be for the better. I am afraid unaffordable rents in the future may squeeze out my favorite small mom-and-pop food operations, unique in my neighborhood. On that gray day after my return from sunny Charlotte, I felt in the dumps driving along Merivale Road.

US/CANADA Border Crossing Regulations for Covid End Next Week

September 29, 2022

The federal government just announced that Covid-related regulations crossing the border will end next week. It has been a nightmare to cross the border for the past couple of years. The danger of people coming to Canada with Covid infections led the government to introduce the ARRIVECAN system, mandating people to fill out a complicated form on a cell phone before arriving in Canada. The Americans responded in kind, but strangely, traveling by air into the US was allowed with a negative Covid test while traveling by car was not permitted (unless you were an American citizen). 

Resulting from the different border crossing policies, I experienced the most bizarre situation last summer. I could not drive with Kathy to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (driving from Ottawa, one has to cross the border). Since Kathy is a dual Canadian/American citizen, she drove to Dulles airport near Washington, DC while I flew there the same day. Coming home was different; we drove together and entered the country as Canadian citizens. And, of course, we had to fill out the ARRIVECAN form before crossing the border.

I have been crossing the border for dog ages; early on, when I went to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Vancouver, I drove south to California and then across the US on Route 66. But even before, I remember our drive to Seattle from Vancouver with my father, who informed the American border guard he’ll stay in the US as little as possible. That comment did not sit well with the official who hauled us in for questioning and then had the benefit of trying to decipher my father’s heavy accent before letting us go.

I have always had some innate fear of talking with government officials, especially police and border guards, who brought back memories of the Hungarian secret police and the aura of the heavy hand of government officials. Border crossing was a chore for me those days, not immersed in the philosophy the police and similar organizations serve you, the citizens of Canada.

I was apprehensive when, with a friend of Italian origin, we drove to Seattle with my newly minted citizenship card in the 1960s. My friend warned me that border officials would haul him in and question him because of his Italian name. Surprised to hear that, I wondered if government officials had prejudices against nationalities, including Hungarians. And so it happened; we were subject to thorough questioning, but I escaped detailed scrutiny, and they let us go. Although this incident confirmed my apprehensions, my discomfort with government officials waned in time, especially after I had joined the government in 1973.

It was easy to cross the border into the US in the old days; all you needed was identification like a driver’s license, which, of course, I always carried with me. The reverse, crossing into Canada, was the same. But sometimes you did not even need a solid piece of ID, as when my son’s friend, a recent Russian immigrant to the US, came to visit us in a rented car with neither US citizenship nor a valid driver’s license. He successfully talked his way into Canada at the border and confirmed the ease with which one could enter Canada.

Many of our family border crossings started with camping in New York State. An hour’s drive from us in upper New York State, the pine-treed campgrounds were not only cheaper to stay at than comparable Canadian facilities, but were also less crowded. And, we found wine cheaper down there and the challenge was how to import wine to Canada. Some people suggested I should fill up the water tank of our tent trailer with wine coming home, but I resisted; the water container would have had a taste of having been filled with wine, not the taste of choice of family members. (The limit for importing wine was two bottles per adult). Then we discovered ‘two-buck chuck”, the wine distributed by Trader Joe’s, the retailer in the US.

A case of two-buck-chuck, even paying the customs duties was much cheaper than anything we could buy in Canada. Most of the time, the Canadian customs officials just waved us on when we told them we had a case of wine worth US $24, altho once they told us to go into the office and fill out all the customs papers. This experience cost us ten dollars, but I found it to be a real bother and time-consuming affair as well.

My good luck of never having trouble at the border rossing nto the US ran out when I arrived at the border with my carpentry tools in the car. They immediately sent me inside and took apart my car, checking all the tools. I was going to build a deck for my son’s house, but the border officials were suspicious that I had other intentions. They were afraid that I would take jobs away from Americans. It took over an hour to get on my way; I pointed to my gray hair and said I was retired and had no intention of working and taking a job away from the locals. Further, I explained to them I had lived in the US for years but came home to Canada for my career, which was over.

Complications arose when I mentioned I had an expired draft card with a 5A rating. The younger officials knew nothing about draft cards and I tried to describe the Vietnam war and how Americans were drafted for service. This entire episode came to a hilarious end when an older border guard burst out in a boisterous laugh and explained to the younger officials what had happened in the sixties. The bottom line was that they took away the draft card I cherished and carried with me all the time when I worked in Norfolk, Virginia, in the sixties.

But the border is a two-way street and I never forget the incident when I bought a bottle of liquor at the duty-free shop coming home and the Canadian border guard asked how many ounces were in the bottle (there was a limit on how much one could bring back home). I looked at the bottle for information but could find none. I told the official I bought it at the duty-free store and had to be a size permitted for import to Canada. But he would not budge and I was ready to consume part of the bottle when he suddenly decided to just let us go, looking at the lineup behind us. As soon as we crossed the border, I felt some corrugations on the bottom of the bottle, and lo-and-behold; I found the information I had been looking for.

But next week we will go back to the old days, and a passport will be sufficient to enter Canada. The US is already open with a Canadian passport. Hurrah! Were the heavy-handed regulations preventing the entry of people with Covid useful and worth the cost of losing the tourist business? We’ll not know unless the government undertakes a study of it.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?

A Canadian Welcome Called ArriveCan, Driving to Canada

July 11, 2022

“You have been picked randomly to take the covid test,” said the Canadian border agency officer, handing David and his two children covid test boxes. They drove from Durham NC crossing to Canada via the Thousand Islands Bridge into Ontario. That was David’s introduction to Canada, after four years of absence.

He and the children travel with Canadian passports, all had three covid vaccine shots, and filled out the ArriveCan document successfully. So what more does the government want? Do they have Covid? The government just did away with random testing at Pearson and other airports in Canada because of the huge delays. If you have a government mandate based on science, as our PM claims, all Covid mandates are based on science, how come you do not enforce it at airports but enforce it at border crossings by car? This is utter nonsense.

The one good thing was that the entire conversation at the border took five minutes, but the agent left them with an ominous warning to take the supervised tests on the first day upon their arrival and submit them in twenty-four hours, or a fine of $5000 may be levied.

To put it in context, my son David and the two children came to visit us for a few days at the cottage that is on an island accessible by boat. And they were told to take the covid tests with a person supervising via an audio/visual internet connection. On this remote island, the internet is sparse and slow, and sometimes non-existent. Have the government policy wonks considered all the potential circumstances where they may have to administer this wretched Covid test?

So David made appointments for all three of them for the next morning; each appointment was scheduled for twenty minutes by the government.

I listened to the conversation the next day when the government officials, three different ones, instructed David and the children, aged nine and twelve; to take out the info sheet from the Covid testing box; fill it out with their birthdates; addresses, etc. and then swab their mouths on two sides for three seconds each and each nostril for fifteen seconds and the government officials counted the time down.

Then they put the labels on the test tubes; put the swabbed sticks back into the tubes in the right direction; etc. and place the test boxes in the fridge (a weird suggestion since the last time we came back to Canada and FedEx picked up our tests. The driver told us the FedEx truck was unrefrigerated). Like you were in kindergarten. And then they were told how to submit the repacked boxes. Two of them said to get FedEx to pick it up (as if FedEx would send a boat to an island), but the third one said Lifelabs and Shoppers Drugmart are places where you can drop off the boxes. Seemed to me the interviewers needed additional training; the instructions provided by the three people should have been identical.

 A couple of interviewers asked David what time it was as the interview was taking place (Canada has three time zones), a strange question; not knowing where in Canada he was and what difference it made, although the information was available. The border guard asked David where the cottage was for his stay in Canada. The IT people developing this program should have provided location info for the interviewers if they were worth their salt (the question showed the interviewers could have been all across Canada and did not know where David was).

This lack of coordination by the agencies delivering ArriveCan and testing reminded me of a similar situation that happened to me when I came back from the US in May. Although the border guard told me I do not have to quarantine, I received a robot call every day for fourteen days upon my return, asking me about my quarantine location. Assuming the border guard punched in the right information, why had the government follow-up program kept calling me? Does the government contract with the lowest cost IT companies that may not have the best track record? Or, perhaps, government officials never test-drive their creations.

Another ridiculous aspect of the experience David went through is that he never received the result of the tests. He stayed less than a week, but by the time FedEx picked up the packages and the lab developed the results, he left the country. He just told me he never received the results and it is a week after arrival. The entire exercise is a total waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Yes, vaccinated travelers to Canada may have Covid. But the effort required for, and the inconvenience caused by, testing far outweighs the benefits of finding out how many people entering Canada. Covid is community-spread today in Canada, far more than by people arriving from outside the country.

If the government wants to test arrivals to Canada, it should test all arrivals, including those by airplanes, via highways, and boats, and should make sure that all the agencies administering this process are well-coordinated. Just my opinion.

A Slice of America, where Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina Meet

June 2, 2022

Sometimes one drives through a small geographic area and discovers its small towns have a rich history. One such area we encountered is where the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina meet. The area experienced the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands, the discovery of copper, the development of a company town mining copper, and the destruction of the environment leading to remediation. These have been major historical events. So how did we get there?

My daughter rented a vacation home in Murphy, North Carolina. The area is famous for hiking, walking, rafting, and mountain biking and daughter Megan and family wanted to enjoy these activities. The rental home was so big that we were all invited, though I left rafting and mountain biking for the younger generation. But l discovered other places to visit that interested me: the Cherokee Museum in Murphy, NC, and the Ducktown Copper Museum in Ducktown, TN.

The vacation home we drove to in western North Carolina (on the Tennessee border and a couple of hours from Atlanta, GA), was hugging the hill, almost sliding down, with huge picture windows facing the mountains and trees pruned in front to enhance the view. We took a serpentine road to access the vacation home, which was more like a mansion, with huge rooms and many bathrooms. It was difficult to turn the car around at the entrance to the home. But to go down the driveway, we had to turn around the car: it would have been impossible to back down the steep, curvy, and narrow laneway.

Murphy, NC (population 1600 in 2020), was a few minutes away from our vacation home, and housed the Cherokee County Museum, with panels describing the Trail of Tears, the 800-mile trek the Cherokees took after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, pushing the Indians out of their ancestral lands onto federal territory (now Oklahoma). Some people called it ethnic cleansing in response to the settlers’ demand to take away the Cherokees’ land for their use. Over 4,000 Cherokees, about a quarter of the Cherokee Nation’s people perished on the trek.

We believe in Canada we were cruel to our native population by taking their children away from their families by force, to educate them in residential schools into our culture. In the US, the government chased them out of their native lands by force and put them into camps until all of them were cleared out of their ancestral territory. 

On leaving the Museum, I asked the receptionist if they employ any Cherokees. I would not have known if she was Cherokee and was simply curious.  She responded obliquely by saying that the Museum sells native crafts made by Cherokees. She may have misunderstood my question. To me, it seemed to make sense that in a museum dedicated to Cherokee history, they would employ people of Cherokee heritage. But then I remembered that the government chased all the natives out of their territory; perhaps there were no Cherokees left in this area. 

Then we saw the Ducktown Copper Museum. Ducktown, TN (population 560 in 2020) was a ten-minute drive from our rent, named after the Cherokee Chief, whose Cherokee name translated to Duck. (called Duck), in their native language. The Ducktown Mining Museum occupies the old headquarters of the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC). Our guide was a white-haired woman, a native of Ducktown – whose husband, brother, and father had all worked in the mines. She said that people started working for TCC as young as thirteen years of age and stayed with the company all their lives. 

TCC had a good reputation for labor relations, and was good to its employees, she said, although I found that there were strikes by the workers demanding higher wages and benefits.  When I asked, she confirmed the strikes but was proud of the company and showed us around explaining how copper was mined at a depth of twenty-five hundred feet. She said that she went down into the tunnels with her husband. I found it surprising to hear from her that the elevator could go down to the bottom of the mine in a couple of minutes; it must have been fast. 

Our guide also described how Ducktown had become the center of mining for copper, after a European American panning for gold in 1943, found copper instead. A copper rush resulted. In a couple of decades, over thirty companies explored and produced copper. Berra Berra Copper Company was the biggest mine at that time headed by a German-born mining engineer, Julius Raht. The company had expanded when roads were built to transport the ore.

During the American Civil War, the Confederates took over the Berra Berra Copper Company, the largest copper mine, and used its production for ninety percent of their needs for copper during the war effort.

But there were environmental impacts. The smelters built to separate the copper from the rock needed fire, and the logging for timber used to fire up the smelters denuded the entire landscape.

The constant burning spewed sulfuric gas into the air which, when mixed with water vapor in the atmosphere, became sulfuric acid and came down as acid rain, ruining all the vegetation and further resulting in topsoil erosion. The acid rain killed aquatic life as well in the Ocoee River. The entire area of sixty square miles had become a moonscape, visible by satellite imagery from the sky. 

But the mines created upwards of 2500 jobs and a booming economy and the environmental degradation had been ignored. To reduce the impact of acid rain, the mining companies erected tall chimneys, hoping for the dispersion of sulfates, only resulting in the dispersion of sulfites in a larger area.

The farmers in close-by Georgia suffered as a consequence of the acid rain and the Government of Georgia, on behalf of the farmers, sued the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC) for damages, in the early twentieth century. The lawsuit ended up with the US Supreme Court, which agreed with the plaintiff and called for an injunction to stop the operation of the mine, which was never enforced because the TCC started collecting the sulfuric acid and selling it as a byproduct of the copper mining process. 

In the early twentieth century, the TCC acquired many of the smaller copper companies and ran a store where the employees purchased all their requirements, and the store deducted the cost of their purchases from their wages. Often, employees developed a large debt that they could not repay and were forced to keep on working for the company. The guide explained that the company provided housing and clothing for the employees as well. I was wondering what life felt like in a company town, where the company ran everything.

With copper prices dropping, all the mines finished operating in 1987. By that time environmental remediation had been going on by the State of Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and others. The guide said that although many million trees have already been planted, some moon-like areas were left intact for people to see what the landscape looked like during mining operations. 

I found it interesting to discover that even small places that are drive-throughs for most people, have unique histories, once you scratch the surface. While Murphy was, at one time, the center of the Cherokee Nation, it is now devoid of Cherokee people, except for a Museum dedicated to the Cherokees. And Ducktown, once a booming mining town with thousands of people, has shrunk to a few hundred people, having only a museum commemorating the once huge copper mining operation.