Road Trips and Hike Reports

Sunday morning Brian and I headed off for a truly outstanding wood fired bagel at Fabrique de Bagel in Magog QC, about 15 miles north of our B&B.  This wood fired very fancy seeming bakery isn't in stylish downtown Montreal or Quebec or even in an upscale suburb. It's on the side of a provincial route in a rural area not ever close to any city bigger than maybe 10K people.  My breakfast sandwich was on a light crispy little roll which they called an English Muffin but didn't in nay way (other than being round) resemble what I would call an English Muffin. No matter, it was astonishingly packed with flavor from the thinly sliced ham, sharp cheddar cheese, delicate egg and a smear of Dijon mustard.  I'm pretty sure my eyes rolled back in my eyes while I was savoring it. We then headed to Coaticook Gorge.  I learned from Brian's family the Coaticook isn't pronounced like 'coat-eh-cook' at all.  Apparently it's more like 'Quitacook' which se...

Family obligations come in all sorts of forms.  When my grandmother died a few years ago, she had made it clear that she wanted me to inherit some of her household belongings.  In her end of life period, she lived in an assisted living facility and she took almost nothing from her normal adult life into that facility.  The family helped her furnish her little apartment but nothing in there was anything that had any meaning to anybody since it was all new stuff and very unremarkable almost dorm like furniture.  When she actually died, most of the 'grandma and grandpa' furniture was already gone and I couldn't/wouldn't or didn't make the effort to come get any of it from Oregon.  To be honest it all seemed to happen in silence and I wasn't really aware of the process but even if I was fully aware I'm not sure it would have changed the outcome.  Still, I wanted to make sure that I did end up with some things that had that sense of family history.  Thankf...

A few weeks ago, a cousin of Brian’s and the cousin’s grandson were killed in a freak accident while at their vacation home in Maine.  I never met the people who died but I have met some of their siblings etc.  We came to Vermont to attend the celebration of life that was held for them.  The celebration was an ENORMOUS gathering with hundreds of people in a field near an Organic Dairy in Vermont and it was a touching presentation but it’s really family business so it is not something I’ll describe farther. We started our trip after work on Friday and drove to Clifton Park (suburban Albany) in a fairly easy 190 miles for the first night’s hotel.  The next morning we got a pretty early start, partially because we didn’t sleep all that well.  The upside was that we had a little more time to spare than we might have guessed before need to get on the road to arrive at the celebration at 2 pm in Vermont.   One attraction that I’ve been wanting to see is Ausable C...