A trip to the Shire

Now that I have caught up to date on the home front, I am going to dedicate the next two posts to my summer vacation with Josh. Our friend Allan recently purchased 62 acres of beautiful Laurentian countryside and took the plunge to move up to the country. He has a dog, and a teenage son with who lives part time with his mom, and big plans. Josh and I hope to eventually buy a piece of his land and move up there, but not for the next few years. In the meantime, we are very interested in helping him wherever we can. He chose to name his land The Shire. It looks and feels like the kind of place hobbits would be pleased to settle.

Josh has gone up there without me several times on very successful mushroom picking expeditions in the spring. I went with Allan and Josh to see the place just before Allan made the purchase. It has a valley with meadows full of wild deer, songbirds and wildflowers, lots of old apple trees scattered about, a small river that divides the land, and lots of forest along the side of a small mountain (a big hill for my readers out west). There is an old farmhouse, old enough that the doors are small and the smell is musty. What used to be a barn was rebuilt by the previous owner as a  cozy little two-room house. Allan is planning to extend the new house, as well as build an outdoor summer kitchen and a big workshop, but he decided to start off creating some areas for summer fun for guests and have a party to invite his friends to see his new domain.

Back in April, when I managed to negotiate taking two weeks of summer vacation overlapping with Josh’s fixed construction holiday (no easy feat!), we were thinking about taking an extended camping trip back to Grand Manan in New Brunswick. When Allan made the decision to buy the land, I suggested to Josh that we vacation closer to home, and given that Allan lives an hour from Montreal by car, we could take some day trips to Montreal to deal with the gardening, shopping, cooking and laundry.  Allan currently has a bar fridge, a chest freezer, a microwave, a barbecue, and a countertop stove with two burners. He’s been living off of barbecue and pasta a lot, so was very grateful for our fresh picked garden treats.  Cooking and food storage space being limited, we used our cooler and kept enough perishable food for a few days at a time then restocked in Montreal.

We started our vacation with two days
 up at our friends Shaun and Elsbeth, whose annual summer party in Ste. Adele coincided with the beginning of our vacation, and the last two days before our daughters went to sleep-away camp for three weeks. The whole family spent a lovely weekend camping out, swimming in the lake, playing on the trampoline, hanging out with friends, singing and playing music by the bonfire. On Sunday,  Josh and I drove further north to take the girls to Camp Massad in the Ste Agathe area, and stopped at a friend's place for a boat ride and drinks before heading back to Montreal to get ready for our escape. Our son, just turned 18 and working in a warehouse for the summer, agreed to feed the pets and take in the paper while we were away, so it was just me and Josh.

We took some time to wander through the woods, and for several days (the ones it did not rain) I explored for the best spot to swim in the river. It has lots of rocks and rapids, and is pretty shallow although the depth varied by location and rainfall. We saw partridges, ducks, a red tail hawk, and we saw tons of deer footprints as well as otter and coyote. On our last night we heard a lot of coyotes whooping it up, thankfully some distance away from our tent. Allan has seen bear as well, but not while we were there. We kept our food in his house, but camped out a 5 minute walk down into the valley.

Our goal was to help Allan set up some facilities before his party. Given the variability of the weather, and the tiny size of the house, we helped Allan build, decorate and set up an open sided shelter with fire pits on two sides, tables, counters, seats and benches. He also decided to put up his 18 foot diameter inflatable pool. The location he chose started out as a hillside with meadow grasses and wildflowers taller than I am, which required a lot of hacking with a machete, weedwacking, levelling, digging and hauling of many stones over several days. On the day of the party, it was still tipping over, so we got a crew of friends, some of us wearing bathing suits in the frigid water of the pool, to pull up the side and prop it up with bags of earth. By the day we left, the water was up to my hips in the pool and looking pretty stable.

The reason the water was so cold was that we were filling it with a combination of rainwater (plenty of that this week) and a hose from Allan’s well with the most delicious cold spring water imaginable. It is great to drink, but a bit invigorating to swim in. I gave it one last try the morning before we left back to Montreal, but it was too cold to fully dunk myself. As well, the past two weeks we have had ridiculously cold nights for July.

I believe on the coldest night the temperature plunged to 8 celsius, and the other nights it was around 12. This is quite unusual for the Laurentians in mid-summer. Usually I sleep in a nightgown and use a sleeping bag or light blanket even. I have never had to sleep in sweatpants and a t-shirt and sweat shirt, double socks and three sleeping bags piled on top. When I was walking to my tent in the evening, I could see my breath. So even though the sun was pretty hot on the days it was out, the water kept on being cooled back towards glacial every night. Being July, though, I was determined to go swimming despite the weather. Our winter is too long, I refuse to give up my summer!

One interesting side effect of the heavy rain and cold nights was there was a lot of mist rising from the river in the evenings (signifying the water temperature dropping, of course), and the valley being full of mist. We had a fun evening playing with a laser attached to one of Allan's levels making bright red lines through the misty air. We probably terrified a few deer in the process but we had a good time.

We took one road trip further north midway through our vacation, but that is the subject of my next post.

I took a lot of landscape photos, first of all because the area is so beautiful, but also for my neighbour Iulia who has decided she wants to paint Canadian landscapes. They came out pretty nice, so I have added a bunch here and on my next post there will be more.

Allan's dog Maggy is in heaven living in the country. She was happy to follow me everytime I went for a walk and jump into my pictures.

I got some photos of wildflowers, typical Laurentian flowers like milkweed (left) and bladder campion below.

This is the Dalesville river where it cuts through Allan's land. Allan hopes to get all his friends to help pull some rocks out to make it more swimmable. A nice project for my vacation next year, perhaps. 

 

Here you see the mist in the valley. The clouds at sunset and moonrise were pretty spectacular too.