2009 Ends, 2010 Begins

November there was NaNoWriMo, the month of writing 50,000 words. December there was recovering from NaNoWriMo, and getting ready to travel to Toronto for Christmas then further south after.

Before we arrive, it always feels as if there will be lots of time to do everything we want to. After we arrive, we realize that the time we thought would stretch out blankly before us is actually already full of things to do. And this time it was also shorter than we had planned, as headed south early for family reasons.

These days I am thoroughly spoilt when we go on a road trip. I never renewed my driver’s license, thinking that I would not need for it (I forgot that even when not cruising plans are carved in jelly), so I have lots of time for watching the landscape as we pass through it. There is a lot of landscape on the drive from Halifax to Toronto. Happily it includes goodly amounts of beautiful landscapes, trees and hills lit by the sun, glimpses of water, stretches of city. In places you are reminded that nature is not always benign. There are the areas where trees charred by fire below sprout green above. Then there are other areas where landscapes roughly shorn of trees and plants remind us that our behaviour is not always benign either.

We paused overnight on the drive to Toronto on the outskirts of Quebec City. The room was warm, but when we woke in the morning it was achingly cold and the car was reluctant to start. A day later, in Toronto, we used their well thought out directions to find our way to the friends we were staying with. The days passed quickly, Christmas came and went. We saw more friends, but mostly we spent time with family. Then shortly after Christmas we set off to drive further south - earlier than we had planned, called by family business in Miami.

That journey too went well. We drove during the day and stopped overnight, and arrived there late and tired on New Year’s Eve. The next three days were relatively quiet - then we drove to Atlanta one day to take one of the family to catch a plane, stopped overnight with other family, and drove back the next. It helped a great deal to have a friendly place to lay our heads overnight in between drives!

January passed in and around Miami, taking care of business. The best that could be said about the weather there for several days was that it was warmer than Halifax or Toronto - we managed to get there in time for a record-breaking spell of cold weather. We walked many days; we enjoyed the brightness of the sun. Hearing news of storms in Nova Scotia, we followed the weather reports and paid attention to the direction of the wind, cheerful when the boat would be sheltered from the gusts and worrying when it would not. But all remained well there while we were away.

Our long drive back to Halifax was made much more pleasant because we visited with more friends along the way back. But we knew we were back in the land of snow and winter the fourth day along, when the snow no longer hid among the trees, where the shade lay, but glittered at us from the sides of the roads. When we pulled into the ploughed parking lot of a snowy rest stop that completed the confirmation.

Much of our driving was through hills and mountains, especially leaving the maritime provinces and on our route through New York and Massachusetts. Some of the scenery was breathtakingly beautiful, some of the drops awe-inspiringly precipitous. One morning we looked down on the fog rising out of a valley below, lit by sun above and shading the homes and fields and roads below.

We crossed back into Canada on the evening of our last day of driving, bent on getting back in time for Richard to have a day of rest before going back to work. That last day of driving was a long one, but we looked forward to being in our own place again. A day to readjust to life in Nova Scotia, and we edged back into our land-based routine again.

Some Pictures: