va va voom

For months I had been planning on going to Williamsburg on the 27 for my friends Alison and Scott's engagement party. They graduated a year before me, both geography majors at Mary Washington. After living there in Fredericksburg for four years, I still take for granted how large the Commonwealth of Virginia is, but figured a quick 375 miles to Williamsburg from home was not a big deal. However, the deal was sweetened when I found out that Junk Science would be playing the night of the 26. I had to be home today, so this trip ended up being a 750 miles in 36 hours whirlwind. I told this to my friend Paul, who responded, "Only Colleen Earp would go 20 miles per hour in her sleep." True story.

I left for Fredericksburg around 3PM Friday, arriving an hour before the band went on at The Loft at 9. Much to my dismay, this was actually the band's farewell show because the drummer is heading to Montana for a position with Americorps. (We are all happy for him, but the music will be missed!) While waiting for a college buddy of mine to meet me, I hung out at Hyperion, my favorite coffee shop maybe ever. Cute little historic building in a cute little historic city. It's not that I wanted to stay in college forever, but there are definitely things I miss about that town on the Rappahannock. Good show though, and I stayed at the house of one of the band members with a bunch of friends.

The next morning, after another stop at Hyperion (seriously, the iced coffee is cold brewed and just the best I've ever had), it was off to Williamsburg. The friend I met for the show the night before, Jonathan, was also a geography major with Alison, Scott and myself, and was also going to the party, so he drove us down there. I don't know why I had it in my head that once I was in Fredericksburg from NJ, Williamsburg wasn't much farther, but that's basically not true. It ended up being a long day and a fast turn around for me, but it was so good to see some old friends.

On the way home, I stopped in northern Virginia to see one of my old roommates, Brittany. I am overall not remotely a fan of the overdevelopment in Fairfax County, but I am a huge fan of Brittany so it was definitely worth the stop. It meant getting home at 3AM today, but it did make it an even 36 hours of touring the southern part of Megalopolis.

introduction

Oh hey!

I've decided to start a blog to post all of my adventures in one place that I can share. Until my next trip, I'll be backdating entries from handwritten journals and other blogs from past travels. It's a great distraction from the term papers I should be writing right now.

We spent a little time in Seattle to visit Rachel, the world's largest piggy bank, a bronze statue in the Pike's Place Market, and we also stopped by a coffee shop on Battery Street where some of my friends left me a gift about a month ago when they were driving across America-- a lei, hiding behind a Robert Browning book. Hilarious! Like we said, we had dinner with Justin Anderson, who seems to be doing well out in Seattle. Our flights home were all right. Flying in Las Vegas in the middle of the night was pretty cool. Unlike most city airports where the lights just peter out over the suburbs, the lights ended abruptly at the edge of the city where it met the desert. Kind of weird. Katie's parents picked us up from Newark early this morning. We're pretty tired, but hopefully we'll get the rest of our photos up for you to see soon, and recap a few of our last awesome moments. Amazing trip with amazing ladies!

Just wanted to let you know that we have safely arrived in Vancouver! We already dig the place and are looking forward to tomorrow's adventures. A few photos are being posted from the travels and from the sunset on Jericho Beach, which is where our last hostel is.

Tree: Bigleaf Maple
Beers: Russell Cream Ale, Russell Honey Blonde

We wandered around Vancouver today. I love this city! There are a lot of cool unique districts, it's clean, there's a lot of bike paths and parks and whatnot, basically encouraging people to get out and do things.

We also checked out the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver. It's pretty enormous and sweet and there's a lot of trees, but I hung out with Katie, who couldn't cross the bridge on crutches. We hung out with some crazy wooden statues and got our hands stamped for visiting various children's stations...

The girls went along with my intense desire to have dinner at a microbrewery, so we ended up at Yaletown Brewery. Beers of the day: Hill's Special Wheat and Red Trucker Ale. We spent some time at Sunset Beach Park this evening, which is exactly what it sounds like, on the English Bay. It was really pretty and a relaxing way to say goodbye to this awesome country. Can't believe we're heading home tomorrow!

Revelling!

We have arrived in Revelstoke, British Columbia, although we almost didn't make it because we were so awestruck by the beautiful things we saw along the Icefields Parkway in Banff and Glacier National Park this afternoon that we probably could have stayed there forever staring.
http://s276.photobucket.com/albums/kk14/JackCanada/day%2012/

Trees include Lodgepole Pines (slender variety!), Black Spruce
Beers include Mount Begbie (a Revelstoke brew) Pale Ale, Kolsch and Cream Ale, Alexander Keith's Red Amber (again from Nova Scotia), and Sleeman's Honey Brown (from Guelph, Ontario). Note to parents: Amanda and I did not have five beers each. The bartender was kind enough to pour us a bit of each to taste before ordering.

Tonight we're in a Same Sun hostel. I dig the name, because we're all under the same sun. Of course, that sun sets really late up here... the past few nights it's been light till nearly 10. We got another hour today when we got to British Columbia, so we weren't as far went in the time zone, but still. We're more than 5000 kilometers from home and we're having a great time!

Banff is lame, so we're not posting any photos.




JUST KIDDING!!! Photos may not do this place justice, but we'll post a gaggle of them over the course of the evening nonetheless.
http://s276.photobucket.com/albums/kk14/JackCanada/day%2011/

(Also because we are all concerned that my dear friend Justin Doyle will attack us if we don't.)

Trees for the day: Western Red Cedar, Water Birch
Beers for the day: Alexander Keith's IPA from Nova Scotia (at happy hour price!) (and very good, and I'm not usually a fan of beers that you can see through), Show-something or Showgirl or something -shine from Calgary (which wasn't great, surprise surprise Calgary)

Today was beautiful.

Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff tomorrow! Banff

Tomorrow we go to Banff!

Today's drive brought all sorts of surprises, which was good because it was another long one (between 7 and 8 hours somewhere). Amanda and I are still doing just fine with driving, switching off as needed. We expected Alberta to follow Manitoba and Saskatchewan and basically continue the flatness till we got to the Rockies. We were still awestruck by the beauty of it, possibly due to the vastness and vividness of the colors-- the greens and beiges of the fields, the bright blue sky (alternating with the deep blue-grey apocalypse style clouds and some sweet lightning off in the distance). Our ears are telling us that we're definitely not at sea level anymore, pop pop pop pop pop. At one point, we went up a hill and around a curve and were suddenly in this gorgeous hilly area.

Other highlights of the drive included finding another Sibbald-- this time an itty bitty town just over the border into Alberta, and stopping for lunch in Fiske, Alberta, another itty bitty town that had a random gazebo in an empty lot. We saw an older man going for a stroll, and we're pretty sure he told the other twelve citizens of the town that some strange girls were having a picnic, because for being only a pair of blocks big, a lot of cars sure went past. Everyone waved though. Everyone's so nice here.

And then we got to Calgary, which probably wasn't going to win favorite city of the trip, but an emo twelve year old skater boy wearing skinny girl jeans flipped me off in an already psychotically stressful parking lot, so I have decided that Calgary is of no use to me other than being the layover on the way to BANFF!

Oops, we were too busy being old ladies to post last night

Today (yesterday) we discovered the awesomeness of Jamie's eyesight. She was the first one to spot a 30 foot moose, annnd the first one to spot the prairie. We went to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and found that it should be easy to find a 30 foot moose, but it wasn't. As a side note, 75 year old motorcycle men from BC cannot take legit pictures of people AND a 30 foot moose. See pictures for details.

We discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not actually been on horseback for 50 years. Also, it is the USA's fault that the Mountees were created and everyone hates American whiskey traders. Colleen would like to add that it was not her people's fault, but only Katie's. Colleen and Amanda became Mountees in the child-sized costumes, although it may have cut off their breathing. Katie and Jamie combined make one Mountee. We watched a troop of RCMP doing drill practice which was sweet, and then we watched 1st graders do it which was creepy.

Then we drove to Saskatoon, and it was really flat with some random hills thrown in for kicks. We found that Saskatoon's downtown is only a block, despite the fact that it's Saskatchewan's largest city. Across from the hotel was a sandwich place called Badass Jack's, so of course we had to eat dinner there. When we enter the hotel, we found an alternate universe/igloo/hobbit hole on the second floor. Sadly, the rest of the hallway to the room did not match that. We went on a mini pub crawl through Saskatoon for Amanda's birthday and sampled some more Canadian beers. Great Western is brewed in Saskatoon, Rickard's White from P.E.I., and Grasshopper from Calgary (our next stop). Jamie and Amanda experienced the coldest temperatures ever when we went into the liquor store to find the Grasshopper, but they survived without frostbite.

After we finished the beer and uploaded some photos, we passed out because we are all secretly 80 years old.

Now we're on our way to Calgary, stopping at Beaver Conservation Area before we leave Saskatoon. This was a group effort, p.s., which is why it's so random. Amanda thanks everyone for the birthday wishes, and thanks to Mom Earp for the tinnybopper card!

We <3 Amanda!

IT IS AMANDA'S 22ND BIRTHDAY AND WE ARE EXCITED!!!

Oh, and we're safely in Saskatoon and we saw Royal Mounties, a 30 foot moose statue, and some prairie dogs today. Yay!

We have skipped time zones twice now and have a third one to go in a few days, so please know that I'm not really still awake at 2.07AM. That's just preposterous.

checklists and bison and drumlins, oh my!

Slowly but surely uploading photos... today is day eight already!

When I was in high school, a bunch of us from youth group were at a diner, probably after forcing our youth pastor to bring us to a Presbytery meeting or something. I probably made some offhanded comment about how my goal in life was to break 200,000 miles in the car I drove at the time (a Nissan Stanza which died at nearly 204,000 during my junior year of college) and then I could die happy. Well, Wayne, our youth pastor, did not find that acceptable and wrote a list of things I needed to do before I died on the back of the diner placemat, including but not limited to: live outside of NJ for more than a year (check), kiss a prairie dog (check), and travel to Saskatchewan... CHECK! Another item on the list was "drive on the edge", very unspecific, but I'm pretty sure I've done that in the past week: the edge of the Great Lakes, the edge of America, the edge of Canada, the edge of FLAT, FLAT, FLAT LAND.

But we got to see some bison, and that rocked! Actually, I've enjoyed the flat drive. It's flat. It's very different from the flat I come from, living next to the ocean. It's flat and grassy. And flat. But it's pretty, and I manage to find random minor glacial landforms and other geographic phenomena. Society might call me nerdtastic. Society would be absolutely correct.

Tomorrow we're going to check out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Center and carry on to Saskatoon via Moose Jaw. Life is awesome.

By the way, JACK Parental Units, we are incredibly amused by the plethora of ways you have decided to sign your comments besides "Mom" and "Dad" since there's four of each of you. Keep up the good work.

Hey Fozzie, where've we gone?

Today we drove from Winnipeg to Saskatoon. As mentioned, Winnipeg seemed oddly empty. We figured that's because we arrived on a Sunday evening, but here we are, Monday morning, and it still seems pretty empty. Amanda and I walked around the city a little bit while Jamie and Katie enjoyed sleeping in a little bit. We checked out the hotel's water slide before leaving for the open prairie.

Manitoba is beautiful in its vastness. Nothing but highway, fields, and sky stretching in every direction. We stopped for lunch in a place called White Horse, which featured a statue of a white horse, something about young lovers being killed instead of living happily ever after, the horse was a gift somewhere in there. At lunch we discovered that the oranges that caused us so much trouble at International Falls? One orange hid in the bottom of our bag and made it back through customs and into Canada again!

We have arrived safely in Saskatchewan. Our hostel for the night here in Regina is a really lovely old house. We're the only girls in the building so we have an enormous room to ourselves!

borderline ridiculous

This update will hopefully be posted from the Marlborough Hotel, whose wireless internet is kind of misbehaving. I'm updating tonight because everyone else slept like toddlers in the car for our ridiculously long drive today. This morning we decided to change today's route a little bit, leaving Ontario for Manitoba via Northern Minnesota so we could make Fathers' Day phonecalls at domestic prices, get cheaper gas (the liter to gallon conversion leaves us around $6.50 a gallon in Canada), and check our International Falls. It looked as though it would add a little over an hour to today's trip, but since we gained an hour when changing time zones, it was negligible due to TIME TRAVEL!

International Falls is a misnomer. The Ontario side is called Fort Frances, another papermill town, and it was kind of difficult to find the bridge to Minnesota. The "falls" were, as best we could tell, some rapids running under the bitty little bridge we crossed that had natural gas pipelines and a shared lane for busses, trains, and trucks. We survived that, and then there was customs. We were sent to see the Agricultural Dude because we had a small bag of baby carrots (American), a bag of grapes that were going bad that we'd meant to get rid of (Mexican), and two oranges from the last hotel's continental breakfast... all picked up in Canada. Well, he ok'd our grapes, but we kind of didn't want them back, and he ok'd the carrots because they were American, but he claimed our oranges couldn't be transported because they weren't in a box or bag... and then he quarantined those to his jacket pocket. Snacktime for the USDA Border Patrol!

A note to any Mary Washington Geographers who may be reading-- I drove past a sign for Bemidji today! It was kind of several hours out of the way and I already felt bad enough for talking my friends into driving through Minnesota and adding time to our trip... but I pulled over and got a photo. AMAZING. This photo and others will probably not be up till tomorrow because the internet is not sure if it wants to keep working or not this evening.

I drove from lunchtime onward, crossing us back into Canada. We'd gotten rid of our carrots so passed through customs without a problem. The lady asked why we were driving through Canada, and I told her because we thought it was awesome, and she said we were absolutely right. Welcome to Manitoba! It is REALLY flat! And there is roughly nothing within several dozen kilometers of the border. I enjoyed the drive. Everyone else fell asleep till we were pretty much into the city. So far in Winnipeg, we're impressed with the size of the city but how not crowded it feels. Then again, it was Sunday evening when we arrived. We're in a sweet hotel and all rather tired since we feel like it's an hour later than it is.

And now that this is besously long, I'd like to add a post script: Congratulations to our friends Becky and David, who became parents for the first time this weekend! Welcome to the world, Samuel!

Happy Fathers Day, Dad! (And Cliffie, and Mr. Paton, and the AG!)

Thunder Bay is cool (awesome AND less warm). Tomorrow we leave Ontario behind for new places that none of us are remotely familiar with. We're pretty excited!

Tree of the day: Eastern Hemlock, the lookout platform at the gorge was surrounded by them

Also, Amanda and I continue to try new domestic beers. Tonight's was Kokanee, a brew from British Columbia. Not bad!

Soo-per!

Sault Saint Marie (also called "The Soo", yes, spelled like that) is easily my favorite city so far. I knew a lot about it before we got here because it was featured in the Eastern North America class I took as a geography major at Mary Washington. It was just really cool to see everything the professor talked about (even though I took the class two years ago).

There's one on the Ontario side as well as the Michigan side, and we visited both. The Ontario side is a papermill city, but both sides have extensive canal systems, which we were fascinated by. We checked out a sweet little museum on the Canadian side and ate dinner (in a boat-shaped restaurant!) and watched ships go through the locks on the American side. We actually drove to Rudyard, Michigan to pick up American cell phone signals to catch up with our families at domestic rates. We ended up pulling over at a playground to make the calls, which must have been strange looking to anyone passing by. It was just a really interesting and chill day!

Tree of the day: paper birch. Those things were everywhere on the gorgeous drive up here.

PS- Just wanted to share the hilarity of the evening. We all headed down to the pool/gym area. Amanda and I decided to exercise a little bit to offset the sitting in a car for such long stretches. She took the stationary bike, I took the treadmill. Somehow, we blew a fuse and I about faceplanted on the thing. It was probably really funny to watch. It's also probably really funny to imagine.

Toronto, day two!

Highlights of the day:
Colleen: the man playing norwegian wood on the sitar in the subway
Jamie: having Moose Head beer at the comedy show tonight
Amanda: the huge stack of pancakes from breakfast covered in chocolate and powered sugar
Katie: sitting out on the patio out on the 5th floor of the hostel in the beautiful weather

Beer of the day: Moose Head at Betty's
Tree of the day: Red Pine

JACK and Jill went up a hill... to Sudbury!

Hello from Sudbury! We have arrived safely and are staying in a totally sweet Howard Johnson. We think we've recovered from our technical difficulties, so here I am updating from Amanda's computer. However, the photobucket website is currently having its own issues, so we'll try updating that later or in the morning. So sorry for the delay!

We left Toronto this morning, heading north toward Sudbury via Sutton West, where Sibbald Point Provincial Park is located. My grandmother's maiden name is Sibbald and that's the area our ancestor people are from, so I was pretty excited to see the place even though Grandma told me a few weeks ago that she doubts our relation to these Sibbalds in particular, claiming the last name is kinda common. Grandma, I beg to differ, because now that I think about it, it was nearly IMPOSSIBLE to find our tartan when I was in Scotland. I decided it would be necessary to reclaim the land for my family.

We arrived at the park, and oh my gosh, it was gorgeous! The waterfront area was so peaceful and pretty, sitting on Lake Simcoe. We wandered back up to Eildon Hall, the house which Susan Sibbald named for her family home in Scotland after she immigrated to Ontario. Lovely home, but it was not yet open for summer so I didn't get to see the inside. Amanda and I went on to check out the church that Susan's son had built in her honor. It's a lovely little gothic building that is home to St. George's Anglican Church and a small family cemetary. My alleged ancestors sure chose a beautiful place to take their eternal nap... I'll get photos up soon! Now that I think about it, our Sibbalds are Scottish and this Sibbald is from Cornwall, England... but wait, the original Eildon Hall is in Scotland... I suppose I have to do some homework when I get home! Regardless of my relation or not, it was a really nice park. I'll just go ahead and claim it as my own!

The drive up to Sudbury was really pretty, too. Lots of trees and cool rock formations, very little in the way of development besides the road itself. We made a pit stop in Ojibway territory, where we met some nice shop owners who warned us about seeing moose. Warning?! We're hoping to see moose on this journey!

This is getting long, so here are some final notes I'll leave you on:

• trees of the day (bonus trees because they were all identified in MY park!)
• silver maple
• black willow
• American elm
• We named the car Jill. JACK and Jill, duh!
• I thoroughly enjoyed driving 100 on the highways today!
• We're getting used to the metric system.

HI Toronto

We've made it to lovely Toronto, Ontario! We'll be staying at another HI (Hostelling International) place for the next two nights. We farfed around Niagara Falls for a bit this morning, seeing an enormous, gorgeous whirlpool, some glass blowing, and of course, the falls themselves in daylight before heading up here.

So far in Toronto, we've done a little walking around the vicinity. Jamie and Katie headed back to the hostel to give Katie's foot a rest and Amanda and I tromped all over the place a while longer. At one point, we met a really nice couple and their friends, who we walked with for a few blocks while they told us about cool stuff to see in the area. Just like everyone else we've talked to, they were blown away that we're driving across the country, but were excited for us and wished us well. Everyone has been really nice. We found a lot of neat restaurants that we're excited to eat at tomorrow, and walked right up under the tower/needle. Click here to check out some of today's photos!

On a side note, our car continues to amaze us. We were concerned that its tragic flaw was the fact that the speedometer only read in mph (look in your car at home, does it have mph AND km/h?! I feel like most do!). Since Canada is one of those completely sane nations that relies on the metric system, we went so far as to create a cheat sheet of some standard speed limits and tape it to the dashboard. Eventually, I decided to fiddle with some of the buttons on the dash (this is a 2008-- basically a computer on wheels) and found a metric setting. The odometer and thermometer were reading in metrics, but it took us a while to understand that the speedometer was also registering in metric measurement, so we spent a few minutes driving waaaay under the speed limit (consider that 50km/h converts to about 30mph... and we were in a 30km/h zone...) before Amanda was clever enough to figure out this FABULOUS feature. Life is good!

Welcome to Canada, it's the maple leaf state!

Today was the big day! It seemed a bit surreal as I was driving to the grocery store at 7AM to pick up a few last minute things. My mom kindly drove us to pick up the car, and we were on our way. It was an easy drive through NJ, PA and NY, only to met with our first big adventure: getting through customs at Niagara Falls. While the person in the booth checked out our passports, she asked questions like, where we were from, where we were going, where we worked... and how we knew each other, since all of those answers varied a bit. The response? "From church." Apparently that's not a good answered, because we were asked to pull over into customs and have the entire car searched... down to the photos on my camera (I hope the officer enjoyed the few shots of us picking up the car this morning). Amanda actually had to go into customs to surrender the pepper spray her mom sent along... oops. The officers recommended bear spray though, which is legal in Canada, and stronger. Interesting.

We went down to the falls just to get a sneak peak and have dinner. Pretty sweet, can't wait to see them during the day! But we're back at the hostel now, getting ready for bed and enjoying the sweet thunderstorm.

http://s276.photobucket.com/albums/kk14/JackCanada/day%201/

And, to all of my friend people back in Virginia reading this, you will see in photos that our very, very sweet 2008 Chevy Impala has VA license plates!

Christmas Eve!

It is like Christmas Eve up in here! We leave in about thirteen and a half hours!



... and between the two girls I've spoken to so far this evening and myself, 0% of us have packed yet.


I'm not sure if I have spent more energy in the past few weeks jumping up and down about this trip, or trying to keep myself from jumping up and down about this trip, but either way, we leave in the morning and I am stoked!

EDITED TO ADD: It is 11.37PM. I am mostly packed. I wanted to share with you that I think, hands down, the most important thing I am packing is my Field Guide to North American Tree Identification.

Also, maybe the directions. And clean socks. WE ARE LEAVING IN UNDER 10 HOURS!!!

Monday is so soon!

I finished all of our directions from hostel to hostel and to all of the random cool funky things we want to see, so I thought I'd share.

Our excellent adventure is going to look a little something like this.

Excuse me while I go jump up and down a little bit.

Yaaay!

less than a week to go!

Here is the official JACK goes to Canada blog by all four of the JACK girls, though I'll post here too.

Where I am most excited to go: Sibbald Point Provincial Park in Ontario and Glacier National Park in British Columbia
Why I think Canada is awesome: My ancestors hung out there for a few generations before moving to New Jersey
How I contribute to this excellent adventure: I'm pretty good with maps


We're tie-dying shirts in my kitchen sink right now, so I'm going to go help with that...

America is connected to Canada!

Last night, I woke with a start around midnight, and felt I really, really needed to reread a text message sent to me over the weekend.

Let me explain. A few of my good friends from college are currently driving across America, having left a few days after our graduation and getting home in another week and change. When I told them that the Canada trippers and I would be flying home from Seattle at the end of our journey, and they told me they'd be passing through Seattle, I suggested they leave me something.

I didn't think they'd follow through!

Sunday, I was at a loud show on the boardwalk with some friends, and slightly distracted, so I read the text from Jeremy, "Seattle. 2nd and Battery St. Bellino Coffee... Love, America." I thought it was just a really sweet here we are, thought we'd say hi type dealy.

Tuesday night, I read the following:
"Seattle. 2nd and Battery St. Bellino Coffee. Right bookcase, behind selected poems of Robert Browning. Object hidden. Love, America"


Just one more thing to be super excited about, even though Jamie, Amanda and Katie have never met the America boys, and Ross, Matt, Jeff and Jeremy have never met the Canada girls! Jamie and Katie and I have all graduated and come home and are waiting patiently for Amanda to graduate at the end of the month so we can finish our planning and embark on an excellent adventure!