Canada 2025, Part IX: Fat Sailors

 Friday, October 10th was the day we were to leave the area and drive east, back across the province, to the Dartmouth/Halifax area for the wedding the next day. As such, we got up early and made sure all of our stuff was packed, cleaned out the hotel room and checked out, and got our coffees from Tim's before heading up the hill to say goodbye to Daisy's grandmother.

Goodbyes in Canada are never easy. Grandma is 92, was not going to the wedding (neither were her aunt and uncle who lived next door, or any of Daisy's cousins from his side of the family) so this would be the last time we saw any of them for this trip. Leaving grandma is doubly hard because we are fully cognizant of the fact that it may be the last time we see her alive -- at her advanced age and with the health problems she has, it is very possible she could take a turn for the worse at any time, and the next time we'd be traveling to Canada would be for her funeral. We know this. We don't like knowing it, but we know it. We always say we'll be back next year (and we always are) but all of us knows that while that will likely be the case, we still have a very limited number of years we'll be able to say that and mean it in the spirit which it's intended.

Daisy asked her grandmother, before we left, if it hurt her feelings that we stayed in the hotel instead of with her when we were there. It had been weighing heavily on Daisy's mind for the entire trip. While we do like the freedom and independence of staying in the Cove Motel -- or, like we did last year, in the AirBnB down the street from grandma -- Daisy did not want to offend her by it.

"Well," grandma said, "that bed in the spare room is not big or comfortable." 

She's right, it absolutely is not; when we stayed there in 2023, half the nights I'd wake up to find that Daisy had gone downstairs to sleep in the basement because it was too uncomfortable or too hot with both of us in there when grandma keeps the house at 80 degrees all the time. 

"Yes, but would you rather we be here and stay with you?" Daisy asked. "We just don't want to impose."

"I don't mind if you stay here [Daisy]," said Grandma, which is the closest thing we'll ever get to a yes, I would much rather you stay here with me. 

So, moving forward, we'll be saving the money and will be staying with grandma in the house again for future trips, and we'll adjust for that. I find the house peaceful and the time there gives me a lot more reading time, downtime, and the ability to take naps basically whenever I want. This is, essentially, all I want out of a vacation.

I personally don't mind being in the house, but there is that factor of imposition. I never want to be a bother, especially not to a woman in her 90s who is very set in her ways -- but I also like the security of knowing that if she has any health issues or needs our help, we're right there ready to assist. And honestly, the woman is lonely -- she hides it well, and she'd never outright admit it because of her pride, but she does love having us there. 

So, we said our goodbyes, as bittersweet as they were, and got on the road.

Our plans for Friday were as follows:

1. Stop for coffee and maybe food at the cafe in Truro
2. Hit up the Giant Tiger in Truro -- the best one we'd visited in the province last year
3. Drive down to Peggy's Cove to finally see the Peggy's Cove lighthouse
4. From there, drive into Dartmouth, check into the hotel, and finally eat something

Auld's Cove to Truro is a nice little drive:

And from there to Peggy's Cove is also a nice little drive still:

And just for the hell of it, why not just plot the course from Peggy's Cove to Dartmouth too?

So yeah, it was...a lot of travel time for one day, and entailed us driving essentially the distance of one end of the province to the other -- maybe not fully distance-wise, but absolutely time-wise. 

We left town before noon, leaving Tim Hortons and the best poutines in the province behind us; I would not drink another double-double or eat another honey cruller for the rest of our trip, and the poutine I had the night after we arrived -- with Daisy's aunt and uncle -- was the only one I ate on the entire trip.

Onward we pushed to Truro, stopping at a gas station to use the bathroom and get some really questionable bubble gum that sort of tasted like cleaner, and we finally arrived around two at the cafe. My stomach was going nuts and I didn't really want anything. I don't remember if I actually got anything, honestly. I wasn't feeling great and I was very tired from having gotten up so early. Not to mention, after a full week of sleeping on the thin/hard hotel mattress, my back was screaming at me in a language of pain that ibuprofen couldn't touch. 

We hit the Giant Tiger in Truro to find this:

I found this so hilarious that I had to take a picture of it.

Guess what? They did. They did have chocolate chips.

I asked Mama this past weekend why they'd feel the need to advertise that on a sign. When we went inside, they did indeed have giant center-of-the-aisle bins of bags of chocolate chips, and people were filling their carts with them. 

Like...is there a run on chocolate chips in Atlantic Canada? A bunch of fat sailors coming in off their boats and needing their semi-sweet chocolate fix? I was actually rather awed at the sight. It wasn't people frantically buying them like it was $2 DVDs in a bin at Walmart on Black Friday, but...it was a steady stream of consumers approaching these bins of chocolate chips and putting 3, 4, 5 bags at a time into their carts, as casually as someone picking out loaves of bread or canned vegetables.

Of course, it was Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. If there is some traditional Thanksgiving dessert in Canada that requires the use of an industrial amount of chocolate chips, that's not information I am privy to as a dirty American who is also not a fat sailor. Just fat.

Anyway.

This Giant Tiger was also mostly a bust this time around. We each got a few little things; I bought an orange shirt that supports the charities of Canada's First Peoples:

I'd wanted to get one at the Giant Tiger in Port Hawkesbury, but they didn't have it in my size. All profits from the sales of these shirts go to charity --

So it was important to me to support this. Plus, I really liked the design. Daisy would later point out that back home in Nebraska, it would look like I was staunchly pro-life, which she rolled her eyes and said I'd fit right in with the religious right nuts in this state. 

It's not about that, though, obviously. 

But yeah, aside from a few odds and ends like that, we left Giant Tiger this year mostly disappointed. It's hit or miss; you can't win 'em all. And to be fair, there was a lot in that store that I wanted, but unusually enough for Giant Tiger, almost none of it was in my size this time around. 

It is what it is, I suppose. 

After this began the long, long drive down to Peggy's Cove.

For those of you who don't know, and I wouldn't expect you to if you are not from or haven't been through Atlantic Canada and specifically Nova Scotia, Peggy's Cove is a beautiful, out of the way cove on the southeast tip of Nova Scotia, with long stretches of boulder-covered beaches. It is the most "Nova Scotia" place I've seen in Nova Scotia -- and by that I mean it definitely looks like Scotland. At Peggy's Cove is a lighthouse -- a decently tall lighthouse, the most famous and most-photographed lighthouse in Nova Scotia.

This is, perhaps, because it is in a very photogenic location -- it's the kind of area that when you see calendars of lighthouses, the photos you'd take there are the ones you'd see in said calendars. Or postcards, or paintings of seascapes. It is, for lack of better description, exactly what you would expect when you think of those things.

Anyway, I've never been to Peggy's Cove. It's been on the Canada list for years, but one thing or another prevented us from going there together before. Last year we had Mama with us, and travel is hard on her -- plus, by the end of our trip, we'd just gotten back from Prince Edward Island and Green Gables, so adding more to that would've been a burden and overwhelming to us all. Two years ago, when it was just Daisy and I up there in May, we wanted to take a day to explore the Halifax area (including Peggy's Cove) but wildfires in the area were causing evacuations and we were lucky that they didn't get close enough to the airport to cancel our flight home.

Daisy had not been to Peggy's Cove since she was there with the family as a young child, long before she and I were together. It holds special meaning to the family as it's where Daisy's parents had their first date. Between going there and making the drive around the entirety of the Cabot Trail, it was very symbolic to us -- tracing the steps that many others in the family had done before, together, for the first time. 

When we finally got to Peggy's Cove, it was late afternoon and the sun was already speeding downward, yet there were a lot of people there. Turns out that in the time since Daisy (and even her parents) were last there, the lighthouse area had built a very large visitor's center and two-story gift shop behind it, leading up to the lighthouse as a sort of staging area. Canada had done something similar with Green Gables in PEI as well; the last time the family was there before last year, it was basically just the house and a little gift shop -- there's an entire museum and visitor's center there now.

To a certain extent I think this commercializes these scenic locations too much, but to another extent I really like seeing Canada put money and planning into these locations' heritage and giving visitors things to see, learn, and buy. More power to you, Canada, for realizing that sometimes it's necessary to monetize things a bit. 

Anyway, we arrived just in time to get some of the best possible photos; the lighting was wonderful.

You can't actually go up into the lighthouse, sadly; it's locked shut, and I am not exactly sure how "functional" it is at this juncture. However, as you can see, you can definitely venture out on the rocks -- basically as far as you want, all the way down to the water if you want, along the coast. 

It looks very bright and pretty, but as we were there in mid-October, it was not exactly warm along the ocean, and there was some wild coastal wind that day. We decided not to press our luck on the rocks, lest I lose my balance (because let's not joke about this -- between the two of us, it would definitely be me whose fat ass slipped and rolled down the very hard rock face into the ocean). I did not want to become one of those statistics that they had very clearly posted warning signs about:

Upon showing that pic above to a friend once I returned home, his response was "how very Canada of them."

After getting a lot of photos -- and I mean a lot of photos -- we ventured back up to the visitor's center to look through this giant two-story gift shop. 

Truthfully, gift shops in Canada are a mixed bag for us and it's a toss-up of whether they'll have anything we want -- and if they do, if it's a clothing item, if they carry it in our size. Most of the time, the answer to that latter question is "hahah, no, fatty." The largest sizes a lot of shops will carry is a 2XL, and while that'll generally fit Daisy fine, I like to wear my stuff a little looser. Even though I've lost a lot of weight over the past few years, I like a hoodie to be big and baggy and I like my t-shirts to not make me look or feel like a sausage about to burst from its casing, so my bare minimum for zip-up hoodies and t-shirts is 3XL and pullover hoodies and polo-style shirts 4XL. If I can get a t-shirt or hoodie in 5X, I will, because it means I won't have to worry about it shrinking too much when it's washed and dried.

Unfortunately, the Peggy's Cove gift shop -- for all of the wonderful stuff it had -- was not a fat-friendly one. Most of their clothing only went up to XL, with some scattered 2X's here and there. We were really striking out on a lot of fat people clothing this year, it seemed.

Upstairs, I did come across what appeared to be a rugby shirt, navy and cream striped -- but also, it looked...well, like a typical "sailor shirt" or "pirate shirt." I don't know how to describe it other than that. Like a striped shirt a low-ranking pirate would wear on a pirate ship?

I dunno, use your imagination here, folks.

But it was long-sleeved and knit like a rugby shirt (without a collar, though), almost sweater-like, in a formal cut. It had a "Peggy's Cove, NS" embroidery on the front chest pocket area, and it was on deep clearance, something like the equivalent of about $20 American, if that. 

"I actually really like this," I told Daisy. "It's huge, thick, warm, and kind of makes me look like a pirate or sailor." I held it up against me. Daisy arched her eyebrows in doubt.

In the end, I did not get it. But I thought about it hard for the time we were in the gift shop.

"I'm glad you didn't get it," Daisy said later. "I thought it was hideous."

"It was hideous," I said, "but that's part of why I wanted it. I just...didn't need it, and I have so much clothing now as it is."

But really, folks, do you know why I didn't get it?

Because I'm not a fat sailor.