The parents gave us two things to do before leaving for home -- neither of them were requirements, mind you, but they were places to go and see that they thought would be fulfilling, fun little adventures for us. The first one was to go to the beach at Cape Jack -- a small, out of the way beach that was said to be beautiful, where nobody was ever around. It was far from a picturesque beach, like the one in Inverness, as it was supposedly a more rocky shore, but we were told it was gorgeous and usually nobody was there.
The other was to visit the monastery in the town of -- are you ready for this -- Monastery. Dad had told us that it was one of his favorite places on the planet, with a beautiful walking path that led up to a blessed holy spring that you could drink from (and were encouraged to), and there was a giant church there with an attached -- again -- monastery. Both were sort of out of the way places in the middle of nowhere, and while I wasn't necessarily enthused to visit a house of Jesus (given my staunch atheism), I had an open mind and I love going on adventures with Daisy. Adventures create memories. Adventures with Daisy make me happy. Life with her, in general, is an adventure.
We decided to do these things on separate days -- Cape Jack on the night before we left, and Monastery on the morning that we would be driving back to Halifax. I think. This was a month ago now, and my memory is rather fuzzy of the way the events unfolded. Daisy will read these travel narratives I write here after every trip we take together, and she will tell me things like "you're not doing this chronologically; we did X event on X day and we did Y event on Y day, and X before Y, you're getting them messed up." It used to really bother me but honestly, it doesn't anymore. I tend to remember the important things and the minutiae of when is lost in the ether. Sometimes I'll swear my recollection of time is correct and will argue the point with her, and other times she's very clearly right and I just had things out of order. I really stopped caring about most of it a while ago and now just try to focus on the stories of the events themselves, because that's the overall point.
As we were wrapping up the last day or two of our trip, we began hearing stories of wildfires outside of Halifax, and some were getting pretty close to the city and threatening homes around and just outside the city limits. Daisy's aunt and uncle, when they visited, mentioned the fires briefly and almost in passing, as if mostly unconcerned. There had been fires previously that had gotten close enough to where they lived (just outside Halifax, I guess) to where they'd been told to prepare to be evacuated, but the evacuations never came to pass.
By the time we were getting ready to leave, evacuations were already starting to be issued for the Halifax general area (though not, I don't think, for most of the city proper -- just the suburbs and surrounding areas) and it had become the top story on the national evening news in Canada. It had also become a leading story on the national news in the states. And we would be driving back into Halifax to get to the airport, hotel, drop off our rental car, and fly out. So, it was fairly concerning to us.
There's not a lot of things I'm afraid of on this planet. There's not a single person I fear, I don't really fear death as much as I should (if I die, it means I don't have to worry about bills or paying student loans anymore, so there's that), but that doesn't mean that there aren't things that I don't want to "go through" or experience. I don't want to drown, I don't want to go to prison, I don't want to be hanged, I don't want to get seriously ill, and I don't want to die in a fire.
Nova Scotia is much smaller than it appears to be on a map. I'm sure that you could drive one end of the province to the other in about 6-7 hours, from the tip of Cape Breton where Bay St. Lawrence is to Yarmouth on the far southwestern shore. So, when a large chunk of it is on fire, that tends to be a serious concern.
In Mulgrave -- and even in the surrounding towns -- we saw nothing. We smelled no smoke, we saw no smoke, the sea air was crisp and clean just as much as it was any other time. If it had not been in the news, we would not have known anything was happening. I want to stress this as it feels like we were completely detached from the events just a few hours away, eventhough we really weren't.
Anyway. I'll come back to this later. Onward with the story.
Cape Jack is a beautiful, but not exactly hospitable, beach. To get there, you have to drive down some really winding, hilly back roads well off the main highway, following fairly vague signs, passing some nondescript houses with yard cars (some nice, some decrepit). It reminded me a lot of driving through the countryside of West Virginia, except on those drives you can't see the ocean in the distance through the treeline.
The parents weren't kidding; Cape Jack is what I would refer to as an "abandoned beach." There are a few houses around it and leading up to it, but all of them are at least half a mile from the shoreline. The shoreline is not so much a sandy beach as it is covered in giant rocks and debris.
But. It is beautiful.
And, like the parents said, there was nobody there.
Down the shore from where the actual "beach" is, there's a small farm with a farmhouse, a barn, and people living there who own big trucks -- I don't mean tractor trailers or farm-use trucks, but big F-250 bro-dozers with lift kits and mud tires. About a mile away from them on the opposite end of the shore, up on the cliffs/hills, there's a McMansion built into the hill that looked really expensive, but was very clearly built there for the seaside view. It was also about 3/4 of a mile from where we were.
As you can see, the beach is rocky. This is typical of a lot of the Nova Scotia shoreline -- I haven't seen a lot of beaches up there -- and by "beach" I mean "where the ocean meets solid ground" that isn't rocky. There are the sandy beaches here and there, yes, but the above photo is more of what you'll see.
We got there in early evening, when it was still very bright and sunny outside. I very easily navigated a path through the larger rocks to get down to the smaller ones, while Daisy had more trouble (even though she went ahead of me). She was maybe 200, 300 yards further down the beach than I was when I realized something was amiss.
I had to pee.
This is a wide open beach in the middle of nowhere at the end of a long, winding road through wilderness, and I had an entire large Tim Hortons double-double in me from the drive.
I had to pee.
There were no bathrooms, there were no signs, there were no people around and no houses close enough to offer facilities in my time of need.
I looked down the shore. Daisy was down there walking along the rocks, far away from me.
I looked behind me; the house with the farm was at least half a mile from where I stood. There were no people outside or milling around.
I looked beyond Daisy, up on the hill to the McMansion, which was clearly much farther away than the farmhouse behind me.
I shrugged (I don't know if physically, but definitely mentally), undid my shorts, and peed right there on the rocky beach.
It took 30 seconds at most. I put everything away and redid my pants and re-joined Daisy further down the beach as if nothing had happened.
Getting off the beach was a problem for Daisy -- the bigger rocks, like the ones you had to step on and over to get down to the actual shoreline -- were filled with bees. Yellowjackets, specifically. Daisy is deathly allergic to bees. She said she saw them everywhere, that they were flying down into the rocks because, I guess, they made their nests in them/under them.
I didn't see a single one. Anywhere. I looked. I was very vigilant. I saw no living creature of any kind, flying or non-flying, bee or non-bee. Nothing. I tried to help her through the rocks, telling her to step where I stepped, but she was having supreme difficulty doing it. When she finally got out of the rocks and back onto the grass/gravel beyond them, where we'd parked the car in the cul-de-sac, she was very angry with me that I'd chosen the "most difficult" path/way to get out of the rocks and had made her go that way too.
Uh. I don't do hard things; I take the most direct route that is the easiest path forward. This is basically one of my tenets of life, not just in beach-crawling. Getting on/over/off the rocks sucks, it hurts your feet, and it's uncomfortable. I don't know what way she took to get over them the first time, but apparently wherever she went was filled with bees, where my way back over them was faster, closer to the car, and bee-free.
Once we were back in the car, I told her that I'd peed on the beach.
"Where?" She asked. "Are you kidding me? There are people around!"
"Just there in the rocks," I said. "What people? We're the only ones here. The houses are at least half a mile away and nobody is around. Do you think that people are watching us out their windows with binoculars?"
I would like to pause here for a moment so you can consider that mental image of the residents of those houses looking out their windows, binoculars pressed against their window panes, being like "Do you see that? He's pissing! He's pissing right there on the beach! Get their license plate, I'm calling the mounties on them!"
"And," I added, "so what if someone did see me? It's a beach -- the urine will flow into the rocks, into the sea, and be reunited with the earth. It's not like if anyone saw me they'd be able to tell what I was doing or identify me from half a mile away. I'm not from here and they'll never see me again. The worst thing that would happen is that stories would be told about the pissing bandit of Cape Jack, who let loose his pee and soiled the shores of this beloved province, etc."
I'm sure "and I bet he was American, too" would be added to said stories.
We took some pictures on the beach, and as we were leaving, a truck with several teenagers in it -- high school or early college-aged I'm guessing, arrived for some beach-walking. They looked at us as if we were aliens, or invaders/intruders on a private beach that they personally owned -- just looks of disgust that we were there soaking up the scenery too.
Watch out down there, I fired a gallon of hot, fresh piss into the rocks is what I wanted to yell to them as they gave us their condescending looks, but I did not.
Anyway.
The trip to Monastery was slightly more eventful and deeply unsettling to me.
There is a giant....convent? nunnery? I don't know exactly what to call it aside from -- well, a monastery -- there, also back off the main roads and through barely-two-lane gravel roads up in the woods. If the monastery itself is your destination, you absolutely cannot miss it, because it's winding road, winding road, small bridge over a creek, woods, woods, more woods, some wetlands, woods, more winding road, and then BAM a giant monastery complex in the middle of nowhere.
We pulled into the circular drive of the monastery and noticed several things immediately --
1. there is a giant church next to the actual monastery complex/building
2. there was one car -- a bigger, older 90s-model Lincoln Town Car -- parked between the two buildings (with Pennsylvania plates -- in Nova Scotia, so figure that one out, because we couldn't)
3. even through it was a bright, sunny day, there were no sounds anywhere but the wind
4. there were no other people or even a hint of other life around the entire area, anywhere.
I immediately felt a sense of unease -- strong unease. Something didn't feel right. It felt like we were being watched, or like we were being followed or tracked by a predatory animal. Daisy did not feel this feeling while we were there.
As I mentioned above, I'm really not afraid of anything. I've lived in at least two different haunted houses (including this one -- I'm sure I'll tell some of those stories here eventually) and I remain unfazed by a lot of the supernatural. But I could not shake the feeling that there was something watching me, something wrong with this place.
"Let's go see the church," Daisy said.
"We really don't have to," I replied.
But it was no use. Two minutes later, we were inside this very large, very quiet, and very empty Catholic church.
The church was very old, all wooden construction, but clearly from the 1800s or early 1900s. Yet, it seemed like no time had passed inside. It was very well-kept, very clean, and the stained glass windows looked like they'd been installed yesterday instead of many years before.
The church was quite possibly the quietest place I've been in my life. It was unnervingly quiet. So quiet I could hear my heartbeat, so quiet that I could hear Daisy breathing when she was twenty feet away from me.
Lining the...I guess, altar area? (I don't know church terminology) and all along the right side of the church -- where there were separate pews/bench seating, I guess where the church choir likely would sit -- were prayer candles. There were two boxes -- one for donations and one where you could write your prayer on a slip of paper, place it inside, and then light a candle for it afterwards.
Almost all of the candles were lit and burning. Unattended, in an old, old Catholic church, in the middle of the day with nobody around. Many of these candles were new -- they'd been lit very recently, as in...that day. Some of their wicks were barely blackened by the flame, as if they'd been lit by some unforeseen entity just before we'd entered the church.
Everything was silent but the wind howling outside around the building. The old wooden church would occasionally creak a bit against the wind.
Someone had to light those candles. Someone had to do it very recently. Someone who might be silently watching us from the shadows even now, when we thought nobody was around.
I suddenly realized that the uneasiness I felt was dread. A deep-seated dread, a dread that told me I did not belong here, that I needed to leave, that I was not welcome.
"I have to get out of here," I told Daisy. "This is intensely creepy and I need to go back outside."
"Okay baby," she said, with a sort of amusement. "I'll be outside in a minute."
It felt as if the eyes of a thousand ghosts were upon my back and following me as I exited the church and the door closed behind me.
Once I was outside, the bright sun and the breeze brought me back to reality. Everything felt normal again, aside from the fact that there was still no one around anywhere, and everything was still quiet. I no longer felt the dread or uneasiness I'd felt inside the church.
I waited for what seemed an eternity for Daisy to exit the church. For a few fleeting moments before she did, I wondered if whatever was inside had gotten her, possessed her in some fashion. You have to come back in, Brandon. We have your wife. She likes it here. This is your new home now and you'll never have to leave it again.
Finally, she came outside, normal as ever. I told her about the dread I'd experienced. She said she felt nothing but relaxation and peace.
Those of you who are religious are probably reading this like well, you felt dread and like you didn't belong because the lord knows you are a heathen, an atheist who dances with the devil, an anti-religion lost soul who has rejected Jesus -- and let me tell you that you're still wrong, and I'll prove that to you here in a bit.
Well, okay, you're right about the atheist, anti-religion thing.
Anyway.
Beyond the monastery and further up the...I guess, mountain? into the woods, there is a holy shrine and holy blessed spring.
Holy blessed spring, Batman!
This was something else Daisy's parents had mentioned that we couldn't miss, a beautiful peaceful place in the woods that we needed to see and experience. Dad had mentioned to us on the phone that he had drank water from the spring many times, that it was encouraged, and that so far it had never hurt him (which was less than convincing to me, a man of science who doesn't generally scoop untreated groundwater out of a spring in the wilderness to drink it).
The shrine, and spring, were up a winding path with archway structures and statues/plaques of varying sorts build and/or embedded into the earth. Wooden signs, aged from many years of Nova Scotia weather, pointed you in various directions -- shrine, spring, the anti-abortion monument (because oh yes, there was one of those), etc. There was not another soul there, except for maybe the holy ghost of Jesus, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Once we got up the path far enough, it took a sharp left -- and, directly in front of us, was the "holy blessed spring" -- a little trickle of a creek that came down off the mountain and out of a pipe. I believe a footbridge went across it at the bottom as well. Hanging from hooks embedded in the rock were two tin cups. Camping cups, beneath a tiny sign that proclaimed that this, yes, this was the spring.
I walked up to the cups, rinsed the dust out of one of them in the pool of the spring, and got a cupful of the fresh water right out of the running spring. I drank it, questioning everything I'd ever been told or learned from my boy scout or scientist days. It was clean. Refreshing. Free of impurities. Honestly, it tasted like well water. Just water right out of the ground, no mineral or chemical taste.
So, and here's where my heathenism comes in -- I'm either not so vile as to where water from a holy blessed spring would hurt me (because, essentially, it was holy water), orrrrrr the entire religion thing is absolute and total bullshit and I was literally just drinking water out of a creek.
Daisy watched this entire chain of events unfold, amusedly, and had filmed me drinking the spring water on her phone. I wanted to ask her if, when she watched it, the camera caught the demons leaving my body, but I chose not to. She drank from the other cup (I think) shortly thereafter, and it was around that point where she pointed out that this was supposed to absolve us of our sins.
"Like, all of them?" I asked. "I am pure and can enter the kingdom of heaven after this point?"
I had to really try not to laugh. Daisy is not a religious person, but she is a spiritual one and says she believes there is some truth in all religions. I think, conversely, that there is very little truth in any of them, but I don't openly criticize. Believe what you want. I have the freedom and the sense of logic to understand what's bullshit and what's not, and I'll never criticize someone for having faith -- sometimes that's all someone has to keep them going, and all of us have to find peace on this planet in one way or another. I don't have to agree in order to empathize.
"When I was washing and drinking from the cup," Daisy said, "all I could think about was covid and how many people with covid drank from the cup in the past three years."
I shrugged. "Doesn't matter," I said. "It's a Jesus cup. I'm sure it's been cleansed of disease by the holy spirit."
We then looked around the site for a bit before getting back into the car and leaving Monastery -- both the physical monastery as well as the town -- to head back to civilization.
Our last bit of time in the Mulgrave area was mostly uneventful. We packed our stuff, carefully and precisely, so that we wouldn't be overweight when it came to checking our bags. This was made more difficult by the fact that Grams had given Daisy a set of very nice, expensive china to take home. Daisy had to wrap it in clothing and meticulously pack every single piece to make sure it wouldn't get cracked, chipped, or broken in transit from Nova Scotia back to Omaha. Between that, all of the new clothing and souvenirs we purchased, as well as the food we were bringing back (mostly ketchup chips, some candy bars, and some K-cups), packing everything so that it would not only fit but wouldn't be overweight or damaged was almost like event planning. Daisy had brought a backpack in her luggage that would fit the china, and with careful planning and some luck she was able to get everything to fit.
Me? I just stuffed everything I could into my suitcase and my own canvas backpack and zipped it closed, hoping the zipper wouldn't burst on the suitcase in the plane's cargo hold(s). The backpack would stay with me, but the suitcase would need to be checked when we got on our plane in Halifax. This packing I'd done would become even more difficult when we stopped at a Giant Tiger in New Glasgow on the way back to Halifax and purchased even more things.
I should backtrack a bit to explain some of the travel plans.
Originally, our last full day in Nova Scotia, we were planning to arrive in Halifax early and tour the city, see the touristy areas and the harbor, get some beautiful pictures, eat at one or more vegan restaurants, etc. However, as mentioned above, the wildfires right outside the city were growing. By the time we left Mulgrave to head towards Halifax, they'd become catastrophic in many places and CBC radio was doing full-on, no-commercials live news coverage for our entire drive towards Halifax.
These are the alerts that came across our phones while we were traveling towards the blazes.
So, because of the evacuations and possible dangers in wandering about a city that was a hair's width away from going up in smoke, we opted to forego the touristy stuff and get back to the airport, check in for our flights as early as possible the night before, and hope that the flights did not get canceled due to smoke or encroaching fires.
Despite all of this, we saw no smoke in the air, from any direction, for as far as we could see. We smelled nothing, we saw no orange glows, nothing. Now, the airport is a bit outside of the city of Halifax proper, but it should have been close enough for us to see or smell something. Apparently it was not. Just like in Mulgrave, if the stories of the fires hadn't been all over the news an sending us alerts on our phones, we would have had no idea whatsoever that they were happening.
We arrived at the airport hotel without incident, dropped off the rental car, got our room key, and finally we were safely in Halifax and ready to fly out early in the morning. We repacked our stuff again in the hotel room (to account for/accommodate all the stuff we'd just gotten at Giant Tiger in New Glasgow) and had a very filling dinner once more at the pizza place in the hotel lobby.
In the morning, we got up and left the room, checked out, and made our way to the airport gates. After lots of walking and originally going to the wrong terminal, we found the right one and checked our suitcases -- mine was 48.5 pounds, and Daisy's was 49.0 (the maximum is 50). And went through security. This was where we got our last Tim Hortons of the trip, sadly -- and I had my last real Canadian double-double. We sat at our gate for what felt like an eternity before we finally got on our plane and lifted off the ground in Nova Scotia for the last time.
Oh, how I wish that were the end of the story.
Our flights home took us from Halifax to Montreal, from Montreal to Chicago, and from Chicago back to Omaha.
I don't know how many of you fly through a lot of airports in any given year, but if you ever have the chance to avoid flying through Montreal, avoid it. Montreal is an old, antequated airport that looks and feels run down. It feels claustrophobic, worn out, and somewhat dingy. Customs in Montreal is a nightmare, and I briefly lost my wallet and phone when they didn't come through the machine correctly. Once I got them I was basically booted to the side for additional screening, as the half a pizza and my vapes in my backpack were enough to trigger security to take a second look. Once I was deemed okay, I was almost thrown to the side to make way for a neverending flow of more international travelers, feeling like I'd been somewhat violated. It was far from the pleasant experience we'd had in Toronto. Between that, the neverending lines of people, the noise, and the general stress of it all, I was very happy once the plane lifted off Canadian soil and set its nose and engines pointed toward the states once more.
Chicago O'Hare was fine.
I almost want to leave it at that, but I think it bears some explanation because I've railed against O'Hare airport here in the past -- railed about how much I hated it, how I thought it was the dirtiest, ugliest airport I'd ever flown through and how I would actively avoid flying through it if I could -- but I must admit that until last month, I hadn't flown through O'Hare in over a decade. In that time, they've done a fair number of renovations and had performed a good bit of upkeep, and the place ended up looking, and feeling, far nicer than it ever had before on past visits. I'm not sure if it was a major overhaul or my stress and lack of sleep that made me notice more or less -- or the fact that I was back on my home soil of the United States -- but O'Hare didn't bother me this time around. We easily got to our gate and chilled out for a bit, and once we were able to get on the plane we did.
Two hours later, in the middle of the afternoon on May 30, we touched down in Omaha. The parents picked us up and brought us back home to our kitties who sorely missed us. It took about six hours for Sadie to come out of hiding, but once she did, I scooped her up and held her like a baby, loving on her as much as I possibly could, telling her everything was okay and that she was safe and we were finally home...and after that she loosened up and she was fine again.
And so ends the story of our trip to Canada. The cats were fine, our house was fine, and I stayed up for many hours afterwards doing all of our laundry. Daisy and I would both return to work the next day (which was, coincidentally, our wedding anniversary) and life returned much to normal -- as much as it ever was, anyway.
In the aftermath of the trip, both of us have been pretty busy. I'll cover that in subsequent updates here. But there you have it, yet another tale of international travel from yours truly.
