RVing around Lake Erie Part II

We took the non-Interstates around the lake where we could to try to see what was around.  The Interstates are the 100km/hr freeways, whereas the regional highways are often 60 or 80km/hr and go though towns.

We randomly found a tank by the side of the road.  I think this was the equivalent of an RSL club.

Jax wasn't even as big as one of its wheels!

We visited the Perry Monument at Presque Isle State Park in Pennsylvania.  Apparently the Americans and the British were fighting each other here in 1812, and a guy called Perry built some ships and beat the British.  I find the idea of fighting a naval battle on a lake pretty funny.

We learned how to make S'mores - this is an American/Canadian thing where you roast a marshmallow on the campfire and then sandwich that and some chocolate between two sweet crackers (they taste like biscuits).  It's pretty tasty although very messy.

We stopped off for our final night on the Canadian side of the lake, at Rondeau Provincial Park.  There was a beach there, and Jax had a great time rolling in every dead fish he could find.  Stephen had a great time chasing Jax.

Jax running away from Stephen.

RVing around Lake Erie Part I

A recurring theme of our travel here in North America is that there is so much that we want to see and do, and so little time in which to do it.  In Canada you only get 3 weeks of annual leave a year (and that's as a senior employee - standard is two), and with Vicki working contracts, that causes issues as well.  As such, our scraping together every little bit of holiday time to try to do something sometimes backfires, as a weekend is never really long enough to fly somewhere and see everything we want to see.

We were being fairly ambitious with this trip - we wanted to rent an RV on Thursday night, drive it 1200km across the border and back again, and be back for work on Monday morning, so 3 days and 3 nights.  We also wanted to see things on the way while we were doing it.  It mostly worked out, but a lot went wrong.

One of the first things we discovered was that the RV place was only available for pickup between 2 and 4pm on Thursday - so no picking it up after work as we'd intended, causing us to have to negotiate a half-day on Thursday in order to make it.  At the same time, we discovered that the RV place was actually 40km north of our house, inaccessible by public transport.  As we don't own a car, there wasn't an option of driving up there and leaving the car for the weekend (we would have had to pay to rent a car for the entirety of our trip in the RV).  We juggled a bit, and worked out that we could catch a taxi from our house to the rental place with Jax.  $120 of taxi fare later... we were there.

As per my last post, we figured out a couple of days before we left that most campgrounds were "closed for the season", but we managed to dodge that bullet by finding the only 3 campgrounds that were open and planning our route around those.  What we weren't expecting was to be told on arrival that our RV was also "winterized for the season" - despite the 15 degree days, it was getting close to 0 at night, and thus we weren't permitted to use anything on the RV that used water, in case the pipes froze overnight.  So no shower, no sink for washing up, and no toilet.  That was certainly out of left field.  Luckily we'd booked campgrounds that also took people in tents, so they had showers and toilets there - but you never realize how convenient running water is until you have to walk 200m to get to it.

We had another rude shock after driving the RV out of the parking lot and straight to the petrol station - $100 of petrol covered 1/4 of a tank.  Ouch.  We also quickly discovered that the RV averaged 23L of petrol per 100km travelled (a small car averages 5L/100km on the highway) - so it was costing us over $30 in fuel to drive 100km.  Double ouch.  Over the course of the weekend it cost us nearly $400 in fuel for the 3 day drive around the lake.

We crossed the American border with no issues, and visited our first campground near Niagara Falls in New York state.

Here's the RV we were driving.  It was 23 feet long (7m).

The campground was quite nice - our campsite had a paved area with a BBQ, outdoor setting and a rocking chair, but it was a bit cold to use these.

The campground seemed like it would be a fairly lively place in summer - through the back gate was a small amusement park with a rollercoaster and some other rides.  I guess in school holidays, people probably bring their families here in tents or RVs and camp out for a whole week, packing their children off to the amusement park for some of the days.

Inside our RV - you can see there's a small kitchen area with a microwave, 3-burner stove top and a sink for washing up (when you're allowed to use water).  Behind that there's a bed (a bit smaller than Queen size).  The door at the back right is the washroom which has a toilet and a shower which we couldn't use.  To the right there's another sink (bathroom sink), plus a wardrobe cupboard, fridge (surprisingly big and cold), and then a dinette table and chairs at the bottom right of the picture.  Above the cab there was another double bed, but I think you'd have to be pretty crazy to sleep there - there was around 20cm between where your face would be and the roof when you were lying on it, not very comfortable.

More to come in Part II!

Around Lake Erie - Planning

Like last year, we've been mostly staying at home over winter.  This is apparently a typical thing for people in Canada to do - in winter, they hibernate, with maybe a trip to somewhere sunny like the Bahamas.  In summer, they go and do things.  And thus I apologise for our lack of posts for the last few months - aside from one photo-less trip to Florida to run the Disney Half Marathon, we didn't do much except hang around at home.

This winter has been dubbed the winter that wasn't - we managed to train outside every day except for one, where it was -23 or something with wind chill.  The rest of the time it hovered around -5, and was generally rather pleasant.  I think we only had a few snow days, and they were nothing like last winter.  Similarly, this spring has been nothing like last spring's 2 months of constant rain alternately freezing and thawing and making the sidewalk a deathtrap.  This spring has been mild and beautiful, even hot sometimes.  We even had a few 25 degree days that made us blink and wonder if we'd magically been transported back to Brisbane.

Easter long weekend in Australia is usually 4 days of camping, making the most of the last days of summer.  Easter long weekend in Canada is only 3 days, and apparently it is normally either raining or snowing.  Over "winter" (October to May), everything is generally "closed for the season", and apparently people are too set in their ways to see the heatwave and generally beautiful weather as an excuse to declare the Easter long weekend a weekend for doing things.  Not us!

They're predicting temperatures of between 10 and 16 degrees C, so we've rented a 23ft motorhome, and are planning to drive it around Lake Erie over the 3-day weekend.

The original plan was that we'd just stop whereever we felt like it, but we discovered that the owners of RV parks are set in their ways as well, and most campground and RV parks don't open until May 1.  Some panicked googling found a total of 4 parks that are open (out of about 50 - I'm glad we have the internet and don't have to make phone calls), so we've made some bookings and planned out a route, and hopefully everything will go to plan!  Hopefully!

Jax is coming with us, so we are crossing fingers that there are no issues crossing the border with him as we've never done it before and aren't sure what they'll ask.  We have our ownership papers from the rescue, plus proof of his rabies vaccination, and I believe that is all we should need.

The motorhome part sounds slightly scary.  When I went to book the places, the website had all of these options - pull-through or back-in, full hookup, 50 or 30 or 20 amps... having no idea, I just picked whatever sounded good, and hopefully it will be ok.  Surprisingly, they all seems to have wifi, which is interesting!

So off we go on Thursday night on our big adventure.  Will we be snowed in by a freak snowstorm?  Will we accidentally drive the motorhome into a tree?  Will we even make it across the border?  Who knows!  Stay tuned for photos and hopefully not-too-crazy stories.  

The Great White North

Christmas is a pretty lonely time when you're 15,000km away from your family.  We decided to distract ourselves with a road trip - Stephen couldn't get time off work, so we only had 4 days, and we spent it driving along the Trans-Canada Highway to a town called Kapuskasing (don't ask us how to pronounce it, we still don't know).  It was a 1,682km round trip.

Part of the reason why we wanted to go was because Toronto has been having unseasonably warm temperatures - it hadn't snowed at all by Christmas, and it was mostly above zero.  None of this was helping our "white Christmas" plans, so we figured that if the snow wouldn't come to us, we would go to the snow instead.

And snow there was!

No, really.  There was a lot of snow.

The other reason for going north was to try to see the Northern Lights - and just like on my last trip, they decided to not show up.  We did see a red glow in the sky behind the clouds which is technically the Northern Lights, but it wasn't quite what we were hoping for.  So we will keep trying!  Apparently October is a better time to see it, so we may go back then.

All in all, it was a pretty uneventful trip - we had been emphatically warned against driving up north in the winter by a number of Canadians, but we decided to go anyway (crazy Australians) - we just made sure that we rented a car with winter tyres, and it handled the snow quite well.  There were no freak snowstorms (although driving in a car at night when it's snowing looks like you're going into hyperspace), and the temperature never really got that cold - probably the coldest was -12ish, and it gets to that in Toronto.  We were lucky that it didn't get much colder - apparently when it goes below -20, you need to plug your engine block into the electricity so that it doesn't freeze, and we didn't have that attachment on our rental car.  It was amusing to see parking lots where every park had a powerpoint at the front of it though!  (We forgot to take a photo!)

Unfortunately, part of the problem of travelling with a dog is that one of us always has to stay with him in the car, so for most of the trip we ate fast-food in the car (I never want to see another burger again).  Considering that it was Christmas, we came prepared with a car fridge and a basket full of food, which we had to use on Christmas Day to have our brilliant Christmas Dinner of 2 minute noodles because not even fast food was open.  Yum!

Jax loved the snow.  I can't really put into words how much he loved it.  It wasn't like the dodgy wet mushy snow that we usually get in Toronto - this was 30cm of white powder on the ground.

The snow was up past Jax's legs, so watching him get around was pretty funny - when it got really deep, he hopped through it like a rabbit!

From what we saw, things were quite a bit different up north.  For starters, there were snowmobile paths next to all of the major roads, and people were making heavy use of them.  Apparently taking your snowmobile to the burger shop on Boxing Day is a commonplace sight here!  Another thing we learned, is that the further north you go in Ontario, the more people speak French as their first language - I was fairly surprised when I walked into McDonalds and heard the cashiers switching between serving one customer in fluent unaccented English and the next in fluent French.

We tried to stop the car every couple of hours to get out and stretch our legs and give Jax a break, and that meant that we discovered a few parks that we are going to need to go back to in summer.  In one park, we walked along a boardwalk that was the start of a trail, following a set of tracks that we have now worked out belonged to a Canadian Lynx.  Jax sniffed at and followed the tracks enthusiastically, but stayed very close to us and wasn't keen to go chasing off after them into the forest - smart dog.

Narnia!

The trip was a nice break - it was good to get out of Toronto and do something fun for a few days, and we had our white Christmas after all (even if we did have to suffer 2 minute noodles to get it!).  Unfortunately, it's now back to work tomorrow.  

Morocco Trip Part 3: Marrakech

We caught the early train from Casablanca for the 3.5 hour trip to Marrakech with little incident.  We thought Casablanca was warm - but Marrakech is an inland city and tops it by about 5 degrees, so it was getting above 40 degrees.

We decided to walk the few kilometres from the train station to our hotel.  We were initially a little concerned, as there were hordes of people on the pavement yelling and waving flags - I was worried that it was a political demonstration, but it turned out that they were excited because that evening, Morocco was to play a qualifying match for African Cup for football.  Apparently an upcoming football match, 14 hours away, necessitated a horde of people driving up and down the road on trucks, motorbikes and cars with flags, yelling and blowing vuvuzelas.  I could understand it an hour after they won, maybe....

Walking down one of the main streets, where we were constantly passed by flag-waving soccer hooligans :)

After we made it to the hotel, we wandered around the Djemaa el Fna for the afternoon - which is the central square.  The square is full of people doing all sorts of things - snake charmers (with real live snakes), monkey handlers, people drawing henna tattoos, jugglers, fortune tellers, acrobats and dancers.  We did take some photos but they don't really get across the scale of the place.  At night time, the sellers mostly clear out, and they bring in food carts and benches, to set up food stalls - like the Night Noodle Markets only with more people yelling at you to come and eat at their shop.

There were a bunch of carts like this selling freshly squeezed orange juice too.

We decided to hang around in a cafe for a while and relax, and try one of the local specialties - mint tea.  It was really nice!

Around the Djemaa el Fna was the souqs - commercial district/markets.  They were very busy and full of people, and you could walk for miles passing shop after shop.  They tended to cluster around certain professions - there was a dyer's souq, and a leatherworker's souq, etc.

The different parts of the souq has very different looks as well.

A more touristed street.

A street with more locals.

We saw a lot of carts pulled by donkeys on our wanderings as well - fairly old school.

The sky was incredibly clear, and we were staying in a riad right next to the Djemaa el Fna, so Stephen had the opportunity to take some arty photos of the Koutoubia Mosque (the largest in Marrakech).  It has a distinctive minaret due to the decorative balls on the top.

Koutoubia Mosque at sunset.

The old and the new.

Koutoubia Mosque by daylight.  As I said previously, we were staying very close to the mosque - this allowed us to fully experience the local culture by means of an early morning wake-up call for the dawn call to prayer.  It was much louder, and lasted for a much longer time than I was expecting.  Apparently there are loudspeakers on the side of the minaret.  It wasn't a very good sleep-in.

The street on which we were staying. There were many cats in Marrakech - they were everywhere.  I was slightly concerned that there were so many of them that they would end up in our evening dinner.

Tiny kitten on the mosaic floor.

We visited the Saadian Tombs, which has some beautiful architecture.  Apparently the story goes that the sultan built the tombs for himself and his family.  When he died, the next sultan was quite keen on everyone forgetting his predecessor, so he blocked them off from view, and they were only accessible through a tiny passage in the adjacent mosque.  They were rediscovered by aerial photography in 1917.

Ornate mosaics and arches.

These were the tombs of the chancellors and wives, scattered around the grass.

The mausoleum.

We also visited the Bahia Palace, which had yet more beautiful mosaics and architecture.

 Recess on top of a door.

Arabic calligraphy was engraved into the mosaics as well.

Unfortunately, the camera battery ran out at this point.  We did buy some more, however, they were "refurbished" batteries (someone had cut off the top and tried to glue them back together), and they didn't actually work.  So no more photos!

All in all, it was a whirlwind trip, but it was a very interesting place to visit.  It was fairly difficult to go straight from the comforts of home to a place that is so culturally, linguistically and meteorologically different (we arrived home to 5 degrees and raining).  If we were to visit again, a longer, more relaxed trip via somewhere more western and French-speaking might be a good idea as to help us transition.  

Morocco Trip Part 2: Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca

In Morocco, there are only two mosques in the country that non-Muslims are allowed to visit due to their interpretation of their holy book.  Luckily the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca is one of them, so we decided to go and check it out.

It is a stunning building.

It has the world's tallest minaret, at 210m tall, and is built partially on reclaimed land and partially on a platform over the ocean.  Apparently this has something to do with a passage from their holy book that states that "the throne of Allah was built on water" - part of the floor is glass and looks straight down into the ocean.

The detail everywhere was beautiful - every surface was patterned with different mosaics and arches.

The pattern on the minaret in more detail.

The side of the mosque including the fountain.  The sky is incredibly blue.

We went on a guided tour of the mosque, which lasted around an hour.  We were surprised to see that they ran tours in French, English, Spanish, Italian and German, and English was one of the smaller groups.  Our clothing was fine here, but other tourists who apparently hadn't noticed that they were visiting a Muslim country were made to purchase shawls to cover their bare shoulders, arms, and, uh, cleavage.  I bet that was fun for the ticket seller to explain.

The Royal Door.  The guide suggested that this is only opened when the King wants to come and pray - everyone else enters through the side door.

The mosque has a retractable roof - like a sports stadium, but carved with many ornate patterns.  Apparently the King (Hassan II) who commissioned the mosque wanted the worshippers to be able to "contemplate God's sky and ocean", and the roof is opened on special occasions.  Pretty cool idea.

This is facing towards the front of the mosque - I am not sure what you would call this area on a mosque, but it would be equivalent to the pulpit of a Christian church.  We took our shoes off when we entered the mosque before stepping on the carpeted prayer area.  25,000 people can fit inside the mosque, some on the floor here, and some on the "women's galleries" that hang over this area (I couldn't get any good photos of them).  The women are completely segregated from the men - there are separate entrances and carved screens so that the women's entrance is not visible to the men.  The white carved portions at the tops of the pillars are actually masking speakers, so that everyone in the hall can hear the prayers.

It was quite dark inside the mosque, so here are some obligatory artsy photos, taking advantage of the light shining through the windows.

 Reflections on the tiles around the outside of the carpeted prayer area.

Patterns everywhere!

The dome roof of the entrance foyer.

Underneath the mosque are washing facilities - apparently one of the requirements before praying is for "ritual purification" to various degrees.

There is a hammam (Turkish bath) under the mosque too, but apparently it is never used as people visit the many hammams nearby instead.  Apparently at a hammam, one is supposed to hang around with various buckets full of water soaking - it sounds kind of like a public spa that one undertakes in one's underwear.  It wasn't really our kind of thing, so we didn't partake, but the patterns on the walls were beautiful.

A day was really enough to see Casablanca - the next day, we set off on the 3.5 hour train trip to Marrakech, which is the subject of the next blog post.

Morocco Trip Part 1: Casablanca

With Stephen's 30th birthday fast approaching, I asked him whether he would rather go on a surprise holiday or have a big party.  Unsurprisingly, it being Stephen, he picked the surprise trip.  Unfortunately for me, that meant I had to find somewhere cool to take him.  I struggled trying to find a location that was suitably cool while also being close enough for an extended weekend trip - until I saw an advert from Air France on a website, quoting cheap fares to the north of Africa.  Hooray, I thought, and booked flights to Algiers for a 5 day holiday.

I started looking up accommodation, and realised my error - I had thought that Algiers was in Morocco, but it  was actually in Algeria (who'd have thought).  I managed to call quickly enough and cancel the booking - rebooking the flights to the correct destination of Casablanca (which is actually in Morocco) this time.  Luckily they cancelled the booking, or this might have been a very different blog post!

The next problem was clothing.  Morocco being a Muslim country, I wanted to respect the local customs, so I took a number of trips to cheap local stores looking for appropriate clothing - long pants, long sleeved shirts and tunic-style tops that cover your hips (headscarves are optional, but most travel sites recommended wearing your hair in a ponytail).  It was tough to find appropriate clothing, considering that the forecast for Morocco was 40 degrees and it's coming up to winter in Canada - plenty of long sleeves, but all designed for -10 degrees.  I managed to scrounge together enough clothing in the end and hide it from Stephen - and then it was time to pack and go!

The custom is for men to wear long pants in Morocco as well (apparently wearing shorts is like walking around in your underwear), so my packing instructions to Stephen the morning of the trip gave the game away - I said to pack long pants and no shorts, but no jumpers.  When we got to the airport in the evening, I asked if he could guess where we were going, and he suggested that if it needed long pants but not jumpers with absolute certainty, it must be for religious rather than weather reasons, and therefore he thought we were going to Morocco (I knew I was dating him for a reason - smart man).  

Once I confirmed that we were going to Morocco, we were both a bit nervous - I had been so busy organising the trip that I hadn't really had a chance to think about the cultural and language issues that we were about to experience, and Stephen had only just found out.  We caught our flight to Paris, changed into appropriate clothing, and caught our flight to Casablanca, arriving in the early afternoon local time.  

Nothing ever goes quite to plan when you are in a strange place.  I had plans for getting from the airport to our hotel - the airport train should take us right there - but we discovered while purchasing tickets in our best French (most people in Morocco speak French and Arabic but no English) that the airport train didn't actually go to that station - but it went to one 3km away that we should be able to catch a taxi from.  We quickly discovered on the train that there were no stop announcements, and very few signs on the stations.  We figured that our stop would be the last one, so we hopped off 45 minutes later when the train stopped... in the middle of nowhere, 10km past our hotel.  Stephen managed to negotiate a taxi fare (with me translating for him), and we finally made it to our hotel around 4pm, exhausted and ready for a shower and some sleep.  All things considered, we didn't do too badly for the first mistake of our trip.

The next day, we headed out to see the local sights.  Our first stop was Casablanca's main attraction: the Hassan II Mosque, of which we took so many photos that it requires its own blog post (to come).  We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city.  

Casablanca is the biggest city in Morocco, but it doesn't actually get that many tourists - it's more the business hub.  Most of what we saw was beautiful buildings.

Stephen really liked the cute little balconies on this building.

Even the local Christian cathedral manages to look vaguely Moorish.  No giant cross, for some reason.

The main square was a nice garden surrounded by government buildings, mostly empty of people.

You would have thought that we were the only tourists in the city or something.

We also visited the tiny local market - here's a swordfish just lying there dead in the open.  Ugh.

Apparently they eat turtles too.

Next up, Part 2 (where the good photos start) - the mosque!