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  • Toonie time

    Due to some unfortunate early morning coincidence, we both woke up a couple of hours before the alarm went off yesterday, and then decided to get an early start, so left Hinton on a gorgeous sunny morning at 7am,

    and promptly blew our advantage by lingering over a couple of poached eggs and some salty spuds at a caff in Evansburg.

    Richard, our navigator, contemplates the jam selection.

    The rest of the day was just drive drive drive.

    Saw some deer, but they all stayed off the road.

    Decided not to go shopping.
    And we got to Saskatoon about 11 and a half hours after we started.
    On the way, of course we saw some grain elevators. Here is a mother feeding its young.
    In olden times, the young were the same boxy shape as their folks, with the same woody complexion, and grew up sporting the names of their towns or sometimes interesting bible quotations on their sides.

    Nowadays the young take after their parents who are rounder and harder and less interesting, and who have sought corporate sponsorship (much like today’s humans who prefer designer logos I suppose) so you can no longer see where you are from a friendly landmark.

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  • Hope to Hinton

    Day 2 dawned wetly and foggily, much like ourselves.

    We crossed the Coquihalla in good time, surprised for no good reason to see lots of snow at the summit,

    and then swanned down the other side, past some of my favourite landscape, around Merritt

    and on to and past Kamloops, noting pine beetle damage

    and on and on up the Yellowhead, through Jasper

    and finally to Hinton where the L&W; Family Restaurant served us some pretty good greek salad, spanakopita and navy bean soup.

    The sun has set

    on bunnies large and small and so we hit the hay for another day.

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  • Hope, pie and we-haul

    A while back, Ruth happened to mention she was looking for another driver to help her move her stuff across this chain of Tim Horton’s we call Canada. And so I stepped forward as co-pilot, co-driver, menu scrutineer and chief gastro-whinger.

    Before leaving I enjoyed a pleasant Victoria Saturday with Judy and Peg, drooling over the baked goods at Moss Street Market

    and then being treated to a quartet of Ferris‘ finest rockefeller oysters…

    Have left Anton, who has been doing a good impersonation of a living vacuum cleaner at mealtimes, to convalesce from his (successful) eye op in Sidney.

    It’s all started well. Ruth left the lot this morning with the U-Haul van; my mission was to drive her car to her house; only her car refused to start for me (I think it was suffering some separation and relocation anxiety and plain just didn’t like me, as it later started willingly for Ruth). Not a problem though; the car needed to be hitched to the van once it was packed anyway, so I was able to just leave it in the lot and wander around while Ruth’s burly men packed her earthlies into a compact space. Which they did with alarming speed!

    Then, ready to head off, there were some more fraught moments in the lot while the cheerful attendant could not find a database listing for the car model we wanted to hitch to the van (which would have meant we would have had to haul a longer, heavier car trailer instead of a dolly). But the heroic general manager finally sussed it out and gave us the all clear, and off we lumbered to the ferry, which we made in plenty of time.

    We managed to get to Hope, where the mountains are wreathed in fog, so it was lucky we meant to stop here. After some veggie burger and spinach salad

    a good ol’ meat loaf dinner

    and a shared piece of lemon meringue

    from the Home Restaurant’s justly famous pie case, we had a stroll round the local supermarket where they had proudly flagged Local Products (the cashier explained this meant products that had been packed in Burnaby, rather than in China or Mexico or someplace – hence you could buy “Local” almonds, dates, raisins and escargot seasoning!), and soon we will tumble into dreams, resting up for tomorrow’s haul through the mountains.

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Book cover of Rhona McAdam's book Larder with still life painting of lemons and lemon branches with blossoms in a ceramic bowl. One of the lemons has a beed on it.

“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”

Alison Manley

Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.