Author Archives: newsgrl

08.30.13
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Vacation Travelogue: He could make me happy …

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S: Play that song Mark.
M: But I don’t know the chords.
S: I’ll look it up. It’s by the Cowsills, “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things.” Here, here are the chords (sets iPad on a stool, displaying tablature; holds chord book in one hand, iPhone playing the song the other hand). OK, now play, quick!
M: (Dissolves into laughter.)
S: (See above.)
M: (Picking at guitar and singing under his breath) … There is a house in New Orleans they call …
S&M: (More laughter.)

And I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew, he could make me happy …

08.30.13
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Vacation Travelogue: Irish Moss

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There is a spot — see it above — on northwestern-most tip of Prince Edward Island where the Northumberland Strait meets the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here you can see the waves from both sides come together.

This place, called North Cape, is home to a research wind farm with as many as two dozen huge wind turbines. The turbines had no trouble spinning today. They were amazingly quiet. At the same time, the sea was so rough that the fishing boats stayed in the nearby harbor.

We stood on this wind-lashed promontory, in the shadow of a laboratory, where scientists and engineers are creating a sustainable form of energy and watched as a man harvested Irish moss with a hand rake. This crop has been gathered on the western shores of the island by locals since the 1930s, both by hand and also using horse-drawn rakes. Carrageenan, a thickener used in dairy and other products, is extracted from the moss. As evening approached, the moss farmer hurried to move his old Toyota truck, just feet from the incoming tide, up the steep, red, rocky hill and on home with the day’s harvest.

08.30.13
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Vacation Travelogue: The Mill

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When Mark and I went to Italy, I felt a connection to the land of my ancestors. I had no idea I would experience a very close link to my past on this trip. It happened today, in the photo below, in the MacAuslin Woollen Mill, about an hour’s drive from where we’re staying.

The big machine on the right side of the photo is a wool twister. It runs almost the length of the room, and takes wool that has been washed and carded and twists it into yarn. My paternal grandfather, George Calvin Rand, traveled the country, including the Atlantic Provinces, setting up machines made by the Davis and Furber Company, based in North Andover, Mass., where I grew up. This is a D&F machine.

Mark and I traveled to visit the mill as that is where our friends Heidi and Tom (who own the house we’re staying in) bring the wool from their sheep. Upon entering the mill, we felt as if we had stepped into the way-back machine. Machines were whirring, belts were spinning overhead — it was an OSHA nightmare. And the amazing thing was that we could get as close to the machines as we wanted, and talk to the people running them, which is what we did.

As we watched the fellow running the twisting machine, we walked to the end of the long apparatus and there it was, a plate that said Davis and Furber. Made chills run up my back. Could my grandfather have set up this machine? The mill was rebuilt after a fire in 1947. George was working then. I’ll let my dad weigh in on whether he thinks his father may have had his hands on this very machine.

We bought a MacAuslin blanket for our bed, we needed a new one, and this seemed like the perfect gift to bring home from our vacation, that and the memory of this visit to the mill.

08.30.13
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Vacation Travelogue: Fuel, the other kind

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Did you know that leaving Bangor, there are no gas stations for 100 miles?

No?

Neither did we.

That’s our car with only gas fumes remaining, stopped at the Wyman blueberry plant somewhere east of TWP 24. Right, it is so sparsely populated that the towns don’t have names. On a map, it’s Township 24.

I was calling it Towns Without Petrol 24, and a few other things.

As my well-traveled husband was telling me to (stop yelling and) trust in the universe, a rescue squad truck from Calais happened by and stopped to help. A pair of EMTs told us to follow them to the Wyman’s yard, and they got us connected with a sheriff’s dispatcher who was calling around to find a wrecker that would bring us gas.

Meanwhile, Mark walked to the blueberry plant where he found a young kid unloading blueberries off an 18-wheeler. The kid gave us a gerry can of lawnmower gas, enough to get us down the road 25 miles to the 24-hour station just before the border crossing.

The dispatcher told us to call when we got to the gas station, to make certain we had arrived safely.

So, thanks to the kindness of two EMT’s, a forklift operator and a dispatcher, we arrived at our motel in Pocologan, New Brunswick, an hour late but no worse for the wear.

Mark tells me this is the magic of travel, trusting in your fellow man (and woman) to see you down the road.

I’m beginning to believe he’s right.