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We woke up and Morgane and I hung out at Chandra’s while Ghis went to have breakfast with Martin, our old Montreal neighbour!

We walked along Queen St. in the Beaches area to find some lunch and the sunshine was beautiful. Morgane chatted a lot with salesclerks in stores, especially at The Body Shop where she told a guy that she wanted to be an actor or else a creator. She sure is good at making friends.

We walked by Lake Ontario – Morgane played in the park with Ghis and I walked Carmanah in the off-leash dog area.

We had dinner at a great cheese place called Taste that offers only local products.

At night we went to Ryan and Sarah’s house for my first house concert. Joel Fafard played some great guitar for a houseful of great people. There were some writers, like Sarah, from my UBC creative writing program there. I also met many artists including a puppeteer.

We left halfway through the concert so we could drive out of Toronto. This gave us a headstart on our drive and helped us find cheaper hotels.

Almost back in Quebec…

I would have liked to explore London a bit, but I got an email announcing that we had tickets to go to the taping of The Hour on CBC. If you don’t know, this is Canada’s only late-night talk show. George Stroumboulopoulos has interviewed so many famous people and Bono called him the best interviewer.

We got into Toronto and wandered the CBC buiding. There was a little museum where I found out that Mr. Rogers, Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant were all recruited to TV by a CBC producer. Then, since no kids were allowed at the taping, I went in alone.

I was dressed in a mix of this and that – whatever cold-weather clothes I could gather that weren’t in the laundry already, so I wondered about my decision to go on TV! I got a seat where I could almost reach out and touch George’s chair. The studio had huge medieval doors. It all felt a bit surreal.

The guest of the day was Chubby Checker and it was interesting to hear him speak. He can’t be young, but he still has a real spark in his eyes. He says he wanted to be a star since he was four years old. He’s just glad it came true. He also says all the dances that exist today are based on his four basic movements: the twist, the pony, and I forget the names of the other two (but one is similar to the Jackson crotch grab. He says dancing has always been about exploring sexuality and that doesn’t really change either.

George gave Stephen Harper a hard time for shutting down parliament for so long. At the end of the show, I got someone to take my picture.

Then we met our friend Chandra and ate some great Thai food before crashing at her place. Thanks, Chandra! And if you want to watch The Hour and see the back of my head, I’m wearing a blue shirt and sitting right behind George and you can watch Wednesday’s episode on CBC’s website.

After Iowa, we drove through Illinois passing close enough to Chicago to see a distant skyline. We didn’t want to take the time to explore the big city so we continued on into Indiana and slept there.

In the morning, I didn’t feel like just driving all day again, so we stopped in Michigan for some fresh air and to get a peek at Lake Michigan. It was cold but beautiful. The water was a gorgeous colour and there were sand dunes to climb. Carmanah even ran a little!

Then we went to Kalamazoo! Seriously. This is a great Michigan town – tons of interesting stuff to see, great stores and restaurants and an outdoor shopping street with no traffic. Actually the good part of the street had traffic, but really wide sidewalks with art on display. We ate lunch there and then headed for the border near Sarnia, Ontario.

As we approached the border, we were stopped at a toll booth. We had to pay $3 to cross the bridge to go to Canada. But we didn’t have any cash! The lady said we’d have to turn around and go back to town. In the end, Morgane saved the day – we borrowed her change that she had in her little purse and crossed the bridge.

The Canadian customs official was super nice – very human, not military-like and it made us feel like we were home again. We slept in London, Ontario, and this morning the news on the TV was much less morbid than it is in the US. No more billboards offering medical services or assistance with suing someone. We saw our first Tim Hortons. Small changes that make the difference between Canada and the States.

I don’t have many pictures from this part of the drive. It was really cold and windy in both states. In Nebraska, we only stayed on the main highway although we slept in North Platte and learned that this is where Buffalo Bill had his Wild West Show. Cowboys used to bring their cattle from Texas to the trains in Nebraska and once they were done, they wanted to party, so it was pretty much a cowboy party town.

We saw a lot of cows by the side of the highway and sometimes smelled them, too. We also saw huge Vs of birds migrating back north (although it seemed like a stupid idea considering the temperature).

Iowa seemed a little different. A few hills and in one field we saw five turkeys and one deer all standing together enjoying the spoils from last year’s corn crop.

We made it to Des Moines where we couchsurfed with Mark, but we didn’t make it to the official site where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. I think the baseball field is still there. Mark’s girlfriend, Ryan, said she used to go there on field trips from school.

Des Moines had nice weather, but it was colder than Nebraska. We appreciated Mark’s hospitality a lot and had a wonderful slow-cooked dinner followed by a movie showing on his gigantic TV. Best of all, he taught us some super photography secrets that are really going to change the look of our pictures. He takes great photos and does amazing things with his software.

We said goodbye in the morning and headed towards Chicago, stopping for lunch in Iowa City – a university town that we fell in love with. We found good Asian stir fries for lunch.

Now that we’re gone, I won’t get to make fun of Ghislain when he mixes up Idaho and Iowa and Ohio and puts H’s in the wrong places. Hioha and Hohio! Never mind. He can make fun of my French when we get back to Quebec (but he wouldn’t…)

After Mesa Verde, we drove to Durango to sleep in a hotel. The next day we drove a long way to Colorado Springs, about an hour away from Denver.

An hour away from Durango, we stopped at Pagosa Springs and spent a wonderful morning in the hot spring’s 23 hot tubs. Morgane loved it and said she would remember it forever. We all loved it. Some of the tubs had little waterfalls. They all had different temperatures. There was a pond and we had to walk over a bridge to get to one hot tub and there were little goldfish swimming everywhere.

We drove through a mountain pass that took us up to around 11,000 feet.

After that, we looked at our route and opted to drive in the south and avoid some of the higher passes. For awhile, it was all mountains, all around us.

We saw deer that looked mostly white. I thought they were antelope, but we saw another and it was a deer with a whiter belly.

The towns we drove through had either a cowboy wild west look to them or a New Mexican – Spanish feel.

Even if the road made me a bit nervous, this is one of the best places we’ve visited. Mesa Verde is a park high up on a plateau where there are entire villages built underneath cliffs. They were built from 1200 to 1300 AD and then abandoned. It seems that the residents had to move further south.

Winter turned out to be a good time – we still go to tour one of the cliff dwellings and we saw many others from the lookouts. There were almost no other tourists there so we had a great tour and got to take lots of pictures. We also got to climb down into a Kiva, an underground ceremonial space. Kivas are circle-shaped and have an entrance plus a ventilation chute.

Our tour guide, Linda, was amazing and let us stay and take lots of pictures. She also swore Morgane in as a junior ranger.

Afterwards we had just enough time to drive the 6 mile mesa drive and see other dwellings from various lookouts and the sun temple.

I didn’t love the drive down either, but it was worth it!

We decided not to go from Zion to Bryce Canyon because of the snowy conditions. Instead, we drove south into Arizona and headed for the four corners. This is a remote area and the only spot where four states touch. At the monument you can put one hand in Arizona, one in Utah, one foot in New Mexico and the other in Colorado.

We had good weather for driving as we passed Lake Powell and the big dam, so we decided to continue on. Unfortunately it started snowing so it was a long drive to the next town. Our tires are working really well though.

We ended up sleeping in Kayenta. The entire north-east of Arizona is a Navajo Indian reservation and we found it strange that our GPS didn’t pick up any of the hotels in town.

We were glad to find that there were hotels, but the Hampton was full so we stayed at the Best Western which wasn’t as nice. We had some food from a cafe next door and the bread was something new for us – fry bread, I think it’s called.

In the morning, a lot of the snow was melting and we drove off to the four corners. We decided not to stop at Monument Valley despite Ghis’s interest – a lot of western movies were filmed there. We’d kind of seen enough red rock for awhile.

We drove past horses and not much else until we finally arrived at the four corners monument. And… it was closed. How can a monument be closed? Oh well. The guide book had described it as a big nothing anyway. So onto Colorado and to Mesa Verde we went.

It was a bit cold when we visited Zion, but we were able to drive all the way through the park whereas in the summer, only the shuttle is available.

The cliffs are so amazingly high, my eyes got tired of looking.

We saw some wild turkeys across the river and then some deer when we stopped to do the river walk. Morgane found a nice rock to climb up and slide down. The hike was flat, but we were pretty tired by the time we got back to the van.

The drive out of the park via the east entrance was exhilarating. First we started to climb and then we drove through the tunnel that was built in the 30s. There are not lights inside the tunnel, but there are holes in the walls that act like windows, letting light in.

There was a lot of snow as we drove past the petrified sand dunes and out of the park. We decided it would be better to head south to the four corners area than to visit Bryce Canyon with so much snow around.

We left Nevada and crossed through a corner of Arizona before reaching Utah. The road led us through a mountain range that they literally blasted through. In Utah, there were lots of beautiful mountains and still some Joshua trees.

In St. George we saw some snow-capped peaks and when we arrived at the Majestic Inn near Zion National Park, we were surrounded by peaks.

On our friend Scott’s advice, we stopped at the Valley of Fire State Park. It was pretty special – mountains of red rock, but with little caves hollowed out here and there.

The best part though was the petroglyphs. We had to climb 84 stairs and then we had a close view of these drawings that are around 4000 years old. The sad thing is that some people have actually scratched their own names over top in spots. Can’t they find their own rock to write on? That is tourism at its lowest.

We were having fun photographing the petroglyphs when some people came up and told us there was something above our heads. It turned out to be a Peregrine Falcon who’d been sitting there all along.