Saturday, May 20, 2023: Thirty-five years – two continents – one friendship.
Info:
Burlington is located on Lake Ontario between Toronto and Niagara Falls. With its approximately 190,000 people, it is part of the Toronto metropolitan region with a total population of over 9 million.
My opinion:
Lake Ontario is a beautiful place. We sought out Nature Trails (hiking trails) and enjoyed nature.
Diary:
I was traveling from Kingston to Burlington on May 17 to meet with a couple who are friends from Ohio. The two live near Columbus.
If you’re coming from the east and want to get to Burlington, you have to go through Toronto. I had hoped (once again) to be able to drive around it.
At first everything went very comfortably, the usual driving in Canada. The closer I got to Toronto, the more vehicles were on the highway, which – whoops – was just six lanes, why are there suddenly eight lanes? Oh my goodness, now it’s twelve, … no, fourteen. Plus breakdown lanes.
And then suddenly I was in the middle of Toronto. Yes, really in the middle. On a highway with no less than twenty lanes and eight breakdown lanes!
And still everything went very comfortably. No jostling, everyone drove with the utmost attentiveness and patience. The usual driving in Canada, just a little more of it. For a short time there was a traffic jam, but it quickly dissipated.
It’s interesting that there’s an expressway for the people who want to go through, and next to it runs what’s called the collector, which you use for entering, and if you only want to go a short distance, you stay on it, otherwise you switch to the expressway in the middle. In addition, there are the two-lane on- and off-ramps that run parallel to that, and all of that comes with one to two breakdown lanes in each case. The Expressway is four to five lanes, the Collector is three to four lanes, and then when an on-ramp is combined with an off-ramp, that can really add up.
Did I mention there was a lot of traffic?
And did I mention that everything was totally relaxed?
Still, I was glad when we left the city behind us and headed toward Burlington via the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way), which was still an eight-lane road. What are eight lanes?
I hadn’t seen James and Polly in more than ten years. That’s why I had booked a room in the same hotel as them, so that we had plenty of time for each other.
It turned out to be three wonderful days in which we laughed a lot, discussed a lot, debated serious issues, and in which it was as if we had seen each other for the last time just yesterday. The only difference was that we had more to tell about what happened in between.
They had originally planned to come to Austria in September, right around the time when I will be in Ohio. Now they have changed their plans. They will be in Europe in September, but not in Austria this time, but they will come in June 2025. So I already know what I’ll be doing in June 2025.
James and Polly love the outdoors, so we spent many hours in woods. In the process, I was able to brush up on my vocabulary as it relates to plants and animals.
James was 39 when I met him as a work colleague. As a joke, I often called him “old man.” He was already an impressive personality back then. Polly and he have been married for 16 years. I enjoyed seeing them so happy together. Polly has to get up at one in the morning every day so she can be at work by three. James makes breakfast for her every day, and twice a week he drives her there and picks her up. They can’t wait until Polly can retire and then they can have more time for each other. Which is not to say that they are exclusively focused on each other and have no interests of their own. But you can just tell how happy they are.
When we said goodbye, tears were flowing.
For me it was time to go north, after all I am headed to Kapuskasing. It was not far now. 880 km.
Just to mention it: I had to pass through the middle of Toronto again. There was a traffic jam. I overlooked the highway splitting and had to change to a lane that was at a standstill. Annie Way’s rear end was still on the previous lane. For about two minutes, we shut down an entire lane of traffic on a Toronto expressway. No one honked, no one scolded, everyone waited patiently until Annie Way could get in line properly.
Two hours later on the drive north, we finally got the big city traffic behind us. From North Bay we were back on the Transcanada Highway – leisurely and relaxed with a 90 km/h speed limit. It was raining cats and dogs. All the places I had looked at on the map, I did not visit – because of the bad weather.
I was on my way to Kapuskasing. Where my father had worked as a lumberjack for two years.
For some reason, I had thought the area must be boring – just forest and nothing else.
In fact, the area is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. It is hilly. Forests with mainly birches and pines, but also spruces, alders and oaks, in between in the valleys there are rivers or lakes, often with small islands – I could not get enough. At the same time, it made me a little sad. Only now, 70 years after my father returned to Austria, do I get a sense of how much he actually gave up for my mother.