Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Empress of India

FIRST POSTED IN 2011…

In Canada, Victoria Day has long been associated with the unofficial start of the summer season. Veggie gardens get planted, family cottages are opened and the cobwebs are dusted off the old bar-B-Q. Canada’s May holiday actually celebrates Queen Victoria’s birthday. The Queen was born on May 24, 1819, at Kensington Palace in London, England. She reigned for almost 64 years until her death in 1901. Canada has been a constitutional monarchy since Confederation in 1867 during Queen Victoria’s reign. It’s a special day for us. We tend to have parades, drink lots of beer and burn up fireworks.

Ever since Commander John Ross named a remote bay in Canada’s arctic after the young princess in 1831, map-makers and civil servants have been busy labeling our geography with her name. There is no name more popular than Queen Victoria’s when it comes to Canada’s public buildings, streets, towns and parks. The Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal, Victoria College in Toronto, Victoria General Hospital in both Winnipeg and Halifax are just some of the big public institutions named after her. In all Canadian cities, and most of the towns, villages and hamlets, it’s a safe bet that you’ll find a street named for her majesty. The capital city of British Columbia is Victoria. There are more than 300 VICTORIAs on the map of Canada.

Many attractions, resorts and lodges which operate seasonally (May to October) open on Victoria Day weekend. It is unofficially called “May 24”, a not-so-veiled reference to the number of bottles in a large box of beer. In fact, the whole ‘Canada’ thing is key to marketing some of our favourite beverages.

Canada is a country that has wild temperature extremes – cold winters and hot summers. So the first long weekend of the warm weather season and weather-obsessed Canadians are out to make the most of it.

In Ontario you will find Victoria Corners, Victoria Square, Victoria Harbour, Victoria Springs, Victoria Lake and just plain Victoria. In Québec there are fewer Victorias, but Victoriaville (population: 21,500) was named for the queen in 1861, and the Grand lac Victoria is at the head of the Ottawa River, south of Val-d’Or. My buddy Suzie, who does tourism promotion in Québec Maritime, tells me that the holiday in Quebec is known by at least three names: Fête de la Reine (Festival of the Queen), Fête de Dollard (commemorating the defense of New France against the Iroquois by Dollard des Ormeaux in the 17th century) and Fête des Patriotes (a reference to the struggle of the rebels of Lower Canada against the British colonial forces in 1837-1838)

New Brunswick and Nova Scotia both have counties named Victoria. In Prince Edward Island you’ll find an attractive seaside village called Victoria, not far from Victoria Cross and Victoria West (nothing is very far from anything else in PEI). In Newfoundland, on the west side of Conception Bay about 50 km NW of St John’s, there are about 2000 souls that call Victoria “home”.

Not to be outdone, Victoria Island (also called Kitlineq) in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago sits on the border between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories of Canada. It is our second largest island (Baffin is the first), almost double the size of Newfoundland and a bit larger than the island of Great Britain. Also, on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut we have The Victoria and Albert Mountains.

For more on Victoria, check out The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Red Rock Coulee will make you feel like you’ve visited the planet Mars.

From Red Rock Coulee in southeastern Alberta, on a clear day, you can see the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana.

In this part of the Canadian Badlands, about 50-60 kilometres southwest of Medicine Hat , Alberta, when the sun is low in the sky, the entire landscape burns with a golden, orange glow that I have never seen before. The best time to visit is around dawn or at dusk.

It gets windy in these parts. A thoughtful traveller has propped up the sign for our benefit.

Not a lot of people here. No fast food. No interpretive centre. At Red Rock Coulee you are alone under the big sky. Alone with the landscape. An occasional deer, the threat of rattle snakes and the tell-tale signs of ranching (grass, water, fence posts) in the far distance are the only reminders of life.

It’s a great place for a private moment. Leave your cell phones in the car. They don’t work here anyway.

Round, redish sandstone concretions up to 2.5 metres in diameter, among the largest in the world, are scattered about the place in a haphazard fashion. They were formed in prehistoric seas out of materials like shells and plants, and then grew in size by collecting sand, sediments and minerals from the surrounding waters. You can actually see the growth layers on some of the broken boulders.

Tenacious orange, black and gray lichens cover the rocks. Temperatures here range between  -46 C (-51 Fahrenheit) in winter and +42 C  (108 F) in summer. Also, this is the sunniest place in Canada! Medicine Hat averages over 2,500 hours of sunshine every year. That’s about 330 days of bright sun. Bring your hat and a bottle of water. And don’t forget to fill the gas tank before coming out. There is no gas here either.

I grew up in Western Canada. And, I have to say, that was a few decades or so ago. In most of my childhood memories, one of the things that keeps showing up is the presence of grain elevators.

I can see grain elevators in the background of an old black-and-white snapshot I have of a bunch of us kids on the town swings on a patch of grass near the railroad tracks. The husband of my grade one teacher was an elevator agent. I think I remember that as a four-elevator town. I have old snapshots of both sets of grandparents with elevators in the background. My family moved to Winnipeg, the big city, when I was in grade school. I missed the prairie small towns where I had lived. In art class I once painted a picture of a row of elevators and telephone poles on a flat plain in front of a beautiful coloured sunset. It was my iconic prairie picture.

I thought of this recently after reading a newspaper story about the purchase of grain-marketing companies in Regina and Winnipeg. I’m no financial expert, and, personally, since I have lived in both Winnipeg and Regina, I have no preferences. I know enough Canadian history to know that Winnipeg and the Richardsons have been big in the grain trade since the early 20th Century, at least. On the other hand, Saskatchewan’s long journey along the twisting, turning road to prosperity allows me to root for that province as well.

What really attracted my attention, however, was a picture of some grain elevators in a Saskatchewan town that must have been taken last week. I see rather elegant rounded towers, possibly concrete, attached to each other in a group. Well, they do seem to be standing in the middle of a flat plain near some smaller buildings, and there does seem to be some lovely fading sunlight around them. But these are not the prairie grain elevators of my childhood!

Built in 1895, this grain elevator in Fleming, Saskatchewan is the oldest existing elevator in western Canada - David McLennan, Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.

So I got onto the internet do some research. I learned that the elevators I remember, the square ones, something like a tall house with a smaller peaked-roof house on top were called “cribbed” construction elevators, built of wooden slats called “wood-crib”. Apparently that design was also built only in Western Canada between the end of the 19th century and the 1930s. I found many pictures of the elevators I remember, and stories describing them as an “iconic “ image of the Western Canadian prairies. So I’m not alone as a former prairie girl in whose memory grain elevators are iconic features in small town memories.

I also learned that grain elevators were first invented in the 1840s by an engineer, Robert Dunbar and a grain merchant, Joseph Dart, based in Buffalo, New York. They moved grain back and forth through the Atlantic coast, the Erie Canal and the central plains area of the U.S. The major change with this invention was the “marine tower” and its “leg” which, basically, scooped grain up from a ship, farm wagon or, later, truck and carried it in “cups” up into a huge storage area. Then it could later be loaded into ship’s holds or railroad cars for further transportation. Before the invention of this elevator, grain was moved and carried in bags loaded on trollies and the backs of working men.

Acadia Valley, Alberta

When you think about the settlement of the Canadian prairies, the connections of grain elevators with the railways becomes immediately obvious. There is no Erie Canal from the flat plains of central Canada. As soon as you start to study the history of the opening of the prairies, the Lake Superior grain ports, which were once called Port Arthur and Fort William and are now Thunder Bay, become important. The grain had to be transported from the plains of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta to the ships on the shores of the great thundering bay, in order to send it to larger markets in bigger cities in the U.S. and Europe. The history of the grain elevators and the railways become tied up together. Research into the history of the prairie elevators brings up names such as George Stephen and Sir William Van Horne who worked with John A. Macdonald in building the CPR across the prairies, and Mackenzie and Mann who built the Canadian Northern Railway in Ontario. The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan notes that the early “wood-crib” construction was a standard set by the CPR as a condition of grain merchants obtaining a licence to build an elevator along the CPR tracks. Farmers brought the grain by wagon or truck, the vehicle was weighed before and after, the grain was loaded into the elevator to be later poured through a pipe into a railroad car and transported east for sale.

This early period of grain elevators, the railways, the settling of the prairies and the development of the grain trade continued through the First World War. In the 1920s farmers’ co-operatives also began to enter the business. As I read this part of the history, I recall other iconic names from my childhood, the Pool name on the sides of many small-town elevators, just above the names of the towns we drove through and the name United Grain Growers. A book written by W.A. Irwin in 1929 described this period as follows: “The pool is the world’s largest farm, the world’s largest shipper of wheat, the Biggest Business in Canada – and it was built by the Man Behind the Plow”. It mattered to those involved.

Behind the community centre in Rowley, Alberta, the Searle grain elevator sports a new coat of paint. June 2010.

There are also museums, and I have to say that I am really happy to hear that. One of them is in Inglis, Manitoba, and has been declared a National Historic Site of Canada. The internet picture shows a row of five elevators lined up alongside a railroad track. The track is described as the “former” Canadian Pacific Railway track. Another is the Searle Grain Company Grain Elevator Site Complex in Rowley, Alberta. This site is located adjacent to two other elevators, the United Grain Growers and the Alberta Wheat Pool elevators, and these also form a row of elevators with vestiges of rail bed.

The Pioneer grain elevator near Oyen, Alberta

The Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village, near Edmonton, also has an elevator that was apparently owned by the Searle family and then was bought out by the Saskatchewan and Alberta Wheat Pools in the 1970s. By then the number of “wood-crib” elevators was declining. The rural world of the prairies was changing, as everything does. Fortunately, some museums preserve the iconic memories of an earlier, and amazing, time when the Western Canadian prairies were settled.

Leslie Windsor

Titanic victims laid to rest in rows shaped like the bow of a ship. Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia

2012 is the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Cape Race, Newfoundland, the closest point of land to the Titanic, played an important role in the Titanic story. Halifax, Nova Scotia, a historic port on Canada’s east coast is where many Titanic victims were laid to rest. In 2012, these places and others in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia will host commemorative Titanic events and retell their Titanic stories.

Newfoundland’s Titanic Trail stretches across eastern Newfoundland from St. John’s to Cape Race. It has an iceberg-watching trip, the birthplace of the wireless age, museums with Titanic artefacts, and a Titanic re-creation using one of the world’s largest ship simulators. In 1912, wireless operators at a Cape Race outpost and ships at sea documented the final hours of the Titanic. The grand staircase in James Ryan’s opulent mansion in St. John’s, Newfoundland was built by Harland & Wolff, the builders and fitters of Titanic. On April 14-15, 2012, a Cape Race ceremony will recreate that historic wireless communication with ships floating over the Titanic site.

Gravestone of the Unknown Child, a Titanic victim, Fairview Cemetery, Halifax

Halifax cemeteries became the final resting place for many Titanic victims. A permanent exhibit at the city’s Marine Museum of the Atlantic holds Titanic artefacts recovered from where the ship went down. The cemeteries, museum and twenty other Titanic sites in Halifax are part of Titanic 100, a Titanic wake and commemoration taking place in Halifax in 2012.

A deck chair from the Titanic on display at The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Check out Halifax, Nova Scotia, Titanic and St. John’s, Newfoundland, an artist’s paradise for more on the Titanic.

Evening Grosbeak in Algonquin Provincial Park

Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario is the oldest of our provincial parks (established in 1893) and one of the most popular outdoor destinations in Canada. It’s a big place – about 7653 square kilometres! That’s bigger than Prince Edward Island. There are over 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometres of streams and rivers running through the park. Highway 60 runs through the southern end for 56 kilometres, and the Trans-Canada Highway bypasses it to the north, but the only way to explore the area is by canoe or on foot. Snowshoes are a good idea in the winter.

I havn’t visited Algonquin Park for a while now (I once fell out of a canoe there), so when by buddies Alex and Judy told me about their recent trip I was all ears. Judy Eberspaecher is a self-confessed “bird brain” and both are excellent photographers and story-tellers.

“We were everywhere that roads were cleared – Opeongo, Spruce Bog, Boardwalk, Mew Lake and the moose (2) were along the highway. We stopped for at least 10 minutes and they just kept munching on dry branches. The Pine marten is a beautiful animal but I wouldn’t want to touch him, although he wouldn’t stay around to be touched. I hadn’t seen Evening Grosbeaks for about eight years so that was the one bird I wanted.”

Algonquin Provincial Park is a four-season destination. There is plenty to do there at any time of year, especially if you’re interested in wildlife. Check out the Friends of Algonquin Park website as well as the official Ontario Parks website. Jeffrey McMurtrie’s maps of the park are insightful and free to download.

More about the Canadian moose – be careful on the highways! Muskoka near Algonquin Park and Ontario Parks 2010.

All pictures on this page are courtesy of Judy Eberspaecher. Thanks for the tales Judy.

Tightrope Walking. This image was originally posted to Flickr by Wiros from Barcelona, Spain.

Nik Wallenda will walk the tightrope after all. The 7th generation family member of the famous Flying Wallendas is the latest daredevil to tempt fate at Niagara Falls. Wallenda has been in the local news for weeks trying to get Canadian authorities to give him the okay. Officials on the US side had already agreed to his stunt but the Niagara Parks Commission in Ontario, Canada, held out, that is, until this week. My guess is the $120 million Wallenda’s tightrope act is expected to generate was what changed their minds. Latest reports suggest Wallenda will pick a July or August date for his walk and the event will be televised worldwide.

Over the edge at Niagara Falls – courtesy of Bobby Mikul

It’s not the first time Niagara Falls has gone with a publicity stunt. In 2000, four hundred lovers from around the world tied the knot in an outdoor event on Valentine’s Day to boost winter tourism. An unexpected snowstorm and at least one very pregnant bride made it a good photo op but a mass wedding pales by comparison to a 1200 foot summer tightrope walk between the American and Canadian falls without a net.

Stephen Peer crossing the Niagara Falls on a tightwire, 1887

A quick bit of research on the Flying Wallendas and it’s no wonder Canadian authorities may be a little weak-kneed. Nik Wallenda’s dad died in a tightrope promotion in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1978. In 1962, a 7-member Wallenda pyramid chair on tightrope went south and killed a Wallenda son-in-law and paralyzed a Wallenda nephew. Then in 1963, a Wallenda sister-in-law fell to her death. That was followed in 1972 by another son-in-law’s death due to a live wire set too close to the rope’s metal rigging.

Despite his family’s less-than-perfect tightrope record, Wallenda is raring to go. Maybe that has something to do with Niagara Falls’ long history with daredevils including tightrope walkers. Charles Blondin became The Great Blondin after he was the first to successfully cross the Niagara Gorge by tightrope in 1859. Henry Bellini followed him, crossing three times in 1873. Stephen Peer was next but his problem was he didn’t know when to quit. In 1887, after successfully completing a double crossing, Peer was found dead below his cable after a reputed night of drinking followed by an unscheduled performance. Samuel Dixon was the last to cross in 1890. Plenty more daredevils have vyed for fame at Niagara Falls since but none have been tightrope walkers. You might say Niagara Falls is due.

Photo courtesy of Tourisme Îles de la Madeleine. Photographer M. Bonato

This Quebec Maritime story follows our British Columbia (BC) post on the Dogsled Mail Run. Each describes an unusual way that mail was delivered in Canada. In 2010, Canada Post issued two stamps commemorating these unique mail deliveries. I stumbled on both while researching dogsledding in Canada. Even though I was raised in Quebec, I’ve never been to Quebec’s Magdalen Islands  (aka Îles de la Madeleine), the site of the second unusual mail story .

Reproduction « ponchon » barrel at Musée de la Mer, on the Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St-Lawrence between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

It was winter 1910 when a telegraph cable stretching across the Gulf of the St. Lawrence broke and left the residents of Quebec’s Magdalen Islands completely cut off from civilization. Magdalen Islanders knew they had to come up with a way to deliver the mail but island fishing boats were deemed too dangerous to sail because of moving ice. That’s when local, Alcide J. Gaudet, came up with the idea of using an empty molasses barrel. Letters were placed in the barrel, a sail and rudder were added and they signed the barrel “Winter Magdalen Mail”. It was launched on February 2, 1910 and just over a week later, it washed up near Port Hastings, Nova Scotia. Murdoch McIsaac found the barrel and when he opened it, he discovered a note from the islanders requesting their mail be delivered so that’s what McIsaac did.

Although the molasses barrel has long since disappeared, one of its letters survived and is on display at the Magdalen Islands’  Musée de la Mer (Museum of the Sea). According to a Magdalen Islands blog, in the 1990s, a second group of islanders tried to recreate the barrel launch. Despite launching in similar weather, tides and currents, their barrel was lost at sea.

Photo courtesy of Tourisme Îles de la Madeleine. Photographer G. Theriault

Photo courtesy of Tourisme Îles de la Madeleine. Photographer M. Bonato

One of our Montreal friends, Steve, is a huge windsurfer/kiteboarder and heads to the islands every year. Canadian travel journalists, Katherine and Eric Fletcher are also big fans and include the Magdalen Islands in their Quebec Off the Beaten Path guidebook. Katharine also gave me a good travel tip. She suggested we drive to Prince Edward Island, hop on the Souris ferry, tour the Magdalens and then catch the ferry and return to central Canada via the St. Lawrence River. The photos on this Mountain Equipment Coop blog  have also whet our appetite. Magdalen Islands and Quebec Maritime tourism sites are informative and the staff I spoke to at both were helpful too.

I think it’s time for a visit.

Photo courtesy of Tourisme Îles de la Madeleine. Photographer M. Bonato

The Cariboo region of British Columbia may be the only place in the world where you can have a letter stamped “carried by dog sled”.

The 20th anniversary Dog Sled Mail Run is January 20-22, 2012. Photo by Thomas Drasdauskis, courtesy of Barkerville Image Bank

The Dogsled Mail Run, an annual Cariboo event, will celebrate its 20th anniversary January 20-22, 2012. Sledders sworn in as Canada Post mail carriers will carry close to 3,000 Mail Run envelopes by dogsled over the Gold Rush Trail, a former sled dog mail route. The Mail Run envelopes, which include a picture of a musher and dog team by a local artist, will be stamped at points along the trail and then delivered to 20 countries worldwide. Many envelopes will also carry a new Canada Post dogsled stamp issued in May 2011 to commemorate the history of the delivery of mail by dog team throughout Canada.

We’ve all heard about the “Pony Express” in the United States, but how many Canadians know that the arrival of a sled dog “packet” or a “batard”, a narrow 22 foot-long canoe paddled by six skilled Voyageurs, signaled “news” in Canada.  For isolated, lonely people in those early days, the arrival of mail was a huge event despite the fact that the news received was often already 12 months old.

The Stage Race on the Gold Rush Trail is a new addition to the 2012 Dogsled Mail Run. Mushers from all over will challenge themselves and their dogs in this event. Winners will take home real Cariboo gold bullion. Warren Palfrey, a local sled dog outfitter, is the race marshall. His great grandfather, Sam Hourie, delivered mail by dogsled during the Klondike Gold Rush.

A corner block of stamps from Canada Post

Jeffery Dinsdale, a Dogsled Mail Run volunteer, sled dog owner and local historian told me he and other volunteers gather all the envelopes for each Dogsled Mail Run. Each is hand-cancelled with three different cancellation stamps, then packaged for the three-day trip over the Gold Rush Trail route and collected for entry into the regular mail system at Barkerville, a famous Gold Rush town. Five envelopes traveling by dogsled at the 2012 Dogsled Mail Run will be ours. One is addressed to us. Four other envelopes will be sent to family members. Each carries the new Canada Post dogsled stamp. If you want to send a letter by dogsled, log on to http://www.dogsledmailrun.ca/  to find out how. Dogsled stamps are available from Canada Post.

2012 Dog Sled Mail Run envelope with stamps from Canada Post

Next week, we head to Canada’s east coast for another great mail story. Stay tuned.

Look what is all dressed up for the holidays!!! It was a crisp, cold December evening. We walked from a Sandy Hill B&B over to an Elgin Street bistro for a meal. After dinner, we took a camera and tripod over to Parliament Hill and snapped a bunch of pix including this one.

Happy Holidays CANADA!!

Recently we did some work for the good folks at Tourism New Brunswick and they tipped us off about a local treasure. Letang, New Brunswick, just north of Grand Manan Island on the Bay of Fundy is the home of Wolfhead Smokers, purveyors of fine smoked salmon products. So we called them up, ordered some fish, and set a date with a couple of our “foodie” friends for a maritime feast.

In 1981 George (Skip) and Karen Wolf started Jail Island Salmon, one of the first Atlantic salmon farms in North America. This company was the first Canadian salmon producer to market its fresh salmon under its own brand. In 1985 George and Karen started smoking some of their own salmon as a value added product. In 1998 they sold their shares in the farming operation, but retained the growing smoking division and renamed it Wolfhead Smokers.

The smokehouse is in the original Jail Island processing plant, located on a secluded cove off the Bay of Fundy in southwest New Brunswick. The salmon is cold smoked according to a traditional Scottish recipe. Taking their time, they start with premium fresh fillets which are dry salted and cured, then smoked very slowly at a low temperature before further curing. The result is a rich, buttery texture on the tongue and no strong salty or fishy flavours.

We also tried the “hot smoked” salmon, which is double smoked. Cracked pepper is sprinkled on the salt cured fillets before they are cold smoked. Then the temperature is turned up so that the fish is actually cooked as it is being smoked. The texture is firm, and the fish is moist, smoky and rich tasting. I took a private moment to savour this one and to recover from the exquisite sensory experience!

Wolfhead Smokers has been accused of adding a secret ingredient to make their products addictive. We were unable to confirm these assertions.

Most of the smoked salmon is shipped to fish markets and distributors in New Brunswick, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Toronto and can be found in specialty shops and fine restaurants. In 2007, NB Premier Shawn Graham hosted the Canadian Premiers’ Conference. He sent his invitations to each Canadian Premier inside a Wolfhead cedar gift box along with packages of smoked salmon.

For the past ten years, Wolfhead has participated in the annual World Wine & Food Expo in Moncton, NB, and 2011 will be their ninth straight year as the official smoked salmon supplier at the NB Spirit Festival in Fredericton.

Our delivery arrived by FedEx in an insulated box with frozen gel packs. Karen told us on the phone to try pairing the salmon with Glen Breton single malt whisky from Nova Scotia, so that’s what we did. She said that after they toured the distillery they tried Glen Breton with their smoked salmon and loved it. At our dinner, one of our dinner mates also brought a Cave de Hoen Heimberger Crémant d’Alsace, a French Brut Rosé which was very good, but you could just as easily pair it with a Niagara or British Columbia Brut if you wanted to go all-Canadian. As I expected, whether it was washed down with wine or whisky, there wasn’t a single morsel of salmon left when we were done.

If you order from Wolfhead, be sure to leave at least a week for delivery, more in the busy holiday season. They can be reached toll-free at 877-965-3432 or by email at orders@wolfheadsmokers.com.