From See Two See: Epilogue

Hard to believe that we have been back at our Seba Beach “home” for more than a week.  We have spent the time cleaning up our RV site and the RV as well as resting up from our journey. I know Greg enjoyed not driving nor hooking and unhooking the RV (I did help with this part though the driving required more confidence and skill than I had).  I think the majority of the week has been spent reflecting on the trip; the people, the country and the history/politics.   The people we met were helpful, informative, and quite lovely. So many were eager to share stories about their part of Canada.  It was from these stories that we learned about the local culture and idiosyncrasies.

Our country is indeed vast, beautiful and, at times, breathtaking. While we stopped and took in the sites every day we know we didn’t even scratch the surface.  It was hard sometimes to decide what to see and what to leave out.  We could have spent the 2.5 months in each province and still have missed “stuff”.  I will say we have a lot of trees (paper bags instead of plastic bags will not lead to a shortage of forests anytime soon).  So much is still undeveloped.  We often wondered what people in the small towns did to earn a living.

I think one of the key parts of our journey was learning the history of the area; so much we didn’t know or I like to think have forgotten. For example, why did the British wanted the  Acadians to sign another pledge of allegiance to Britain? Were the French asked to this after their defeat at the Plains of Abraham? Other questions were I am sure, more political in nature. For example, in the Kingsville area there are thousands of hectares of greenhouses and fields of crops. Yet when we went to nearby grocery stores we found produce from the US and central and south America. Profit as well as politics? We saw Saudi ships unloading oil in Quebec city while our own oil is next door.  We heard misconceptions about the oil sands (i.e. oil sands and fracking tied together) and no knowledge of the strategies in place to attempt to better care for the environment (and the tonnes of joint work done by U of A and the oil companies).  Many of our questions will give us “work to do” in the cold days of winter.

As we read about the two mass shootings in the US in the past few days (one article we read said 250 mass shootings in 215 days in the US) we give thanks for our country despite its foibles and areas where we could indeed do better both politically and socially.  We are indeed blessed and we are so glad we had a glimpse.

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