Storyline: Road Trip with Milan 2018
This storyline was supposed to be finished in 2018, however, the year was full of travels: spring, summer and fall, gatherings in between, and lots of effort in the winter spent on planning our next year’s 3 to 4 months around the world. Now that the world in under lockdown in one form or another and winter is settling in again, I can go back to unfinished projects. This will keep me busy for a day or two, don’t you think?
Bulgarians could finally travel visa-free to Canada and it was time for Milan to visit us before it’s too late. I had told him that if he could pay his flights to Toronto and back, I’d take care of the rest. Even the ticket of over $1,200 CAD was a big stretch for someone who’s pension at the time was about 200 Euros a month. But somehow, he did it. Later I’d learn the story behind the financing. Milan is an amateur artist. He used to teach art in the school of a remote village in northeastern Bulgaria.
That’s how he met my late fried Dora, who at the time was teaching at the same school. Before retirement, Milan was a clerk at the Ministry of Transportation in Sofia. Apparently one day during renovation and redesign, some good and valuable paintings were thrown in the garbage. Milan happened to notice the rubbish and got permission to take the paintings. Having some good art for free made him happy. Selling 2 of them years later made his visit to Canada possible.
We had just returned from a trip to England and Bulgaria. He arrived a week later for a month. That limited time, I had scheduled it to the dot. We’d be on the road for 3 weeks, then we’d visit some of the local attractions: The McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg, and Niagara Falls, to be exact. With no time to waste, the car was packed and ready.
We picked Milan up at the airport well jet lagged and the next day he was half asleep in the back of the car. Alex was paying his debts: when Milan was driving us around Bulgaria after we had just got off the airplane and heavily jet lagged, Alex would fall asleep in the back. Milan would occasionally say – “Hey, wake up. Look at the beauty around us. You’ll sleep tonight”, which of course I had to translate. So now I had to translate the same line but in the opposite direction.
I had planned for his jetlag however. We’d take it slowly: the first two days spent at a cottage on the lake shore in Wellington, Prince Edward County. We could leave him sleeping and visit the wineries or we could do the art trails if he’d join us. Of course, he did. And there, in Bloomfield’s antique store was where he found a boxed set of Mario Lanza records. We got him a box of 6 dust-covered records, of one of his favorite tenors, for two dollars! I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Milan is an opera fanatic. He could not believe his eyes and ears. Two dollars!? That’s how art is valued in Canada.
Funny how something pops up in our memory when least expected. Our memory stores bits of information, to be released at an appropriate (or sometimes inappropriate – A) time. But what is appropriate time? I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning, but this 22-year-old event just popped up in my head. It was a journey on the way to Baie-Saint-Paul that I’ve previously described in the “Road trip with Milan”. Erwin was driving along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River when I spotted a garage sale. I actually spotted two paintings and wanted to see them. So we stopped. It was the end of the day and they were going to the garbage. I knew from the car window that I liked one of them: “How much?” “2 dollars”, ‘How about I give you a dollar”. There, a beautiful sunflower painting still hanging on my wall in the living room, was mine for a dollar. 20 years later at the beginning of our journey to Baie-Saint-Paul we negotiated a box set of Mario Lanza’s records for 2 dollars. Milan could not have been happier.
Next stop was Kanata, staying with Alex’s sister. Milan doesn’t care for cities, so the entire trip was planned around hiking and visiting rural areas with exception of a day trip to Quebec City, but this for later. We’d show him Ottawa of course. After all it is our capital.
We stopped briefly in Kingston, then strolled through the pretty village of Merrickville and arrived in Kanata just in time for the evening mosquito swarms to greet us.
I love watching nature from Marian and Jim’s big windows, but prefer to visit in winter time when all the deerflies, ticks and mosquitoes are gone.
Milan enjoyed running their lawnmower and his first encounter of the mosquitos’ swirls. He didn’t know that nature here comes with such an abundance of them. To some extent, neither did I.
But I knew enough to skip the next day’s hike at Lusk Falls across the Ottawa River in Quebec’s the Gatineau Hills. Jim also took Milan for a canoe tour of a nearby pond.
From Kanata we’d head northeast. Next post – see you in Quebec.
Note: The 2018 road trip with Milan, the husband of my late friend Dora, followed my steps of 20 years before. In 1998 I headed to Saguenay with a friend. On our way we stopped at Baie-Saint-Paul. Something completely inexplicable happened there, at a moment when I had no idea that my friend Dora was dying. For the full story check “Road trip with Milan”
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