Verona, Ontario – Home!


Louis successfully got new tires at a Canadian Tire in Kingston, Ontario. The staff tried to hide their horror at the shape the tires were in (they were more than bald – rubber belts were starting to show through where the tread should’ve been) and agreed that we needed a new set ASAP. We waited around until they could fit us in in the afternoon, and left town with a much happier car.


Collecting site #12 was called Happy Valley Preserve, a name which I thought sounded a lot like a dude ranch. Collin thought I was being cynical and said that happy valley just sounded like a nice place to take a hike. Regardless, it was a very nice place to take a hike, and scored a 9.5 – nice trails, good size, lots of hemlocks, beautiful weather and only a few mosquitoes.



We drove until pretty late, stopping only to have dinner in Orangeville (the first time I’ve eaten Chinese in a restaurant in two years and I didn’t throw up! It was a momentous occasion.) Finally, we stopped at a hotel in Stratford, too tired to make it any closer to our last site and worried all the small motels along the way might close before we found a room.

Wednesday morning we set out for our last collecting site, after having breakfast at a Tim Hortons in Stratford. We figured we couldn’t drive all that way through Canada without stopping at the favorite Canadian fast food chain. It wasn’t bad – kind of Panera meets McDonald's.



Our last site was Port Franks Wetlands and Forested Dunes. As the name implies, it was a trail system going through extremely mosquito-infested waters, and a kind of odd climate in which to find hemlocks. Find them we did, however, a small population but enough to gather 20 samples. Collin and I disagreed whether this site merited a 2 or a 6.5 – me arguing for the 2 because the mosquitoes were truly terrible, and Collin for the 6.5 because, he said, bugs were only one category and even if they were abysmal, they could only subtract so many points. We never did compromise on that one.





Crossing the border with our plant samples wasn’t too difficult. We did have to stop and let the agents inspect our car while we waited in the headquarters building, but within half an hour they’d determined that both we and our dead, dried hemlock needles were harmless and they let us go through.


The rest of the trip home went smoothly. By the time we reached Indiana we were both getting pretty bored, and Collin very punchy (he was amusing himself by repeatedly whistling on the pages of our road atlas). It felt like such a long time since we’d been home.

At home we were greeted by a thoroughly pranked house. Our bedroom was elaborately draped in toilet paper, our closets had all been turned around backwards, there were shoes and a shirt in the freezer, and, perhaps most embarrassingly, our underwear drawers had been switched. Whoever the culprits were (at least some of my family must’ve been involved because they had the only key), they did the job very well! After we cleaned up the mess, we happily climbed into our own bed, glad to be back from our grand adventure in the northeast.

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Levis, Quebec - Verona, Ontario

A good night’s sleep might make the world seem like a better place and traveling much more enjoyable, but it doesn’t guarantee anything when it comes to observation or memory. Somehow when packing up this morning, I failed to remember my very special Tempur-pedic pillow at the hotel in Quebec this morning, and didn't discover the loss until setting up our tent in Ontario. I am seriously bummed. We're going to try and contact the hotel to see if there is any way they can ship it to us, because even shipping it would cost less than replacing it. Besides, it was my birthday present from Collin.



Besides that, it's been a pretty good day. After stopping to see an amazing waterfall in Levis, we drove through the rest of Quebec and made it back to English-speaking country by early afternoon.


Our collecting site was near Westport, Ontario. We walked the perimeter of a small lake, collecting hemlocks all around and trying not to impale our legs too badly on all the hidden stumps some very industrious beavers left around. The stumps and tree damage were so bad we dubbed the place, "Beaver Park Pond," but fortunately the beavers seem not to have a taste for hemlock. The mosquitoes at the site were so bad I had to keep my rain jacket and hood on the whole time, which I'd sprayed liberally with insect repellent to form a kind of invisibility cloak.

Taking notes on hemlock circumference and GPS coordinates - my job on all collecting hikes.



We stopped at a campsite just a little ways away from our collecting site. It's another semi-permanent RV park, although this one more geared toward families than retired people like the one in New Brunswick.

Louis' rear tires are wearing dangerously thin extremely quickly. At the beginning of the trip Collin was talking about replacing them before Christmas, then before our trip to Albuquerque in a few weeks, but now we're going to have to try and get new ones this morning. It's getting a little scary to see them getting thinner every time we stop the car. It's been good for us in learning to trust God - our constant prayer for the last few days is that God will keep Louis running and keep us safe in him. Now we're also praying that we'll be able to get the tires fixed and that it won't set us back too far in our schedule.

Right now, if all goes well we're looking at collecting from site #12 just north of Toronto today (July 14), driving west and camping near site #13 tonight. Then we (theoretically) will collect from our last site early Wednesday morning and drive all the way home Wednesday. We're really looking to sleeping in our own bed (even without my pillow) and Collin needs the full day on Thursday to grade and prepare for teaching at Ivy Tech Thursday night.

Please pray for us, that God will keep us safe, help us get new tires, and even that we'll be able to get my pillow back. It seems like a trivial problem, but it would mean a lot to me.

Woodstock, New Brunswick – Levis, Quebec

We woke up in Uncle Allison’s house, a place so English-country-bachelor that it could’ve been Professor Diggory’s in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, only scaled down to three bedrooms instead of dozens. Everything was impressive solid wood antique, with touches of the British explorer both in South American wall hangings and in the books on his shelves. I wish we could’ve met him. Both from his house and from Chris and Shelly’s descriptions, he sounds like a fascinating man!


We got a late start leaving, making sure that we’d re-locked and armed the security system properly so we wouldn’t have the police visiting us again. After checking out the outside of the Connell museum before we left Woodstock, we headed up north again to our collecting sight on Shea Lake near Plaster Rock, NB.

This site was another difficult one to access, so Collin left me at the car again to make a hot lunch while he tromped through the woods. Fortunately, although it was pouring rain all morning, it’s gotten sunny now in the early afternoon. I spent about a half hour trying to light the camp stove, but finally managed to make a pot of split-pea soup.



That stop was our least successful collecting point. Collin only found five hemlock trees he could sample, and we both just about got eaten alive by mosquitoes, black flies, and particularly vicious gnats. I’ve never bled so freely at the jaws of gnats before. To escape the bugs, we packed up our lunch and fled to the nearest tourist park, a campground on a lake which made for a much nicer stop.


We spent the rest of the day driving through Quebec, a kind of strange experience. It very much felt like a foreign country, between the language and architecture, and yet still very much like North America. The more we drove through it the more we liked it, and would love to take a real vacation there someday. We finally stopped at a cute motel in Levis, just across the river from Quebec, Quebec.




I’m starting to feel rather up-rooted, and am really looking forward to getting home. We’re both missing our church and the fellowship of other Christians rather badly by now. We downloaded and listened to last Sunday’s sermon in the car while driving today, but really craved being able to worship God corporately with other believers. Next Sunday seems like a long time away!

Chester, Nova Scotia – Woodstock, New Brunswick



What a crazy day! We woke up early at our B&B in Chester, NS, packed the car and sat down to bacon and eggs served by our delightful hostess Jane. We would’ve gotten out early, too, if it hadn’t been for the two other couples who drifted down to breakfast at the big table and made long small talk over their breakfasts.


Our first collecting point was Molega Lake, an hour and a half south and inland from Chester. The stand was thick with hemlocks, so the collecting went pretty quickly. It scored a 9 on our scoring scale – half a point off for bugs and half off because the site wasn’t particularly pretty. Until we beat our way back to the lake, that is.



Molega Lake was deep blue, breathtakingly gorgeous and deliciously inviting. As Collin exclaimed when he saw it, “This lake is begging to be fished… by me!” We climbed out to a rock on the edge of the lake to admire the view. Then I slipped and knocked the GPS unit into the lake. We both tore off our shoes and socks and jumped in after it. The amazing thing was, when Collin finally pulled it out after searching among the rocks for a full minute, it was still on and hadn’t taken on any water. We were so relieved!



That was the dumb, near-catastrophe I caused that morning. Collin had his own as we were leaving the site. The trail/road we parked on showed up on our map as connecting to a more main road a half mile or so away. We’d walked halfway down the road, and Collin really wanted to test Louis’s off-roading capabilities, so he decided to follow the trail out.


The road was called “Riverside,” but even the beginning would’ve been more appropriately named “riverbed”. When the road wasn’t completely overgrown with waist-high grasses and bushes, it was immensely rocky, full of logs and sticks, and at one point actually did turn into a flooded creek. Louis did great, until about halfway when a poorly-aimed branch knocked a hole through the rust in his muffler. He grumbled loudly all the way to the end of the road, where three large boulders barred our way from reaching the main road. Collin briefly tried navigating through the woods to get around, but had to concede defeat and head back the way we’d come, Louis complaining the whole way.

Fortunately, the damage could’ve been worse. We stopped at a hardware store in the nearest town, where Collin was able to place a clamp on the muffler and cut the noise down significantly. Louis will probably need some repair when we get back home, but he doesn’t make so much noise that I can’t read out loud so we’ll be fine.

Although we were behind schedule, we still stopped for a picnic lunch at Mahone Bay. The little park we ate in was lovely, even though the town was flooded with tourists and short on picnic tables.


Today was the first day we’ve had to collect from two sites, and we reached our second near New Glasgow at about dinnertime. Because there wasn’t a trail in, Collin left me to get gas and make dinner while he bushwhacked his way in by himself. We met up again when he’d finished, and drove many hours until we reached Woodstock, NB.


Chris Connell’s Uncle Allison graciously offered to let us stay in his home in Woodstock, even though he was away at the time. He sent us directions on how to find the key and disarm the alarm system, which we managed only after briefly setting off the siren. The neighbors called the police, and we had to explain the rather suspicious-looking circumstances to a couple of officers before we could collapse in bed.

Waterborough, New Brunswick – Chester, Nova Scotia


We’ve just about made it to the apex of our journey east. We left Camp Mohawk early this morning after a light breakfast and continued to our collecting site on Belleisle Bay just north of St. John, New Brunswick. Shampers Bluff was a Nature Conservancy site, and we were hoping for a nice walk since there were trails all through the preserve.



Although the property was beautiful, all springy and mossy, the hemlocks were few and far between and often to get to them we had to climb up and down really steep slopes. By the end I had to wait on the trail at each tree as Collin scrambled up or down to sample, and it took us almost four hours to find 18 trees – two less than we should’ve. Collin also ended up with a nasty clipper wound on his thumb that we had to bandage with a tea bag and hair band until we got back to Louis and our supply of bandaids.


Even though we were exhausted and starving by the time we made it back to the car, it was still a gorgeous hike. If Collin had been studying white cedars instead of eastern hemlock it would’ve been amazing!

After driving all afternoon, we made it to our cute bed and breakfast in Chester, Nova Scotia. We’re right on the coast, and had dinner at a little seafood place across the road. We were both really hungry still after eating dinner, so we went into downtown Chester and got ice cream and walked all around the waterfront until the sun was down. It was really beautiful, and our only chance to see the ocean this whole trip!

Millinocket, Maine – Waterborough, New Brunswick


This morning we woke up and looked out our back window in astonishment. We were staying at the base of the biggest mountain in Maine! Mount Katahdin is by far bigger than any of the other hills around it, and it’s the northern start point of Appalachian Trail. The trail crosses the road just down from our cabin.


After breakfast Collin left me at the cabin while he went out to do the collecting by himself. He was trying to find an old-growth stand of hemlocks in the Nature Conservancy’s Debsconeag Lakes Wilderness Area – a stand that’s a couple miles in from the road and currently without trail access. He could hike in faster without baby and me along, and I enjoyed spending the morning taking my time with the dishes, cleaning and re-packing. It was a gorgeous spot to relax and spend the morning!


When Collin came home he said he was really glad he didn’t bring me – getting back to the hemlocks took a long time, and he got pretty beat up in the attempt. He rated the site as a 4 or 5 – miserable to get to and full of black flies (he killed 41) but a nice stand of hemlocks at the end.
We drove the rest of the afternoon to our campsite in New Brunswick. Crossing the border was very easy – I guess we didn’t look suspicious today. I would’ve thought one glance in Louis would’ve led to difficult questions – like what is that white powdery substance we had several boxes of? I’ve never seen cocaine, but powdered silica gel looks like what I think crack ought to.

Our campsite in New Brunswick, Camp Mohawk, is one of the most surreal campgrounds I’ve ever seen. We’re the only tent in the whole place, up on a hill by ourselves with four other semi-defined spots for tents around us. Everywhere else is trailers and RVs, densely parked in a village all around. Most have decks and awnings as big as the trailers, and many even have gardens! It’s a whole different approach to camping and vacation, and I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it.

The nicest part about Camp Mohawk is they have a laundromat AND hot showers – super after staying in a cabin without running water! The camp is also right on Grand Lake, the biggest lake east of the Great Lakes according to the camp manager. After dinner we walked down to the lake shore and watched the sunset on a dock. It was lovely.

Norton, Massachusetts – Millinocket, Maine

Today was a little rough. Since Boston was the last time we were going to have Internet use for a few days, Collin needed to stay and catch up with the Ivy Tech course he’s teaching. We hung out in our hotel until we had to check out at 11:00, and with that late start headed over to Plymouth to find our collecting site.


It was pretty cool being able to explore the woods that the Pilgrims explored and settled 400 years ago. Although Boston is incredibly big and developed and Plymouth is just an hour south, the area around Plymouth is almost rural and heavily wooded. Some of the trees we walked through would’ve been alive when the Pilgrims met Massasoit’s people, and that was pretty neat.


The hemlock collecting didn’t go so well, however. Hemlocks have a pest called Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, a small little bug that sucks the life out of the trees until they are so weak any little drought or disturbance will kill the trees. HWA is killing massive amounts of trees down in the southern Appalachians, like around the Smokey Mountains, but hasn’t reached the northern populations yet. They are spreading north and it’s just a matter of time until they reach Indiana’s isolated hemlock populations, but they haven’t yet.


In Massachusetts, however, we found a large old population of hemlocks all either dead or dying. Not only was it a very sad sight, but it also made collecting samples from the remaining hemlocks much more time consuming and tedious. That combined with all the mosquitoes and the complete lack of a trail made it our lowest scoring hike of the trip – a 3.



On the more interesting side, I also saw my first cranberry bogs! They were pretty neat, all low-lying fields surrounded by wet ditches. They were flowering now, but come harvest time the farmers will flood the fields to create bogs and vacuum up all the ripe fruit. Collin was severely tempted to bag and bring home one of the plants on the edge of the field, but we didn’t feel right about having to lie to get it through customs and back home.

When we finished collecting we made the long drive from Plymouth, MA to Millinocket, ME. Millinocket is right about in the middle of the state, but since all the development is in the far south and on the coast, it might as well be northern Maine. We were headed to a cabin owned by the Nature Conservancy which they generously offered to us since Collin is doing research on their land. Despite it being late and quite dark, we managed to find the cabin and eventually to get the gas lights and heater working too. It was a very cozy end to a very exhausting day.

Green Mountain National Forest, Vermont - Norton, Massachusetts

It’s been another long but successful day. Collin and I woke to a chilly, wet morning and made hot oatmeal for breakfast before drying off and packing up camp.

Chittenden Brooke campsite

Our collecting site today was our first on private property. A gentleman connected with the nature conservancy offered to let us collect on his land since there were no suitable public sites in Northern Vermont. He had an amazing place, high up in the mountains and right on a semi-private and very quiet lake (Wolcott Pond). He also had a gorgeous stone house which he’d built himself, and a lovely garden full of foxgloves and lupine. The collecting went very quickly, which was good both because we were a little behind schedule and also because a heavy thunderstorm broke out just as we were leaving.

Mr. Young shows Collin where to head for Hemlocks beside Wolcott Pond

Foreboding skies as we leave the Young's beautiful stone house

We stopped to have lunch under a shelter by an old covered railroad bridge. It was raining so hard by the time we left that Collin pulled a questionably-legal move and drove Louis into the shelter so we could pack up and I wouldn’t have to get wet. He’s such a gentleman… that and he loves making Louis go exciting places.

Louis pulled into the picnic shelter

Despite several scares along the way (Louis hiccupped once and shut down for a few minutes, then he slid around on wet pavement) and crazy Boston drivers who drive, for no apparent reason, on the shoulder of interstates, we made it to Norton, MA safely. We’re staying in an extended-stay hotel tonight, which means free internet and a kitchenette and full-sized refrigerator! It’s been really nice to have hot showers and hot food after getting all muddy and wet the last couple days.

Tomorrow we’re collecting near Plymouth – the original, as in Plymouth Rock! I’d love to stop and check out the historic site, but unless collecting goes quickly we’ll have to keep moving. We need to make it to northern Maine tomorrow, so it’ll be a pretty long day. I think the next time we’ll have internet will be on Friday in Nova Scotia, so I’ll check back in then.

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