Tuesday, September 23, 2008

wilderness camping trip, day 0 (June 30th 2008)

Finally after 3 months of starting this blog, i am going to write an epic (sadly only 7 days of traveling is an epic for me for the time being) travelogue. The reason for this delay is blamed on lack of time( if you can believe that..i don't..lol!!) to sort out videos,pictures and my thoughts...hehehehe.

The urge to go on a wilderness trip all by myself was the result of a growing underlying feeling of being sucked into something which i have been trying to avoid for a large chunk of my life( the details of which are too private to mention.. ;) ). But to satisfy the curiosity of any of my readers (hope fully i have at least few readers by now) i will agree to the well known secret that even though running away gave a specious momentary feeling of being released , but it never rooted out the problem completely. As i am still finding out, i am gradually rolling back to square one. Maybe if i keep going to trips like these quarterly i can stay in an euphoric state of denial, but alas this is a fad only for the rich people. Anyway , picking myself up from self pitying, and going back to the travelogue, i choose Canada as it vastly impressed me in my past trips (details of which will be published later) and i have heard so much about beauty of the maritime/coastal provinces of Canada. Since i have already been to Ontario and Quebec(not the northern part of the province though) i decided to go to New Brunswick,Nova Scotia & Prince Edward Island (at least that's what the plan was initially) on the Canadian side and Maine and Boston(chosen because its the biggest city where i can fly to for driving to Canada) on the US side. The initial plan was to stay in cheap hotels or B&B's but after a quick search i found that even the cheap ones were not less than $70 a day, so i decided to switch to camping which is almost 1/4th of that even with electricity(i thought its best to have it to charge my numerous equipments). Once again the color green dictated my travel plans(i know i have started to sound like a broken record), but the good thing is that this forced change was one for the best.

I had done my homework of reading up on all this places and looking at the travel time, places to see,made all the reservations and had even made up a Excel sheet hour by hour schedule. Friends and acquaintances will agree that its very unlike me. I blame (i like to pass on the buck,..:D) it on "The People" who keep hammering me with the idea that its high time i grow up and become organized with my life ("The People" are still not happy with the changes though :( ). On the suggestion of Mr. BIL i had bought a GPS system, which came in mighty handy most of the times.

My plan was to fly to Boston on an early morning flight (8:45 AM)(30th June , Monday) and then drive to Fundy National Park(my first destination,10 hr drive from Boston) by sunset while visiting some of the famous Maine lighthouses on the way. I should boastfully add that the previous 3 days i was visiting Montreal with family and had driven almost 2500 miles all by myself :D, and had reached Chicago Monday morning at about 4am and had to return the car at 7:30 AM before going to the airport, thus only getting chance to catch some ZZZZZ's in the cab ride to airport in the last 24 hours. Even though "The People" will like to call it stupid i say its my time management skills :D.

Well it was not as peachy as i had planned. There was a lot of traffic on the way to the airport, and at a point i thought i will miss my flight by hours. Anyway i just reached the airport 15 min's before the allowable luggage check in time. My flight was with American and let me tell you, their service sucks!! and when i reached the terminal there was a huge line at the ticket counters and even on the automatic kiosk's. After staying in line for almost 10 min's i finally reached a kiosk but was unable to retrieve my flight details as their online system choose the exact date & time to crash. As i started to get frustrated over what seemed like a missed flight for sure and also for the reason that one AFRICAN AMERICAN attendant kept on telling me that its was my fault (well partially it was , but nobody likes to be told that) in that nagging tone of voice all the attendants in any kind of public service desk take. People have to understand that its just not the words that we use , its how we use its that's makes it important(i myself am quite oblivious to this fact, but i love to preach). Anyhow, i finally got to see a person on the counter and she issued me a ticket on the next flight( on waiting list though) but suggested that i can try to go to the flight i was originally booked for and see if they haven't reallocated my seat. Luckily the security check was fast and as the fiasco probably had started just before i reached there (lucky me!!!) there was nobody on the waiting list on my plane and i was able to take the 8:45 AM plane. The down side of this whole mess was that my luggage (for which i had to pay $15 :x) arrived on the next flight which delayed my whole plan by 2.5 hrs,and New Brunswick being 1 more hr ahead of Boston didn't help my cause either.

In between the wait period for my luggage i decided to go get my car from Enterprise and get some much needed camp supplies ,like a stove and some propane tanks (in all my previous camp outings i have preferred to cook on an open fire with not very satisfactory results) , a camp light, some mosquito repellents, food (which mainly consisted of various kinds of canned beans,spam and bread) and bottles of water. Thank god for the GPS that i could finish all this in just couple of hours as Boston is a weird maze of roads each going at a different angle to the other(Chicago and New York City is so good in that aspect).

The drive to Fundy was uneventful, only stopping for gas and at the Canadian border. After crossing over to the Canadian side it started to drizzle and become very foggy. I reached at about 2:00 AM and set up my tent in dark (the constant drizzle didn't help my cause either).The only nagging thing was that the tent equipment were kind of screwed up (pieces were missing and some had mud stuck into it) because the previous group i loaned it to didn't use it properly. It took some patience and some improvisation to put it up, but it still took about 50 min's. I had to satisfy my hunger with few slices of dry bread and an energy bar as the constant rain prevented me from cooking anything.
And thus begun my trip.



Day0 drive from Boston to Fundy (warning: until you have a lot of time in your hand to waste and get easily amused by mundane things don't watch these videos :D )


Copyright@ 2008 Rahuljit Pal

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