Happy New Year everyone. I've been MIA for a bit more than a week.
I'm wondering if, for a new year, we should start a new thread. I'm willing but don't want to go ahead if someone else has ownership of that task.
Last week, Boxing Day, we hit the road fairly early as the freezing rain had not yet hit Ottawa. As we reached the divided highway west of Ottawa that heads south, we began to get freezing rain and we used a LOT of fluid on the windshield, but the road was salted and not bad. We reached the 401 highway which runs E-W along the St. Lawrence and later, north of Lake Ontario, in only a few minutes more than it usually takes us. Along the 401, parts of it were completely dry, but we hit occasional bands of freezing rain, but also lots of salt on the road. Once in the Thousand Islands area, we started to see cars off the road and between Gananoque and Trenton, we saw perhaps 6 cars in the ditch, but the temperature was climbing, the road was well salted and we went on, making reasonable time.
A bit east of Trenton, we saw a road warning that the 401 was closed at Brighton. We should have exited the road then, but in our naivety, we headed to the service centre just west of Trenton (and 10 km east of Brighton) for lunch (along with hundreds of others). As we pulled in to the service centre, we could see the traffic was backed up almost to the service centre, but we thought we'd have lunch and the traffic would clear and we'd be on our way.
After lunch, the traffic was backed up further. It took us a full hour to get out of the parking lot and at least 35 minutes to go about 1 km. Then we started tracking our distance and it took us 4 hours, 15 minutes to go the next 9 km to where the road was closed.
We merged into one lane to make our exit and then found that they were picking up the pylons forcing cars into one lane and the road was open; so we never had to get off. We stopped at the next service centre (also the last one before Toronto) for dinner and the guy ahead of us in line had been working on the clean-up crew for 3 tractor-trailors jack-knifed across the road.
The 401 across Toronto is never fun (I counted 14 lanes of traffic on the return trip) but by the time we got there, it was raining hard and visibility was very poor. We were delighted to find a brand new divided highway (not showing on our old map) that took us north to the toll road which also crossed Toronto and has far lower traffic volume. Got to Conestogo, north of Waterloo, around 10:15 pm instead of the anticipated between 3 and 4.
We did have a good visit with younger daughter and her family and in-laws and the trip home a few days later was uneventful and we made good time.
We had a good walk in Constogo, DH and I mall walked last Thursday and I did aquafit on Friday. This afternoon, we hope to get out on snowshoes. We've had lots of the raw material in the last few days.
Otherwise, I've been working on updating and enlarging my presentation on hostas as I will give it to a local gardening club on Jan. 11.
