Coming home

We've been back from vacation since Saturday night, but I'm having trouble getting back into the spirit of my blog. Probably because the vacation was so wonderful. we were at the Gaspe Peninsula, a part of southern Quebec that's about 1,000 miles from here and feels that far away from everywhere else. Canada has many parks, wilderness preserves, and large forests available to the public. The wilderness preserves are called fauniques, and have cabins on them. Each cabin sits on its very own lake - the very large lakes can have more than one. I believe they used to be available to the government employees only, but now they are available to anyone. No electricity, but indoor plumbing and propane - they have refrigerators, stoves, lights, all from the propane. Each cabin comes with a couple of boats plus a dock. Trout fishing in the lakes. Mackerel fishing in the oceans. Fresh mackerel tastes NOTHING like the canned stuff we're used to. We went with another family - our friends S and H, with their son M. H is a fisherman - didn't catch trout, but went for and got a lot of mackerel. They've had a dry summer there, and the lake waters were a bit too warm for ta lot of trout.

The area is very isolated and beautiful. The Appalachian mountains end here, just before the ocean, and they are stunningly beautiful. Great hiking, wildlife spotting (although we didn't see any actual moose). There's one main road that goes all around la Gaspesie, as they call it - a fantastic scenic route with vies of ocean, incredible rock formations, herons, cormorants, gannets and seagulls. Didn't see any Canada gees, by the way. The place is officially bilingual, though there are "English" areas and "French" areas. Acadia, or l'acadie, is what the French speakers call it. There seems to be some controversy. People fly the Canadian flag or the Acadian flag (blue fleur-de-lis on white) to show their preferences. So nice to see a different set of political division than the one I am so fed up with back here. The people were all incredibly friendly and appreciative that I tried to speak some French, though their accents are so strong that I had a hard time understanding theirs.

Anyway, the whole trip was wonderful, de-stressing, peaceful... words are insufficient. Now we're back and, I hate to say it, our park seems so...small. There's the usual problems of a bit too much garbage fishing line, etc., and the walking is not nearly as interesting as our hikes were, but the swan family looks quite healthy. the cygnets are still gray but as large as the adults. One was spreading his wings, so I assume that's a male, since papa swan is always going that. Only saw 1 of the singletons, but we didn't look everywhere.

Don't kill anything while we're away!!

Tomorrow we're off to NH again for another little vacation week of hanging out in a nice cold lake with friends. I certainly hope the Parks Dept. doesn't take advantage of this opportunity to do any more secret, dead-of-night, nefarious activities. Coming back Saturday night, so the next Park Watch will be on Sunday.

Today, it looks like the ducks are taking the back the lake. When the geese were here, and since the geese were killed, the ducks have been hanging out mostly at the fringes of the lake, in the Lullwater, and by the Boathouse. Now it looks like they're returning to the middle of the big lake. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. Still no sign of any male mallards.

The Brooklyn Paper had a nice little article about the geese memorial. http://brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/30/dtg_deadgeesevigil_2010_07_23_bk.html
They estimated the crowd at over 100. Maybe my estimate of 200 was a bit high, but not too bad, I think.

And people do seem to be trying to keep the Park clean - many, many bags piled, but all right next to the trash cans. Now it's up to the parks Dept. to get to them before the raccoons do.