The Canada I miss

Winter thoughts turn to Canada

Many Americans think that it is winter in Canada all the time.  Canadians like to prey on those American fears.

I once had a Canadian neighbor who claimed that our weather in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, was eleven months of winter and one month of damn poor sledding.  It was more like eight months of winter.

Even that is somewhat of an exaggeration since the worst that I can remember is snow being on the ground from mid-October until mid-May.

Shoveling snow was something like opening the garage door in the South.  I did it almost every morning without thinking.

Tay Creek, home of Tay Ridge Angus, our old farm, is in the rolling hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It is just enough colder than Fredericton to be labelled as a snow belt in a very snowy Canadian province.  I think that I recorded twenty three feet of snow in 1974, our first winter in Tay Creek.

I could tell snow tales for hours, but snow is just part of life in much of Canada. I loved it when I was living there.  There are few nicer things to do than go cross country skiing on six inches of fresh snow which just nicely covers your packed trail from the day before.

We also had the tools to handle snow from my tractor mounted snow blower which would eat through a three foot drift and blow the snow 150 feet away to well equipped provincial snow plows that never seemed to stop grooming our rural snow banks.  The biggest problem that I can remember was when the city snow banks got so high that it was hard to see before making a turn from one street to another.

There are a lot of good things about snow.  The first snowfall that stays makes for a much more pronounced changing of the seasons than leaves falling off the trees.   When everything is covered with a foot of snow, you shift into a different gear with much of the focus being on next year.

Snow also brings a sense of peace and even cleanliness. When you are far enough north that the snow stays white, it brings a sense of timeless beauty to the land.  Most farmers in the north want the snows to come.  A good couple of feet of snow on the ground protects the land from the minus twenty to forty degree temperatures.

Beyond the cities along the country roads, snow also makes driving safer.  When you get huge snowbanks along the roads, you can slide off a road and do no damage to your vehicle. Most Canadian snow bears no resemblance to the snow that we have in the South.  Cold dry Canadian snow makes for decent traction and smoother roads.  Southern snow quickly packs or melts to ice which also plagues Canada in warmer winters.

The picture at the top of the post is farmhouse where we lived in from 1974 to 1984.  It has had some remodelling but that doesn't take away the memories.  It was a good house to be in during a blizzard. There used to be a series of sheds attached to the house.  One contained the wood that we used to provide most of the heating for the house.  We had a high efficiency wood stove that would drive you out of the house with little effort.  Our house also had gravity fed spring water and plenty of provisions from our summer garden.  It is hard to even comprehend how my wife, Glenda, managed to can and freeze all those vegetables and raise three children while I was taking care of our two hundred head of cattle.

The only problem with enjoying snow from the inside was that I didn't get to stay in the house during a blizzard.  I was often outside clearing a road to our cattle which wintered nearly a mile back on the farm.  The cattle stayed in woods near what we called the back field.  We had some amazing snow storms and brutally cold weather, but I always managed to take the cattle their daily big round bale.

My favorite part of winter coming was the end of gardening.   The ground between the bush in the foreground and the house was where we gardened.  Each fall, the garden had to be cleaned up and a few loads of composted manure were worked into the ground.  We had  a wonderful garden and grew almost all of our food except for chicken and turkey.  Chickens were for making eggs, and no one would have considered eating one of our hearty hens who survived on chicken feed and a scoop of fresh snow instead of water each winter morning.

As much as I enjoy the vegetables from our much smaller garden patches in the South, it never seems to end.  Already it is time to order my tomato seeds.  I need to get the order in before the end of the year so I can get the seedlings going before the middle of January in order to be able to plant them around the third week of March.   And of course I should mention that we are still getting lettuce out of our winter garden.  I was also working on wild onions in our Southern Outer Banks yard early the third week of December.  You won't be digging any wild onions out of your yard in Tay Creek in December especially while wearing shorts.

Almost like the always connected, never-really-away-from-their-desk business world of America, a Southern gardener gets little rest.  Canadians have a long time to plan and contemplate their gardens which often don't get planted until the first week of June when we are already enjoying the first tomatoes of the season.

I have little interest in returning to the long, cold winters of Canada, but when you have the right clothing, and a positive attitude, snow isn't so bad.  There aren't many farms that don't look better organized and more scenic with a couple of feed of snow to cover those things for which there are never enough time like weed eating around the buildings or moving the pasture harrow back to the implement yard. 

However, it is hard to lust for snow when you know how much shorter the winter can be with a few spectacular December beach days in your pocket.

Thanks go out to my friends, Kerry and Brenda, for the picture of our old farmhouse.

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Ah, Canadian Summer?

When I moved to Canadian in the summer of 1971, one of the reasons that I headed north was to escape the heat.  The other reason was to find some cheap land.  I bought my first farm, complete with 140 acres, a house and barn for a little over $6,000.

My four years of college were in the Boston area, and I spent most of the last summer in classes. Anyone who has spent a summer in Boston will tell you that the city can be pretty nasty in the summer even for someone like me who grew up in North Carolina when air conditioning was still something of a novelty.

Sixteen years later when my North Carolina born wife and I moved back to the states, we were ready for some warmth.  I can still remember my wife saying on a vacation to the North Carolina coast while we were still living in Canada, that she was finally warm all over for the first time in years.

When she made the statement, we were just getting out of the car in Tarboro, NC on a triple digit day.  It was hot enough in the fast food parking lot that the tar of the pavement was a little sticky.

While there are plenty of places that it gets hot in Canada, Halifax, Nova Scotia which was our last Canadian home is not normally one of them.

I can remember putting on a light down jacket to attend a soccer game that our daughter was playing one July.  The jacket felt great.  With fog and mist never far away, Nova Scotia can turn out to be the perfect escape from the heat, but it is not the place to go if you want to swim in the ocean.

Summer in Canada can also be fleeting.  Canadian summer reminds be a lot of the narrow passage from the inlet to the river in the picture at the top of the post.  It takes a while to get to Canadian summer, but the time you're actually there is very minimal.

One of the old timers who lived near our farm north of Frederiction, NB used to joke that you could sum up the area weather with this phrase, "eleven months of winter, and one month of damn poor sledding."

While Canadian summer isn't quite that bad, it is fleeting and sometimes hard to find, and by the middle of August if you haven't found it, you might be out of luck.  It doesn't take long for the evenings to start cooling in August.  Unlike our area along NC's Southern Outer Banks, there is no great expanse of warm water to make for an extraodinaryly pleasant fall.

In September 1973 we were living on the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay of Fundy.  We got surprised by an early season snow storm that knocked the power out for a week.  Snow in September is not something we see here on the Crystal Coast where even snow in January or February is a rarity.

Still I know relatively few Canadians who are unhappy enough with their climate to seek a warmer area.  Perhaps if you grow up with snow for six months of the year, you end up missing it if the snow only shows up a couple of times of a year and is gone by noon,  even before you have time to shovel it.

We do get lots of Canadian friends as visitors, and I am very happy with that.  Their visits remind me of just how nice Canadians are in general and how much we enjoyed living there.

Our beaches are always open especially for friendly Canadians, and the best time of the year to visit is often the fall when the air is cooler and the water is still warm.

Of course if you do fall in love with the area, we have some very nice places that let you maximize you fun in an area where riding down the river is not only possible but a regular event even in the depths of winter.

Why Carolina Fog is Better than Canadian Fog

Fog can be a way of life when you live in some places.  In the early seventies, my wife and I lived on an old farm on the Nova Scotia coast along the Bay of Fundy. 

While the view of the water across our neighbor's sheep pasture was often stunning, it was also more often than not obscured with fog.

My theory as to why so many homes like our old farm house were painted bright colors was that it added some life to the ever present fog.   The only benefit that I could see to the fog was that it made growing some vegetables like broccoli almost too easy.  When your broccoli plants are as tall as Labrador retrievers, you know that they like the area.  It was also a wonderful place to grow English peas, but tomatoes and corn were more of a challenge.

My wife and I decided we wanted to have a commercial farm so we moved to a "better" spot for farming at least if weather is your main consideration.  We found sun for drying hay much easier to count on when we moved to Tay Creek in central New Brunswick. Of course I am not certain that trading cool breezes and fog for black flies and minus forty temperatures balanced out, but it worked for us.

Now we live on North Carolina's Crystal Coast.  While it shares some characteristics with Nova Scotia, it is a far different climate.  I have written before about how little fog we see along the Southern Outer Banks.

What I have learned in the almost six years that I have been on the NC shore is that fog here is a lot more beneficial than it was in Nova Scotia. At least it works that way if you are a home owner trying not to use your heat pumps.

Nova Scotia had so little heat along the shore that cool morning fogs often brought out jackets. Here on the North Carolina coast, we have plenty of heat, and usually a little fog just cools us down nicely.

My wife and I play a game each spring.  We try to see how long we can go without either heating or air conditioning.  Some years we can stretch it to nearly two and one half months.  All it takes is a little work at opening and closing windows at the proper times.

On April 10 after my boat ride on the White Oak River which runs down to the Intracoastal Waterway, I sentenced myself to pulling some wild onions from our front yard.  I spent about an hour out there in the heat which probably got close to 80F unless you believe the thermometer on our bedroom window which registered 106F. 

After I came in the house and cooled off, we headed over to the beach about 6 PM.  Before we left I opened several windows in our house including the upstairs ones in my office which are especially useful in cooling down our house.  With windows open in an adjoing bedroom, the open office windows create a nice crossflow of air that sucks the heat right out of our home.  The temperature upstairs was 80F when we left for the beach.  By the time we got back around 7:30 PM, the upstairs had already cooled to 77F, and the downstairs had gone from 77F to 75F. Of course the only energy that cost us was my climbing some stairs.

We left the windows open all night.  This morning the temperature in my upstairs office was 64F.  Our downstairs temperature had dropped to 69F.  I closed all the windows before the morning air started to warm up.  If the Accuweather forecast for the Swansboro area is correct, we should get close to 80F again on April 11.  We are usually a little warmer than Swansboro.  With our location being farther inland about 3 miles up the river, 80F is easily possible.

With a little luck, we can avoid running the heat pumps for another day.  That's a whole lot better than having to build a fire in the fireplace to warm up on a summer day in Nova Scotia.

Of course, after escaping the heat and crowds of the big city of Boston in the seventies, I thought sitting by a fireplace in July on the Nova Scotia shore was pretty neat.  It all depends on where you are in your life and what your goals are.  Mine have changed drastically.

One of my goals now is to be outside as much as possible with as few clothes on as decency requires. Another is to be on the water as many times as I can in a week's time. That means being able to use my boat every month of the year. Then there is walking on the beach whenever possible.

Carolina fog works better for all that, but I will never forget those times in Canada.  They taught me to never take civilization for granted.

 

A Canadian crop you can count on

I spent much of the seventies and early eighties running a cattle farm in the Maritimes of Canada.  Today I live along the Crystal Coast which is part of the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  Many people have heard of Kitty Hawk, Nags Head, Duck, and Cape Hatteras which are all part of the Northern Outer Banks.

Few people know about the Southern Outer Banks. 

The Southern ones extend south from Cape Lookout and are at their best when the beaches become south facing along the Crystal Coast. 

The area is about as far away fromt the Canadian Maritimes as you can get in climate. The name for the area comes from the way the water looks in the summer sunlight.

A couple of weeks ago we had a visit from some friends who were neighbors of ours when we lived in Tay Creek, NB. We had a couple of large farms there and about 200 head of cattle.   When we moved from our Tay Ridge Farm in 1984, one of the things that the neighbors gave us was a rock with "Tay Creek" painted on it.  Rocks are part of life in Tay Creek.  Someone once said that if any of the farmers who settled Tay Creek had any idea of how many rocks they would have to pick over their lives most would have never started farming.

Tay Creek was especially rocky piece of ground which was reserved only the Scots and Irish.  The English settlers got much better land.  I was lucky in that one of my farms had red soil which had many fewer rocks, but it still had plenty.  Sometimes in the spring when we were working our garden on the home place which is just to the right of the red marker on the linked Google map, it would appear that we had more rocks in the garden than soil.

Each time we plowed a field we got a new crop of rocks which mean you had to haul them off the field.  A local saying was that the one crop you could count on was rocks.  The extremes of temperature and frost always brought more rocks to the surface. We actually witnessed minus forty degrees Fahrenheit in Tay Creek.   

We also got nearly twenty-three feet of snow the first year we were there.  Some years snow would come by the end of October and not leave until early May.  One former neighbor from the area visited us one spring and drove down the Shenandoah Valley in April.  He asked my wife, "Tell me why in the world you left this and lived in Tay Creek?"

That perhaps is another story, but we now live in Carteret County which has no rocks and hardly gets any snow.  In fact we have to manufacture our rocks for driveways and ditches.  The soil is deep and rich.  You might find a sea shell, but there are not rocks that have not been hauled into the county.

A couple of days ago the forecast came out that we were going to have a late frost.  That put me in a quandry since I had already planted some small tomato plants.  Finally I decided that I could put clear plastic cups on top of them.  However, with the winds that we sometimes get, I was worried that they might blow off.   I could have dug around and found about half as many lead fishing sinkers as I needed, but putting a small rock or two on each cup made more sense.  The only problem was that I had no rocks and of course there was no where locally to go pick rocks.

I solved my problem by buying a bag of rocks.  I am sure if this news ever gets back to Tay Creek, they'll likely want the rock that they gave me back, or they will probably try to charge me for it.  However, I think my purchased creek rocks did great on top on top of my minature greenhouses.

Hopefully my tomato plants will come through as usual.  We normally get our first homegrown tomatoes around the first week in June which is about the time when the folks in Tay Creek put their tomato plants in the garden.

Living in Canada was a wonderful experience, but I don't miss the rocks, cold weather, and black flies.

February, the cruelest month of the year in Canada

When we lived in the Canadian Maritimes, I used to really hate February. Winter at that time of the year reminded me of a crow just waiting for an opportunity to steal any hope of spring.

By the middle of February, every phone call that we made to our relatives in North Carolina would bring some report of the imminent arrival of spring.

It is bad enough that folks in North Carolina get to enjoy pansies which bloom all through the winter, but when they start plowing the ground and planting stuff, it is really hard for a farmer to take especially if he is looking at two feet of snow on his fields.

This February 17 morning we are perched on a mountain near Roanoke, Virginia just beyond the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. 

The south has endured a tough winter in 2011 but right now we are basking in some great temperatures and likely to see some 100 year records fall today.

This morning we awoke to 61F or 16C.  This afternoon we should make it to 75F or 24C.

Those are pretty nice temperatures for the middle of February.

The nice thing about living in the South is that you do get to see signs of spring in February.  Earlier in the week I noticed the first bulbs sticking their green leaves above ground.

Down on the coast of North Carolina where we spend most of our time, I recently saw some of the wild grasses turning green. 

Even harder to believe, in about four to five weeks, it will be time for the first mowing of the year in Virginia's bluegrass country.

Early spring bulbs will be blooming by mid to late March even in the mountains of Virginia.

While I think many eastern Canadians take the easy way out and fly off to a warm beach, and then have to face an abrupt re-entry into Canada's lingering winter, I have often thought that the best way to really appreciate spring and get away from the snows of Canada is to drive south through some warmer spots.

While it was only a weeks ago when 65% of the US was covered with snow, today the number is probably under 25%.  The national snow map shows that once you get half way through Pennsylvania, you will be out of the snow even in the middle of February.

And if you time your trip right, sometime between the middle of March and early April, you can watch spring unfold as you drive down Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley. There is always a chance of spring snow storm, but you get even worse ones in Canada.

I can recommend taking Interstate 81 all the way down to where Interstate 77 heads south from Virginia into North Carolina.  North Carolina is an easy state to wander through.

The people are gracious and happy to see Canadians.  They might not know much about Canada, but they wrote the book on southern hospitality and cooking.

I can recommend swinging off Interstate 77 and heading towards Mount Airy, NC where you will find traces of Mayberry and the Sobotta Manor which is our old homeplace and now a wonderful bed and breakfast.  It you can't get in at the Manor, there is a very nice Hampton Inn there.  You can check out Goober's Restaurant, Odell's Drive-in, or Snappy Lunch.  Be aware, you might get asked for documentation in Snappy Lunch if you are there early.

After Mount Airy, I would follow Highway 52 south to Interstate 40 and stay on it until Greensboro where you can pick up 421 South to Siler City and then 64 East towards Cary and Raleigh.  It is a very pleasant drive through the countryside.  Try some barbecue or Brunswick stew at Smithfield's in Siler City.

You might want to swing off the road at Pittsboro and take 15/501 North a few miles to Fearrington Gardens.  They can be spectacular in early April. There are some fancy places to eat there.

Then I would head on back to 64 East which will take you eventually back to Interstate 40. An hour east of Raleigh, take exit 373 off of Interstate 40 and follow Highway 24 to Jacksonville where it exits towards Swansboro.

You can find lots of information about the area in my Beaufort, Swansboro, and Emerald Isle travel guides which are links on the left side of my homepage.  Make sure you take time to walk on the beaches and visit some of the area restaurants where you can enjoy some great fresh seafood. Nicky's is my current favorite unless you want some of the best grouper on earth, then you need to go to Riverside Steak and Seafood.

If you get to the area in mid-April, it is the perfect time to visit Tryon Palace and their amazing gardens. A dose of their tulips will keep spring fresh in your memory for a long time, maybe even long enough for spring to arrive in Canada.

If you are in the area in mid-April, you might just get to taste some fresh local strawberries.

From New Bern, Interstate 95 isn't very far, and if you are brave and clever, you can head north and maybe even avoid traffic around the DC area.

If you decide to stay, we can handle that also, check out my real estate page or my Crystal Coast Life blog for more information on the area.

Even more fun than the strawberries is the cascade of local produce that we get starting in May, and by the first week of June I will be enjoying my own ripe tomatoes.

A ride through a southern spring is much better than having the crow of winter waiting to steal away your hope of warmth.

 

 

Easier to appreciate Canada now

If you have been unfortunate enough to live on the east coast during the winter of 2010-11, you know that it has been exceptionally cold at least through the first three weeks of January. 

It has truly been a coastal winter to remember.  It is not often that the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina gets real winter weather worth remembering.

Most winters we get to enjoy temperatures into the fifties, sixties, and yes, even into the seventies.

This has been a more difficult winter.  We have struggled many days to reach the mid-forties, much less our normal mid-fifties or twelve or thirteen degrees Celsius for the Canadians in the group.

We were even iced in for a while. In fact I felt so bad for our feathered water birds that I took our skiff on an ice breaking mission.

However with a more normal winter storm instead of a snowstorm just passing through the area, I hope all of that is behind us now.  I think Canada and New England have returned to their tradional roles as keepers of the "cold weather."

Through December and most of January the cold air just spilled out of Canada.  Now it is seems bottled up as it should be.

With Canada taking its proper role, it is much easier to be thankful for Canada's presence on our Northern border.

We southerners like to enjoy our out-of-doors four seasons of the year, and it was hard to bundle up enough to do that in December.  Of course we don't have real cold weather clothes, but it is the principle of the thing.  My winter boots are tennis shoes, and even though it was "cold" this winter, I have yet to need gloves though I seem to think I need them since they are often stuffed in jacket pockets.

While the winds have come rolling in after this first normal storm of the season, it was still a pleasure to get up this morning when the temperature was 54F.

Maybe if the wind will die down, I will manage a ride down the river in our skiff, it has been a couple of weeks since I checked in at Red Sixteen.

Of course that is not nearly as long as it has been since I lived through a true Canadian winter, but I manage to keep the memories alive by calling a couple of old neighbors just to feel their pain a little.

Today would be a good day to call, I just ordered my tomato seed so I can get my plants in the ground in late March.

No surprise that I am thinking of Canada

Since the end of November, Canada has really been on my mind.  First we had some Canadian friends visit with us on November 30. 

We became friends long ago in Halifax, Nova Scotia when I was first working for Apple in 1984.  Our children were not too different in age, the other couple was also American. 

Once in a while it helps to have some American friends when you are living in Canada and listening to all the negative things about the US.

Our Halifax friends visited us here on the Southern Outer Banks at precisely the right time.  Their first afternoon here was the last day of November, and the temperature was a cozy 79F. 

The next day was also a great one as the temperature managed to make it up to 76F.  Anytime you can get to the mid-seventies on the first of December is a huge victory for the forces of light and warmth.

I am glad our Canadian friends were here to enjoy our great weather.  We are a temperate climate here on the coast of North Carolina, and our average high temperature for December is 58F.  However, that does not mean much when a stubborn wave of very cold Canadian air decides to visit.

Later in the week some clients from California flew into the area on Saturday afternoon December 6. Our temperatures were in the thirties by dusk.  That evening when we picked them up for dinner, the temperature was hovering just above freezing, and it was raining.

Just about every place to the west and north of us got snow this past Saturday.  Some places in Virginia where we have friends got up to 4 inches of snow.  We were lucky the area's waters kept the temperature just above freezing.

By Sunday afternoon the temperature had managed to get into the forties.  The next two days were not as fortunate.  The temperatures  stayed in the mid to upper thirties. That is about as cold as it ever gets here.

Wednesday and Thursday we managed to work our way back into the forties, but we still have a lot of ice on the water.   Only this Friday afternoon did we manage to break back into the fifties. 

Fortunately for our fish those temperatures seem to have melted much of the ice.

By Sunday we should be back in the sixties, but it looks like we have some more cold weather on the way. Hopefully the warmth we have seen recently we be enough to keep our waters fairly open until we can get back to our average high temperatures.

Canada must be overflowing with cold air.  I think we should block the border.

Weather that even Canadians have a hard time loving

When I did my morning temperature check today, I was surprised to see that Edmonton was stuck at 34 degree Fahrenheit with rain showers and snow.

I can hope that the snow did not stick.  While Edmonton's weather seems to bother me, it certainly has not made news in Edmonton.  I guess if you live that as far north as Edmonton, you are used to cold weather in May.

I wonder just how much cold would it take before people started complaining?

In talking to some of my Maritime friends, I find that they are having a warm, early spring.  Many of their trees are already blooming, and there is even some talk of haying taking place in June this year.

My guess is that only people who have lived in Edmonton for years can really endure the late spring cold without going nuts. It is hard to imagine people bundled up for snow just a day after I enjoyed a warm walk along the beach.

It is even harder to relate to snow while I am tasting my first tomato of the season.

Canada, Land of no summer

When we lived in Canada, the popular notion was that most Americans believed that snow was to be expected on a summer trip to Canada. 

While I can remember seeing snow in Newfoundland in August and "enjoying" at least one September snow storm, in general the worst weather we saw in Halifax in July would have been a day when your down jacket might feel good.

It is a little hard for me to remember how cool it could be in Halifax since it has been twenty-two years since we left Halifax.

The North Carolina coast is not known as being cool in July so my memories are clouded by all the warm Carolina days.

The Southern Outer Banks or SOBX portion of the Carolina coast did have a couple of days last week when the temperature got down in the sixties at night.  We were able to turn off the air conditioning those evenings.  It was nice but it only lasted for two nights, then we were back to heat and humidity.

Most of the time I no longer mind heat and humidity.  It is to be preferred to cold and snow or ice.  Having salt water at eighty degrees is much nicer than having salt water in the forties.

We used to take our kids to the beach in Prince Edward Island.  While the beaches are beautiful, the blue skies often matched the blue color you got from staying in the water very long.  I am having trouble remembering, but I believe the mid-sixties were about as warm as the water got.

Of course there are advantages to cool Canadian maritime temperatures, you can do without an air conditioner most of the time in Atlantic Canada.  Then again on the Carolina coast we do without heat often in January and February.

I used to love camping on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  Our farm there went down to the water.  It was easy to pitch a tent and build a nice driftwood fire for the evening.  The fire would feel good, and often you would awake to a foggy morning like we are having in the Virginia mountains this morning.

Recent reports from my college roommate who summers in Halifax are that Nova Scotia is suffering through a summer of little heat or as my old friend Harvey used to say, "We have eleven months of winter and one month of damn poor sledding."

So with that I will wish Canadian friends in Atlantic Canada luck on coming up with those late August tomatoes.  Our first ones this year came on June 5.  Our tomatoes are catching their second wind after almost taking over our counters earlier in the month.

As I recently wrote we are in the midst of Full Force Summer. I can highly recommend learning to live with a Carolina summer since winter without ice and snow is so pleasant.  If you are a Canadian still looking for a place to vacation, try the beaches of Emerald Isle, you might end up liking it and buying the new house up the street in Bluewater Cove.

Canada, Time to get with the program

We moved from Canada in 1987.  It would be fair to say that we have spent more than our fair share of time since then convincing Americans that Canada is not snow covered the whole year.

Do not get me wrong, doing a little work to help the Canadian tourism industry is fair exchange for the wonderful years that we had in Canada.  However, this May 2009 outbreak of snow in Edmonton is really hard to explain to Americans who are getting ready to begin their annual pilgrimages to the beach.

I can show nice pictures of trees, water, and sunsets and pretend they are Canada, but it does not do a lot of good if Edmonton is buried under a blanket of white.

Americans have a hard time figuring on why anyone would want to live as far north as Edmonton anyway.  When you add late May snows, Canada as country ends up being dragged into the snowdrift.

We have heard that Alberta has enough tar sands to heat the world, so why is it snowing in Edmonton in May? Have not Canadians had enough snow this year?  Is there some plan to store this snow and use it to capture the winter Olympics?

Why is there a place in the world over 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than we are this morning? I am sure our weather is suffering because of Canadian sins.  It may well be time to send in the Saint Bernards with their casks.

Is the snow in Edmonton an effort to share the spotlight with the hockey teams in Stanley cup semi-finals?  After all the Canadian teams are missing in action this year.

Maybe Canadian tire dealers are stuck with extra snow tires that need to be sold.  Whatever the reason, it is time to halt this mid-May snow madness.  We have had enough snow chilled air dropping below the border to cover us for the rest of the year.  Save it for August when we could use some cool air.

Think of the tomatoes that might be in danger of frost, spawned by all this cold weather.

Canadians are amazing people.  You can put 100 Canadians in a restaurant, and the noise level will not rise above a whisper.  It you put 100 Americans in the same restaurant, it becomes a mad house, and we will probably invade a country.

Surely the quiet resolve of our Canadian friends can stop this fiendish May snow.

If the snow does not stop, we can almost guarantee that Dominion Day, otherwise know as your one true day of summer, will be a non-event this year.

Since the opportunity is strong that this might actually happen,  I suggest all Canadian immediately make plants to evacuate to the south.  We are willing to take our fair share.  We have room for close to 100,000 temporary residents so perhaps you can send the expatriates from the Maritimes who are working in Alberta.

They will have cash and can help us settle the long running debate as to whether New England style clam chowder is better than our Downeast style chowder.

They will also fit in well with our fishermen and farmers.  It we get a cold nor'easter in the summer, all it will do is make them homesick for Halifax in July.

Any fog will make the folks from Cape Breton think they have been transported home.  I see it as a win-win situation.  With the continuing snow, you will probably have to shut down some operations anyway, and we would love to have some Canadians with their pockets full of money drop by for a visit.

Things are ready for visitors on the beach.  We can even find some nice homes if our imported Maritimers grow fond of the area after their toes and noses have turned from blue to pink.

I suspect Coastal NC will surprise most Canadians. Our Coastal Paradise is just that, a great place to enjoy with no threat of snow.  They will find it very close to Paradise.

If you have any questions about the suitability of the area for Canadians, just check this blog and its index.  If you want more information there are lots of pictures and links at this site.