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.
We live in an area where riding down the river is not only possible but a regular event even in the depths of winter.
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