Blame Canada

One of the best things about North America is its size. Its people are bigger (both in personality and size), its wildlife is bigger (raccoons, bears and caribou compared to England’s squirrels, foxes and deer), and its land mass is completely enormous.

This makes possible one of the great legends of North America: the road trip. Unless you drive into mainland Europe, road trips in England are pretty insignificant; no motel stops, hardly any decent coffee shops, and by the time you’ve started singing show tunes you’re already in Slough or wherever.

So I was looking forward to my initiation. Although Nina and I weren’t in the best shape at half past five that Thursday morning – I’d had two weeks of sleepless nights, plagued by dreams of wandering through fog in hypothermic confusion while desperately calling Nina’s name, and Nina had the worst flu in the history of man.

But coffee is a wonderful thing. So after a brief stop at Tim Horton’s (our last decent coffee for a week – it’s notoriously bad across the border) we were off to America.

By lunchtime we’d reached Montreal, where we took a break and enjoyed Canada’s answer to Europe. Even though I’ve only been here six months, it was still a novelty to see buildings more than twenty years old and walk down narrow cobbled streets. Trouble is, the European feel extends to everything. Entrance to the city was via a vast traffic jam, and getting out took about an hour because the signs are crap and the roads resemble spaghetti.

There was a beautiful main square, though, complete with all the things you’d expect to see in St Tropez like caricature artists, street clowns and some guy playing Celine Dion on the sax (no luxury yachts, though). We stopped in a little café and watched the world go by, feeling like tourists in our own country. Even the language was different. It’s one of the many things I love about Canada.

But we were soon to be in the not-so-different world of New England. One wave of my American passport (they didn’t even look at my photo – and Nina got across with nothing more than a smile) and we were in Vermont.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had a distinct picture of Vermont. It goes like this: beautiful white steepled church, nestled in trees that are every shade of red, yellow and orange, with green hills rolling across the landscape. That’s Vermont.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what it was like. Okay, so there was only the odd red tree (glorious technicolour doesn’t show up till the end of September), but otherwise it was perfect. The setting sun turned everything pink, including the churches. Little villages with more white steeples kept surfacing from the valleys. We were driving through a postcard.

Eventually we arrived at St Johnsbury, close to the border with New Hampshire, and decided we should visit some sort of information centre. Amazingly, the town had one and it was open. We peeped in to an enormous entrance room with leaflets covering every available surface. At first it seemed as if no-one was there – just a very very huge moose head, about the size of a baby elephant’s, hanging off the far wall. But as we walked closer, we noticed something under the moose head. A tiny white haired old lady looked up at us, her face crinkling into a smile.

She couldn’t have been more glad to see us if we were family she’d been expecting, and was a mine of information. Nina commented on the moose head.

“Oh yes, it is quite big,” she laughed. “I just hope it doesn’t fall on me.”

By the time we left the town, I was going into driver’s hypnosis and Nina was strung out on aspirin. We’d planned to get to the trail head and camp there for the night, but the prospect of hiking in the dark with a feverish friend was not one I particularly relished. We drove into Berlin, New Hampshire (Americans also love original place names), in the shadow of Mount Washington, and looked for a motel.

Well, Berlin turned out to be a perennially useless place to get anything. Not only was the motel hideously expensive and staffed by people who’d attended the Basil Fawlty school of hospitality, it had an outdoor shop which sold none of the equipment we needed and a cinema which was shut. All the time. We headed down the road to Gorham.

After getting a slightly less hideously expensive motel, it was time to find a restaurant. By this stage, Nina was in seriously bad shape. She was burning hot and cold, felt nauseous, and her eyes were actually gumming up. I don’t know how she conned me into letting her drive (was I insane??) but she did.

There’s a phenomenon in the wilderness that hikers like to call ‘trail magic’. Whenever things seem really bad, or you’re just too tired and exhausted to hope that circumstances will let up, something absolutely amazing happens. It’s just another name for divine intervention. And we felt it when we reached J’s Corner.

We shuffled into the restaurant to be told the kitchen was shut. Nina said she was about to cry (to be honest, her eyes were in such a state it would probably have been a good thing), so the waitress went out back and asked again.

“Yep, we can do you something,” she said (God bless American customer service!).

We gratefully chatted to the waitress and said we’d been on the road for twelve hours straight. She took one look at Nina, who looked like she’d just been exhumed, and said:

“Was she driving?”

So I guess we weren’t looking our best. But we perked up once the food came. It was amazing! Big bowls of thick chunky soup with steaming baked potatoes. It hit the spot so exactly that Nina and I just made ‘mmm’ noises as we ate, as a substitute for actual conversation. The other customers looked at us very weirdly. But we didn’t care – we had full bellies and a bed for the night. And for a hiker, that’s about as good as it gets.