Embedded Files
Travel photos in Google photo albums
Travel photos in Google photo albums
Cross Canada (2025)
Our goal is to get as far as Quebec before returning home. Maybe even into the Gaspe Peninsula. In general, we will follow Highway 1 on the eastbound leg, tour through Ontario and Quebec, and return via Highway 16 on the westbound leg. I know... it's not actually across the whole country, but everything depends on travel speed, it's the best we can do for now. Besides, we toured the Maritimes by RV in 1995, so that's got to count for something, right? Newfoundland will get its own tour at some point...
I will shoot drone videos as we go, and I keep a dashcam running full time, so I am generating a lot of video. Thankfully I planned on external file storage before departing! Paring them down to a manageable length and posting more-or-less weekly on this journey of ours will keep me busy in the evenings!
Hope you like the bakery tour. We do... Little known fact: the calories drop out of all baking if you break it apart before eating.
Here are links to the three legs of our planned trip. Of course, everything is subject to change!
Eastbound
Ontario and Quebec
Westbound
Drone Videos (2024)
We drove the RV to Arkansas to witness the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. I shot lots of drone footage along the way, compiled them into short videos, and posted them onto Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook videos are difficult to view without a Facebook account, but these links should make them generally available. Facebook will nag you to create an account, but just ignore the nagging.
Or... here is a link to my new You Tube channel, where the videos are available to anyone regardless of membership. I am still learning how to use YouTube, but I will probably soon stop using Facebook for videos. As they say... please like and subscribe...
The eclipse - Greer's Ferry, Arkansas I'm showing this video first because it was the main goal of our trip even though it took a month of travel to get there! This is the version I uploaded while we were still on the road. I made another version to be uploaded once we returned home.
Sawtooth Canyon is a favourite site for me and Stella. It's just south of Barstow California, about one mile of gravel road off a secondary highway. This was our fourth stay at the park, and it never gets old. I tried my new drone's "active track" and "collision avoidance" features to follow me up a trail that overlooks the desert. I got a bit nervous as it flew among the rocks, but it came out unscathed. Amazing technology! Here are a couple of videos from CA-62 and I-10 roadside after we left Sawtooth Canyon. The first one is in the middle of nowhere, east of Joshua Tree in California, and this one is from a rest stop called Texas Canyon about 100 km east of Tucson.
We spent three nights in Alamogordo NW, visiting the White Sands National Park and the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Unfortunately, no drones allowed there. The Alamogordo sunsets were spectacular, and I tried to capture one with the drone. The route out from Alamogordo involves a long climb over a mountain range, with the highest point about 2500 m, so it was a good workout for the RV. We stopped at a couple places on the climb to shoot some video.
Our next stop was in Carlsbad, home of the famous Carlsbad Caverns. It's underground and a National Park, so that's two strikes against drone footage, but it is a stop worth making and I highly recommend you go if you can. We found a river-side walk on our first evening, and I played around with the drone there instead of in the park. After two nights in Carlsbad, we were back on the road through the desert. A river cut a swath through the plain, so I had to stop for a look. I'll bet it's wild during a rainstorm.
Leaving New Mexico, we entered the great state of Texas. Man, that's a BIG place. We stopped along the roadside to fly the drone, and soon it was time to cross the Pecos River. The rivers are impressive in this part of the world - one minute you're on the endless prairie and the next minute you're in a canyon. I learned that swallows really don't like drones - watch for them in a couple shots. We have a membership in Harvest Hosts, an organization that connects RVers with wineries, farms, museums, etc. for "free" overnight camping. The first one only cost $80 after tasting and buying wine!!! The second one had an eclectic collection of windmills.
We stayed three nights outside Big Bend National Park in the south of Texas and used Jeep for some great backcountry travel - I flew the drone while Stella drove the car. Then we moved to an upscale RV park between Houston and Galveston. Galveston has miles of public beach, so we spent an afternoon walking and touring that beach. A short (free!) ferry trip took us to the Bolivar Peninsula, despite our GPS advice to drive 200 km instead of taking the 15-minute ferry ride and a short drive to Lena's RV park.
More to come...
Old family videos
Old family videos
Logging history. My father, Neil MacDonald, owned a logging company near Prince Rupert and Terrace in the 1960s. These videos are copies of the 8mm movies that he shot while at work. Dad also owned a floatplane, and some of the movies were taken from that airplane. The photo is from about 1968.
Old family history. These videos have a convoluted history. Dad shot them on 8mm and Super8 movie cameras. Each reel contained about 2 minutes of footage, which Dad eventually spliced into a single reel, probably with my help. I packed that movie reel with me until Christmas 1985 or 1986 (Stella and I lived in Campbell River at the time), when I transferred it to VHS tape and gave a copy to each of my sisters. I dug out that VHS tape about 2010 and converted it to one long video file which sat until about 2015, at which time I made short clips and uploaded them to Flickr. I recently re-discovered those clips on a backup disk, and am now (2019) uploading them to Google Photos. The quality is awful, but they still provide a cool view into my family life in the 1960s.
Google Sites
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