Westward Ho!

It turns out I am woefully ignorant about a lot of American history.  And British.  I vaguely knew there was a war in 1812 - Tchaikovsky wrote that Overture after all,  and it was all cannons and crashing cymbals and such - but actually there were TWO wars in 1812.  The British/French one and the British/American one.  Oh, wait.  I just googled the 1812 Overture and that was written to commemorate the Russian/French war.  So THREE wars in 1812.  I’m also woefully ignorant about European history then.

And that seems about right because at school we had two choices when it came to History - European or Australian - and I chose the latter because there were only two hundred years of colonial history to learn about, as opposed to two thousand, and I was lazy.

Anyway, 1812 was a very busy year.  The Americans had already won their Big War of 1776 but the British had been a bit sulky about it.  They’d been preventing American ships from free trade with the enemy France.  The Americans declared War and thought that annexing Canada while they were at it would be good.  

Sackets Harbor, on the northeastern end of Lake Ontario, became the third largest town in New York State practically overnight as the Americans built a huge shipyard to defend against the British navy stationed on the opposite shore at Kingston, only 28 nautical miles away.

Lovely Sackets Harbor in upstate New York.

This charming little town, population now around 1,600, was where the first shots of the 1812 war were fired.  It played a pivotal part in the war, but you wouldn’t know it.  They don’t make a big thing of it, but the Madison Barracks are impressive.  The Fort has been turned into a mixed residential and commercial development and it’s rather well done.

Lovely row houses now private residences with great water views.  There’s even a grocery store on the grounds.

One of these has been turned into a hotel.

Before reading up a bit on the war I asked Dan what he knew about it.  Not much, apparently.  Another missing or forgotten chapter of high school history.  He did mention Dolly Madison which I thought that was a brand of candy but he corrected me.  Ice cream.  Okay, well, she was also the First Lady at the time of the war and is credited with saving George Washington’s portrait as the British were about to burn down the White House.  Wait, what?  They got that close?

Fellow Honorary Members of the Apostrophe Police will no doubt spot it.  Aargh.  And a “mold of flavors” - well, let’s just call this not one of Madison (ah!) Avenue’s finest moments.

And just to be clear, our heroine didn’t personally get up on a ladder and wrangle the 8ft tall painting to the ground - she had her slave do it and then retreated to the plantation in Virginia while the sacking and pillaging went on.  And she got a brand of ice cream named in her honor.

Seems it’s a thing.  Up in Loyalist Canada at the same time, Laura Secord did what I’m going to call a Paul Reverse, trudging 20 miles through the dark of night to warn the British that the Yankees were coming.  SHE got the candy brand named after her.  And her portrait on a Canadian coin.

We crossed the border into Canada at Thousand Islands, a beautiful region where the St. Lawrence River flows from Lake Ontario.  There are actually well over a thousand islands here and a lot of them are occupied, including the smallest inhabited island in the world:

         

This makes me nervous just looking at it.  It’s the size of a tennis court.

But there are plenty of grand summer “cottages” too.

And of course there’s Thousand Island dressing which was indeed invented here at the turn of the last century, some say by the personal chef of the owner of the Waldorf Astoria hotel and a modest summer cottage here:

The waters of the St. Lawrence river are deep and swift and perilous, with many a shipwreck along its stretch, some of which can now be seen thanks to an unexpected benefit of the dreaded zebra mussel.  This tiny invasive species - so harmful to native fish and water intake pipes in the Great Lakes - has also cleaned up the water big time.  Perhaps that accounts for the startling color of Lake Ontario now which reminds me of the Caribbean.

The sand is littered with the white shells of zebra mussels.

We’ve officially started our westward journey home.  We’ll be traveling over 5,000 miles in 60 days on this final leg, zigzagging across the Canadian border.  And with diesel now over $5.00 a gallon it looks like we’ll be eating peanut butter sandwiches for a good portion of it.  

And weren’t we glad we found a Costco selling diesel!  It was only $4.95 a gallon rather than $5.40 everywhere else.  Of course there were another 13 gallons to go fill our 48 gallon tank but we got cut off at $175.00 and had to start again.  And I stopped caring at that point.

When we started out last October diesel was around $3.00 a gallon but for my budget I went way high to $3.50.  Ha!  We’re averaging 12.5 miles a gallon but I have a rule that if I can’t do the math in my head then I don’t have to worry about it.  And I certainly can’t begin to translate Canadian dollars and liters into real money and gallons, so that’s a good thing too.