Big round number birthday trip

Fournier ancestors had a bigger street

The trip was kind of a wild hair. I turned 70 this year, which Sweetie refers to as a "big round number birthday," so I got to choose the big trip. Instead of going back to Europe (always my first love), something made me choose a fly-drive trip through Québec, New Brunswick and New England.

Sweetie and I would fly into Montréal and then drive across Québec over the next few days to visit what Sweetie calls my ancestral "shtetls," the villages where my great-grandparents and grandfather lived and where often their families had lived for many generations. Those were the places my migrant ancestors left behind for the United States.

We would also visit (and stay on) Île d'Orléans, where the people bearing around 170 of the 434 distinct surnames of my settler ancestors lived and worked in the early days of Nouvelle-France. From there we would drive to Acadia to see what was left of my ancestors who lived there before leaving for Lower Canada not long before the Expulsion.

After that, we would visit Sweetie's sister and sister-in-law in New Brunswick. Then a long drive through Maine to New Hampshire to see my older sister and her husband, whom we had not seen for about seven years. Then a drive to eastern Connecticut to meet our two grandnephews for the first time, and a drive to northwestern Connecticut to visit with my cousin, daughter of my mother's only brother, and her husband, whom we had not seen in 10 years. From there, we would proceed to the Berkshires in Massachusetts to see my BFF from high school and her husband, and finally back to Montréal for a couple of days of plain old tourism (and R&R).

Pancho the travel octopod

I figured none of the driving days was too long. I'm half human-half car, and I've done a lot of long-distance driving in my life. Despite my big round number age, I determined that I could handle it. I didn't realize until the end of the trip that the distance would be more than 3,200 km in all — almost 2,000 miles, or more than halfway across the continent.

When we described our itnerary to one of our hosts in Saint John, New Brunswick, he called it the trip of a lifetime. I had not thought about it that way. I knew it was an epic journey, but I left without too many expectations. I knew that I would enjoy whatever I found. As it turns out, it really was the trip of a lifetime, largely thanks to the wonderful family and friends we spent quality time with.

All shall be told, when I can manage it.