9 August

It started to rain and thunder around 5 am this morning, so getting up by 6:30 am wasn’t a problem.  We had reservations on the 8:15 steam engine Mt Washington cog train this morning and the literature said to be at the station an hour before departure.  There were only 38 of us on the train this morning, which begged the question why did we need to be there so early?  The coal fired steam engine goes up the mountain at a rate of 3 mph, so it takes an hour to travel the three miles of track to the summit of Mt Washington at 6,288 feet.  It was drizzling at the station and rained off and on up the tracks.  The train engine pushes the passenger car up the track and burns through about 1 ton of coal.  The steam engine only makes one trip a day.  The rest of the trips are done by a bio-diesel engine.  Regardless both engines have to traverse rails that have inclines as great as 37 degrees.  The train is operated by three people:  the engineer, the coal shoveler, and brakeman.  The coal shoveler shovels coal into the firebox at a rate of one shovel per minute.  The cog in the engine is used to assist in the climb up the mountain, and it grabs a special center track that has distances that match the teeth in the cog.  The uphill steam train has to stop mid-way to take on more water, as the steam engine converts from coal, to steam, to exhaust.  The downhill trip is mostly gravity run, with the brakeman doing the work to keep the passenger car in contact with the engine, which is using the cog to control the engine’s downhill speed as well.

 

 

At the summit, it was  a cold wet 50 degrees, with no scenic views due to being in the rain and clouds/fog.  There were about 30 very wet and tired hikers in the Summit building.  Roger chatted with a guy who is hiking the Appalachian Trail, and left Georgia about 4 months ago.  The guy told Roger that he’s lost 25 lbs on the trek and wouldn’t recommend it as a good diet.  The guy looked very lean to us.

We got to the US/Canada border and it was slow crossing as it took 40 minutes to finally be in the province of Quebec Canada.  It was interesting to note that the Canadian flag was not flying anywhere that we saw, but the Quebec provincial flag of blue with 4 fleur d’leis.  We got the feeling that we weren’t in Canada, but a French province because all the signs are in French and hardly any bilingual.  At the campground the signs that are in English have either spelling or syntax errors, for example “out  off order.”    We got settled in, found out about how to get the ferry to Quebec City and unloaded the bikes so the RV is easier to park tomorrow.  It currently isn’t raining and hopefully tomorrow there won’t be any rain in the forecast because it would be nice not to have to pack the rain jackets.  Roger and I just returned from the shower house, sans shower.  The shower costs 25 cents Canadian for one minute and we had not expected this, because it wasn’t listed as a fee shower in the campground book.  You would think for $75 Canadian/night the campground could provide some free shower water.  Needless to say we were both miffed and Roger turned on the hot water heater for our shower inside the RV.  Showering in the RV is just inconvenient, because I feel compelled to wipe it completely down after it’s all said and done.  The shower curtain keeps the doors dry enough, but then drying the curtain in the sink works well enough it’s just that we don’t want to make a habit of it.  Tomorrow we’ll definitely have some coins, as we’ll be hitting an ATM for some Canadian money.