Travels with Tosh — A Journal; Ep. 43
Saturday, 4 January 2025
Dearest Tosh, the holiday season is behind us, and the rest of the year is in front of us. This will most likely be the last episode of our journey I will publish here on Medium; it has become a place I am not sure I like much, and seems to be headed in a direction I cannot abide. The little extra money I have to spend on things I want, and not just things I must (like bills…), makes me consider every expenditure with a critical eye toward the outlay-benefit balance.
Medium just does not make itself worth it anymore.
Hopefully, if I can find enough time and energy to make the transition to my Substack account — and an internet connection that is strong enough to make the changes — I will begin transporting all of these episodes over there. It will take some doing; there are many of them, and the process must be done entirely on this iPad on which I type the original documents, then copy them to Medium, and add formatting and such to make it somewhat readable.
All of that will have to happen in moving them to Substack, too, plus whatever idiosyncrasies that platform has — I have not even looked, so I have no idea if it will be a long, hard job, or relatively easy, and just time consuming. Time will tell.
As we begin the last three months of the Long Term Visitor Area, I will probably focus on the departures and any unusual experiences happening to me at the window of my Contact Station office.
Right now, most of the new visitors are from Canada, and a large portion of them from Quebec. This has highlighted a problem we have: Quebec is an outlier in. Canada, in that it is the only French-speaking Province, one that has taken the rather extreme position of not helping residents also become somewhat familiar with English, the only language spoken by those of us working here.
Today, for example, an elderly couple drove up in a very large, very expensive Class-A diesel recreational vehicle. Neither of the two spoke English, and we had a very hard time communicating with them as to which of the two passes they wanted to purchase, and for how long.
In the end, they bought an annual recreation pass that is good for two weeks at a time in a specific area, but that is NOT good for sleeping in the Long Term Visitor Area. Unfortunately for them, at the end of the day, I was walking around and saw them leave the area in which they were allowed to stay, and head into the LTVA area with two other French Canadian RVs.
Our assigned ranger will have to be told about this, because he went to them earlier today to check on their passes, and found them in the proper place. He will not find that when he checks tomorrow; the outcome will be challenging, because our ranger is a native Spanish speaker from Peru, who has a good command of English, but none in French. Hopefully, he will come to a pleasant, non-confrontational resolution, but only time will tell.
Until the next time we publish our next episode, Tosh, let us thank all the readers that have kept up with our journey from the bottom of our hearts. Without them, sharing the details would have been far less rewarding.
Here is to looking forward to a future on Substack, whenever that might be.
