Finding the hills in full colour
Even we “hue-challenged” people enjoy fall colours, and I’m back after an afternoon in the hills. Due to a shortfall in my planning, we may have travelled further afield than expected, but I can tell you that the section of the Eastern Townships we visited was glorious; hilly, serpentine and clothed in reds, greens, yellows and mixtures of all. Fall rocks!
The original destination was a hamfest, which for those who don’t know the term refers to a flea market for those who take joy in keeping as much of their old electronic gear operational as possible. Yes, there was some junk on the tables, but the sheer volume of tubes (lamps to those who speak the other kind of English) was a real surprise. A shocker, too, if you plugged some of them in, because there was no warranty offered or implied. When your transmitter requires one of those magical glass capsules with specific alphabet soup as a name, places like a local hamfest are the best source. I did buy some cable, and some porcelain tubes, and a radio and some books and a lightning arrestor, so my time was well used.
The GPS we’ve been fooling around with for the last couple of years developed a case of erratic behaviour; turning off after a couple of minutes and refusing to restart until I popped the batteries. This led to a decision to purchase a newer model (not for me or by me) and from now on we’ll get lost with coloured maps. The useful detail is that the new device takes memory cards, and transferring a set of maps takes significantly less time (2 minutes vs 25). The power cable will ship in a couple of weeks, with my new antenna; the ham radio market is small, and recourse to the same vendor for more than one device goes with the territory. He suggested the inclusion, we concurrred.
Which takes us back to our travels; I hadn’t loaded enough of the map sets, so we had to accept a modified dead reckoning method, where a line pointed towards where we wanted to go and we tried to make the roads fit. Not terribly efficient. I did return to the church where we got married a couple of decades ago; the original had burned down and there was a replacement. I took pictures just the same.
