September 11, 1935-Tourist Trade Flourishes in Canada Despite Bad Highways
The Washington Daily News — Wednesday, September 11, 1935
Tourist Trade Flourishes in Canada Despite Bad Highways
By ERNIE PYLE
QUEBEC — Canada is overrun with American tourists this summer. And does Canada love it? Yes, indeed.
They publish big stories in the papers every time the government issues the monthly tourist figures. And in between times the papers interview the merchants to see how much the Americans are spending. If this keeps up, Canada is apt to get like France was after the war—grabby.
It’s hard to believe, but during July and August there was one tourist in Canada for every five Canadians!
In each of those two months, there were 2,000,000 visitors up here busting around all over the place. And there are only 10,000,000 people in all of Canada.
As early as June, Canada had 1,550,000 visitors. And of course you know that a lot of them were from the States.
The Dionne Quintuplets at Callander are one big attraction. The heavily advertised, old-fashioned Gaspe peninsula is another. And there is always the cooler weather, and the call of Quebec and the North woods.
On the roads you meet as many cars with U.S. license tags as you do Canadian. Up on the Gaspe coast one day we checked on all the traffic we met for one hour. Here is the result:Cars from U.S., 28; cars from Quebec province (of which Gaspe is part), 11; cars from other Canadian provinces, 6; horses and buggies or wagons, 3; dog carts—didn’t count ’em, too many.
I often wonder what some of these other American drivers are thinking as they go bumping along, gripping the wheel and eating dust. My own thoughts frequently put me right in line for the electric chair. For some of these Canadian roads, you know, aren’t so hot.
In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and parts of Quebec and Ontario, the gravel roads are inhumanly rough. The bouncing and jolting and banging sometimes get so bad you think you’ll just have to get out and kick something. And the cars suffer. In 1500 miles of these gravel roads, my car was in the repair shop five nights for tightening up and straightening out.
The roads are fundamentally all right; they’re wide and well surfaced, and very well marked, much of the time better than in the States. But in dry weather heavily traveled graveled roads get washboardy. And Canada was without rain for a month. You get hundreds of miles of “wash-boards” whose depressions are sometimes as much as six inches deep, and its drives you nuts.
Since the rains, the roads are improving. And, of course, if you’re a traveler who sticks to the main highways around the Montreal and Quebec area, you have pavement all the time.
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If you get around the Gaspe peninsula, you’re a good mountain driver. There are mountain roads on the eastern tip that seem to go straight up and down. Gaspe is the only place, in several years of driving over most of the United States and Canada, that I have had to go into low gear to get up a steep grade in an eight-cylinder car.
There are places in Gaspe where you go clear up the side of a mountain for a mile, and then a mile down the other side, without ever shifting out of low gear, and you use your brakes as well as low gear compression going down, too. But the beauty of the scenes makes up for it.
If the visitor to Canada is rabid about his brand of cigarettes, he had better bring a carton along. The popular American brands are 60 cents a pack up here. So we smoke Canadian cigarettes, 20 for 20 cents.
They charge you a cent a dollar for changing American money into Canadian at the banks. It’s foolish to get any changed. American money is accepted everywhere at par, even way up on the Gaspe.
Gasoline runs from 29 to 32 cents a gallon, which is plenty. They say the Imperial gallon is five quarts, but I see no difference in the number of gallons the car uses.
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