road trip day 2!

Day 2 of our road trip started out with a nice (and free) continental breakfast in the hotel, where we met one of our fellow guests, a lady from Ohio who was visiting Auburn with her husband. I tend to disagree with Americans collectively, but always seem to find individual American citizens amicable and polite; I think this is how my dad feels about Korean people. In fact, now that I think about it, this is how I feel about people in general. :)

From Auburn we continued along the small-town tour of upstate New York, making our way through Skeneatles (another quaint little town, reminiscent of the town of old Markham) and Lafayette, which was in the middle of some beautiful hilly farm country. Cazenovia had some beautiful and huge old colonial homes, I can picture Martha Stewart living in such a place.

The approach to Albany became little hairy, when we became aware of the deficiencies of the state's road signage around the same time we learned how imprecies our map is. Somewhere along the way, while still hurtling along at 55 mph, the navigator on our little expedition realized that she had never really looked at a US map from a driver's point of view and didn't really understand which little dots on the map corresponded with which town names, and which little numbers represented which exits on the highway. After a few detours and missing a couple of exits, we finally rolled into our hotel. A surprisingly good lunch at Panera Bakery got our day back on track, and after a nap and a dip in the pool we were feeling human once more.

Dinner at Chili's was interesting. Apparently all the big chain restaurants in NY state are now required to list the calorie content on their menus. It's an eye-opener, but I can see this being a good thing once people get used to it. With the help of the new menu, I chose a nice, relatively healthy (and tasty) margarita chicken (600 calories) instead of a burger (1400 calories). We decided to forgo the 500-700 calorie appetizers, figuring none of them were worth it. Knowledge is power! Unfortunately, having saved ourselves these unnecessary calories at dinner, we decided we were entitled to a few later, and have since discovered Nutter butter cookies. um...

road trip, day 1

we're finally on the road, en route to Windham NY where we will crawl through the mud and hopefully leap over a fire pit alongside several thousand of our American brould n';eetheren. It's going to be an exciting time for sure, but there are some adventures to be had before then...

we left home yesterday during an almost biblical downpour. the driving was...well, actually, I don't know, since I did absolutely none of it. Byron says our little rental Hyundai Accent is 'gutless' but I think if that's the worst he can say about it then it's not so bad. It's far better than being 'unsteerable' or 'difficult to bring to a stop', for example.

We tried to make good time, but the trip from Toronto to Auburn, NY somehow took almost 8 hours. We did spend quite a frustrating time trying to get out of Niagara Falls ("ooh, look, we can cross right at the falls! Won't that be nice!") and we wouldn't want to regret not getting wings for lunch in Buffalo, so we had to stop there for a while. We also passed through all sorts of tiny places that I'd never heard of: East Aurora with its surprising wind farms, Varysburg, a quaint little town, Attica (which has a gigantic walled-in jail in the middle of a suburb...unless the suburb grew up around the jail). Lima NY didn't seem to have a public washroom, and so found its soil amended ever so slightly...we also were stopped in Lima by a fellow in a car who offered to sell us meat out of the back of his truck. We eventually made our way to Auburn, where we slept like logs at the Inn at Finger Lakes. On to Albany in the morning!

summer happenings and visitations by nieces

whoooo, where's the summer gone at? here it is, the long weekend, and it's fall. I blame Annalise, Byron's niece from Regina who's visiting for a few days before starting first year university. They have had some damp and chilly weather out west, and I suspect she's brought it with her. Perfect sleeping weather (and I do love sleeping) but it's sad to see another summer come to an end...

The summer has been one of bike rides, camping, gym-going, and working weekends. Our garden has fallen apart a bit, due partly to my weekend overtime and partly to its being overrun with spiders and slugs. Bleah! We did manage to make some raised planter boxes and a trellis, on which we've grown 2 cucumbers and a load of raspberries, so I can't complain too much.

The volunteering has taken a different path, the bees and Foodshare are last year's news. I'll likely pick up with them again, but wanted to try something different this summer. I've joined forces with Not Far From The Tree, a super bunch of folks who go out and pick fruit, right here in the city. First time visitors to Toronto have been surprised at how much greenery the city has, and among all that foliage we have lots and lots of fruit trees. Until a couple of years ago much of that fruit was going to waste, but Laura Reinsborough decided that was a shame, and started organizing volunteers to harvest the bounty. Volunteers keep a portion, tree-owners get a portion, and the rest goes to foodbanks and community organizations. Win-win-win! After a few picks (about 5 hours work) I came home with 15 lbs of pears, 5 lbs of plums and 5 lbs of rather scary apples. The end result is that this winter we will all get fat on jam, delicious jam!

Another highlight of the summer has been quality time with nieces. My own dear niece Katie is now 15 big years old, and to me that's always seemed a good age to be confused and get into trouble. I am thrilled that I'm cool enough to be a facebook friend to her, and was really excited when she suggested we 'hang out' sometime over the summer. We spent a great day in Kensington Market, talking and listening and learning from and about each other... I'm hopeful that we can make this a regular event.

As mentioned earlier, Byron's niece is here visiting, she's 18 and a completely different species of teenager. It's great to spend some quality time with her. She's a young lady approaching a really exciting time of life. Freshly graduated from high school, with a huge range of interests and experiences in spite of her youth the world is her bivalve, and it's invigorating to share some time with someone so raring to explore the world.

Fall will bring the Warrior dash and the start of night school--Byron is taking an art metal class and I'm taking photography, and oh yes, maybe I'll file my taxes as well :0 and I'm sure that we'll find other adventures along the way, which will be chronicled here in my customary irregular intervals.