Vacation 2007
9:38AM, September 05, 2007 - [ Permalink]
Another year, another vacation has flown by. This year it started with the August ByMUG meeting on Sunday.
I had to burn through the night to finish some stuff (unfortunately, not all of it) before leaving, but, we hit the road and made it to Pog Lake on a new site.
By the end of the second day, there, we set up the tent (Eureka Tetragon 1610)) & dinning tent, the tarps, the all-important hammocks, and generally settled in.
This year, I brought along three audio books to listen to because thus far I had not had any success with listening to them while I worked - human voices talking is incredibly distracting. I listened to:
- Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Clean Up Your Writing by Mignon Fogarty
- Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney
- the unabridged version of The God Delusion by
Richard Dawkins (read by Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward)
The first two went fairly quickly, lying the in comfort of one of the four hammocks. Both were well presented, and excellent to listen to.
At some point along the first two audiobooks, there I was, lying in a hammock, when a Monarch butterfly landed on my leg for a rest. The beautiful butterfly weighted a surprising amount - more than I would have guessed - as it sat there.
I paused to admire it, and summoned Tracey who had her digital camera (an HP Photosmart M425 that she got from Canadian Tire for $100) handy and got a shot off before the butterfly decided it was time to leave.
I only listened to the Richard Dawkins audiobook for a short while before discovering that the topic required me to play close attention - closer than I was able from a hammock, so I switched to listening to it once we'd gone to be, using the iPod's sleep timer function to make sure if I drifted off, I wouldn't get hopelessly lost. Typically, I listened to 30 minutes per night before getting tired enough to fall asleep. Score one for me - I found how to incorporate audio books into my life! Yay!
While camping, I spent much of my time lying in the hammocks either reading or watching the pines sway in the breeze.
My vacation reading list (roughly in order):
- August issue of Monitor Magazine (60 pages)
- A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 2) by George R.R. Martin (1,009 pages) Thanks Alex!
- Designated Targets by John Birmingham (429 pages)
- Neuromancer by William Gibson (271 pages)
- Summer issue of 2600 Magazine (66 pages)
- Waylander by David Gemmell (384 pages) Thanks Louis!
- A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3) by George R.R. Martin (1,117 pages)
- Sword in the Storm (The Rigante Series, Book 1) by David Gemmell (476 pages)
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (259 pages)
- Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy, Part 1 (Sword of Truth, Book 9) by Terry Goodkind (748 pages)
We had numerous guests come up to stay with us for a few days including Tracey's sister her and her two sons, Susi, Sara and Gailene (obviously not all at once).
While Susi was up, we decided that "flipping the potato" was a metaphor for something, but could not decide exactly what it would be. Any suggestions?
This year, we did a fair about of walking - although we only did two hiking trails (Spruce boardwalk and Lake of Two rivers) - most of it was either walking around the campground itself, or along the old railway bed between Pog lake to Mew Lake to the Lake of Two Rivers store (ice cream!) which was a roughly two hour walk in each direction.
On one of the walks, we came across a deer - which many people (and a dog) walked right past without seeing - and I got close enough that I might have been able to grab it. Instead, I shot it.
With my camera.
We did do some limited canoeing - a side effect from having messed up my wrist on a video shoot a couple of weeks before we left, which was truly unfortunate.
After having a look at the forecast (four days of rain), we decided to return early, as it was possible that there would not be enough time for everything to dry off before we were actually supposed to leave - and we hate packing up wet gear (you have to unpack it, dry it out, and the repack it).
Having made the decision to leave, we started the routine, and I turned the car around to make it easier to pack, when I discovered that we had lost our brakes. Now, we had had some brake issues shortly after arriving in the park, but Susi had brought up some replacement fluid, and the car had seemed fine since then.
I surmised that our trip to Whitney the day before had caused our brakes to fail completely. I poked around, added more brake fluid and then noticed it leaking out from under the car - the brake lines had failed completely. Tracey called Canadian Tire Auto Service (or whatever their CAA is called) and they sent a flatbed to come take the car (and Tracey) to Whitney, where they fixed the car while I continued to pack, racing against the coming rains.
The brakes were repaired, Tracey came back, we finished packing up, and hit the road home, getting home a touch after 11:00 PM.
We unpacked the next day, and hid out at home. We watched some episodes of Firefly, as I'd been thinking of it while camping, and then went to see the The Bourne Ultimatum (cool), and I finally was able to make my first visit to the new Canadian War Museum.
On the walk there, we stopped to pick up some cookies from B.Goodes, who now has his cookie-selling truck near the corner of Dalhousie and St. Patrick, behind the Upward Dog Yoga Centre (yummy!). I knew it would take me hours to go through it on my first visit, and I was quite right.
I'll cover the museum in more detail after my next visit there, but suffice it to say that it was a powerful experience for Tracey and myself.
The remainder of our vacation was spent out on walks within the city, more reading, watching a few movies and going to restaurants - we were surprised/dismayed to discover that TJ Pagotas had closed for renovations one night.
All in all, the vacation was wonderful. There was some personal development stuff I'd hoped to work on, but there is always tomorrow (spoken like a true procrastinator).
I've created a Flickr account to toss my photos online. So has Tracey. Enjoy!
