This past week I was in Halifax for two different work purposes. Just one day out the five I was there was kind of damp, otherwise it was a gorgeous week.
Sunday: Vino Volo, an easy flight sitting next to someone I knew, a long commute into downtown Halifax because one of the bridges was shut down, the Prince George Hotel (my home for the next five nights), Stillwell (where 2 beers and a large Japanese fries was $21 and I was asking myself why I don’t live there) and then, much later, Rosie’s Burgers.
Monday: classic Halifax weather (fog like a blanket), day one of a conference, lots of trips to the Weird Harbour on Barrington, then EDNA for dinner*.
Tuesday: gorgeous weather, day two of the conference, more Weird Harbour, Gahan House with a big crew, and a sunset sail around the harbour on the Tall Ship Silva.
Wednesday: the other Weird Harbour, a walk down Spring Garden and back through the Public Gardens, a full day of meetings, dinner at Salt + Ash, wine at Peacock (they let me pick the wine, so Slovenian Cabernet Sauvignon it was!) and more perfect weather.
Thursday: day two of meetings, still more Weird Harbour, another gorgeous day, and after the meetings wrapped a colleague and I walked to brother #1’s house for a bbq and the Canada/Qatar match with brother #2.
Friday: hotel breakfast, one last Weird Harbour visit (along with what I think was the Spanish SailGP team), airport, terrible pizza, and an easy flight home.
Last night we had dinner at Carisma, using a gift card that had given to us as a Christmas gift. We arrived to find it nearly empty — I guess everyone was avoiding downtown because of the World Cup?
Spaghettini w/ black tiger shrimp, brandy tomato cream
Mediterranean sea bass w/lemon, extra virgin olive oil
bottle of 2020 Chardonnay Umbria Cervaro della Sala Antinori
Dessert
Molten chocolate cake
glasses of 2015 Recioto Della Valpolicella Domini Veneti
Normally dessert would be a compromise on something not quite so chocolate-y, but I got to choose because Lindsay accidentally fired sauce all over my shirt when she dismantled a shrimp.
I returned home yesterday from my latest trip to Moncton, the first in a while.
Monday I had a coffee meeting at Epoch Chemistry. That evening, my mom & dad, brother #2, and the S-I-L came over for dinner at The Gahan House.
Tuesday I did a full day in the office, before a bunch of us drove over to Shediac for dinner at Captain Dan’s. It was too chilly to sit outside and fully enjoy the shore setting, but a beer, a chicken sandwich, and good company went a long way.
Wednesday we spent the afternoon outside making beds for kids, so felt like we earned beers on the patio at Monk 10, followed by a big team dinner at The Bunker and a nightcap at St. James Gate.
Thursday was another full day of work events, so I was too introvert-tired to do much other than crash in my room with takeout, especially since I had to be up at 4am to catch a flight.
So: nothing groundbreaking in terms of restaurants, but it sure is a lot more fun being there for patio weather.
This weekend marked the end of two unexpected successes.
Thursday marked the final episode of Hacks (imdb). We only started watching it a couple months ago, but quickly burned through all 46 episodes, and caught up just before the series finale. We’d heard it was good, but couldn’t have known just how good it turned out to be. It was definitely our favourite thing that we were watching. At some point during our watch I pointed out how many parallels there are to BoJack Horseman, so it’s no wonder we liked it.
Last night the Habs were smoked by the Carolina Hurricanes, who look poised to win their first cup in twenty years. As severe as their beating in this series was, the season as a whole has to be considered a huge win. They’re the youngest team in the league, and they made the Eastern Conference Final. No one gave them a chance to beat Tampa in the first round, and they did. Few people thought they’d beat Buffalo in the second round, and they did. Their core is young, their talent pipeline is strong, their contracts are well-managed, and both their organization and their coaching staff are excellent. They learned from their first-found playoff exit last year; they’ll learn from this too. Their season ended less than 24 hours ago, but I’m already excited for next year.
There are very few songs, or pieces of music, that I find myself utterly unable to listen to because they’re so bad. Sure, I’m judgy about music in general, but there are a select few ditties that anger me. “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys, for example.
Another is an ad that occasionally plays while I’m watching SportsCentre in the morning, relaxing with my coffee, trying to center myself before the day begins: the ad for Kars 4 Kids. The instant I hear the first note, I dive across the couch to grab the remote and hit the mute button, often making a guttural sound to block out the janky little earworm before it can take hold.
Last week I read that, following a California court decision to ban the ad for false advertising. (“A strategy of deception” was the judge’s exact phrasing.) The CBC has since removed the ads from circulation; I can only hope all other channels follow. Not just for using deceptive practices, but because it’s one of the most loathsome jingles ever foisted upon the public.
Brother #1 was in town this week, so we got to break bread together a few times. Monday night Lindsay and I met him at Bar Ardo, which I’d been to once before, but Lindsay hadn’t.
I don’t remember everything the brother had, but Lindsay and I had:
Grilled Mediterranean octopus, cucumber, cannellini beans puree, mint
Grilled sourdough bread, whipped butter, Sicilian anchovies (we didn’t order this, but our server accidentally punched this in, so she gave it to us anyway)
Not a great dining experience, overall — wrong things ordered, food coming out at random times, Lindsay’s pasta wasn’t great, etc. But somehow it was still $220+tip. for the two of us. Anyway.
Later in the week I was downtown after a meeting, so I met up with the brother for lunch near his hotel at Som Tum Jinda. Cool little spot, and the food was fantastic. I had the Massaman duck confit; I don’t remember what the brother got but he seemed quite pleased with it. He left there and flew on to Ottawa, promising to say hi to his friends who I became close with when I lived with him for a summer.
Also, on the walk there, I tried a new (to me) coffee spot that he’d tried the day before: Black Wolf. It was good — my acid test is always asking for a cortado to see if they get the flavour and temp right, and they did.
That same day, I ended up at a work dinner at yet another new place: Notte. Well, it’s a new incarnation, but certainly not a new location for me: I spent so many dinners there when it was the wine bar, and next door at Hank’s for breakfast, that I couldn’t even count them. Anyway, the food was pretty decent:
Housemade focaccia w/ parmesan butter & chive oil
Grilled lamb speducci w/ herb marinade, anchovy, spiced yogurt
I had the roasted cavatelli bianco w/ roasted semolina, pork & lamb sausage, butter, pecorino, toasted hazelnuts
glasses of Orvieto Classico and Lazio Bianco and Cannonau
I brought home a piece of lemon olive oil cake for Lindsay but she didn’t want it, so guess who did? This guy.
I uninstalled Instagram from my phone this week. I haven’t yet deleted my account — I do think I get some small utility from local and wine-based accounts — but getting it off my phone solves the immediate problem, which is that the algorithm kept luring me in and fiddling with my brain. I’d been thinking about deleting it for weeks, but pulled the trigger when I was listening to a random episode of Q from last fall where Scarlett Johansson talked about never having been on social. That felt like the universe giving me a sign.
At this point I have no social media left on my phone, having deleted my Twitter account(s) last year, and deactivated my Facebook account about five years before that. I have, of course, never owned a TikTok account. I mean, maybe Reddit counts? But I spend very little time on there.
Early returns are promising. Within a day of deleting the app I’d read more of my current book than I’d read in the previous two weeks.
A couple days after we got back from our trip, Lindsay got sick. And then a few days later I got sick. And then, just as I was starting to feel better, Bianca got sick. She had some kind of UTI or something. But I’m happy to report that, after a couple of very expensive vet bills, she seems to be fine again. She’s a very good girl.
So yeah, it was quite a week. We were both pretty excited for a change of pace by the time Friday rolled around, and we were glad that months-ago us had booked symphony tickets — even if months-ago me couldn’t predicted that both the Canadiens and Raptors would be playing critical game 6s that night. Anyway.
We decided to have dinner at Canoe first, which was somehow Lindsay’s first time there. Luckily, the weather was perfect, so had miles of clear view from the 54th floor. We ate:
I had the duo of pork: roast tenderloin, crispy belly, kohlrabi, baby turnip, cider jus
glass of Produttori del Barbaresco, Barbaresco, Piedmont, Italy, 2022
Lindsay had the wild BC halibut w/ kohlrabi écrasé, cider cream + roasted squid risotto nero
glass of Domaine Fabien Coche, Bourgogne Côte-d’Or, Burgundy, France 2023
screeched tarte au sucre w/ wintergreen chantilly + brown butter milk sauce
coffee, tea
We rushed out of there to catch our 7:00 show, and realized only when we got there that the show was for 7:30, not 7:00. That was my bad. I was so fixated on how this conflicted with the Montreal game that I just conflated their start times.
Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3 w/ soloist Lukáš Vondráček
The world premiere of Cris Derksen’s short piece ‘STILL HERE’
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 9 in E-flat Major, Op. 70
[UPDATE: tragically, just two weeks after this concert, Cris Derksen was killed in a car accident.]
Obviously I know nothing about Rachmaninoff, or this piece, or piano concertos in general, but it certainly seemed a challenging technical piece. My only other observation was that the soloist seemed to be rushing the music. He seemed to rarely look at up conductor Elim Chan during the most challenging runs, during which he seemed to run away from the orchestra. Chan had to do yeoman’s work to hold it all together, from what little I could tell.
Anyway, we left there and got home to a still-happy cat, and I got to see the final few moments of overtime in the Montreal game in which Tampa forced game 7, and RJ Barrett’s insane-sky-high-bounce-and-in 3 at the end of OT to force game 7 in a series no one thought the Raptors could win.
Shortly after leaving Frank we turned north and began the long, boring drive up to Calgary. There was plenty more snow, and a few more deer.
Driving into Calgary was kind of annoying. Lots of bad drivers on the highways. Still ice in the underpasses. Knuckleheads cutting me off and forcing me to miss turns — which, in a city with as many one-way streets as Calgary, is a serious pain. Parking lot full of slush. And then we couldn’t get into our friend’s condo, as someone had…glued her lockbox shut. What the hell is wrong with people? And why did Calgary hate us so much? Anyway, we spent about 15 minutes trying to scrape the glue out of the lockbox before giving up and checking into the Calgary Le Germain.
We didn’t have long to shake that whole encounter off, though, as we were meeting our friends Stevie & Sarah at PARK by Sidewalk Citizen. Sarah had booked it, and what a find she made — food is listed below, but the decor, the vibes, the staff were all terrific.
Three Cuts of Beeswax Dry-Aged Lamb (12-day dry-aged sirloin, 12-day dry-aged ribs, 21-day dry-aged leg) w/ house garlic fries, garlic toum, red pepper jam
Dessert
Daily Donut (strawberry + almond)
“Turtles” Ice Cream
Chocolate Hazelnut Layer Cake
Drinks
Various beer, wine, cocktails…at this point of the trip I wasn’t keeping track
I’ve never heard of dry-aging lamb in beeswax, but my god…it was incredible.
We walked home, chatting, and then Lindsay and I staved off crashing long enough to drink some Burrowing Owl “Athene” (which was tremendous) and change our flight.
Sat Apr 18
After two weeks in the west, in which we’d encountered every type of weather possible, it was time to go home. We showered, packed, and scooted over to Kensington. Our plan had been to leave the wine we’d accumulated along the way at our friend’s condo as a means of payment, but since that plan fell through and we hadn’t the spare kilos in our luggage to bring them home with us, we gifted them to Sarah & Stevie along with some treats from COBS. But really, it was just an excuse to see them again and play with their level-10 adorable dog.
We left them, drove to the airport, dropped the rental car, checked into our flight, and had an easy flight home. There we found one very happy, snuggly cat.
.:.
And so: thank you, BC. Despite nearly killing me in a mountain pass, you remain my second-favourite province.
While Lindsay had a virtual meeting, I went and got us breakfast sandwiches, muffins, and coffee/tea at Queen Of The South. By the time I had the goods her meeting was ended, and we finished packing up.
The next phase of our plan was to drive across the bottom of BC, ending up in Fernie. I’d never been through that part of BC before, and TBH didn’t have much time to research anything in between. I figured we’d just stop somewhere for lunch, and otherwise blast on through to Fernie in a day.
We left Osoyoos, and headed east on the Crowsnest Highway. We immediately started climbing, taking in beautiful views as we crested Anarchist Mountain, and passed through farmland and forest. We drove through a bit of snow at a high mountain pass but quickly drove out of it, and paused to take pictures of Christina Lake.
A few minutes after leaving the lake, we began another climb. We saw signs about needing winter tires through the end of April, but given how warm it had been when we left Osoyoos we figured it didn’t apply that day. Silly us. Not ten minutes later, we found ourselves in the middle of a snowstorm. Five minutes after that, as we drove over the Paulson Pass, we lost control of the car in the snow-covered road at least once. (It turns out we had all-weather mud + snow tires, but not full winters.) We managed to keep it on the road, white-knuckling until we descended toward Castlegar and the snow turned back into rain.
We pulled into the Lion’s Head Pub, and ordered beers to soothe our jangled nerves. While we drank those and waited for sandwiches to arrive, we looked up traffic conditions for the rest of the Crowsnest. Turns out the next section of highway, Kootenay Pass, was already much worse, and would remain so until Thursday morning. We found a live webcam of the pass, and instantly knew we didn’t feel safe driving through it, so we hurriedly changed plans: we booked an AirBnB in Castlegar for two nights and shifted our Fernie AirBnB to Thursday night. Luckily our post-Fernie plans were very fluid, so we had little to reschedule there.
We finished our meals and killed some more time at the pub (they were awesome, and we resolved to return the next day), stopped for coffee, got some groceries, and drove to the AirBnB — they were fantastic and had the place ready for us in ~90 minutes. It had lots of space, a mountain view, laundry facilities, and a comfy bed — for us, at that moment, it was a palace. And most importantly, we were safe. We assembled a charcuterie board and drank sparkling wine from the Okanagan, barely remembering the 20 degrees that had welcomed us just three days before.
Wed Apr 15
Obviously we had no plans, considering we weren’t expecting to be in Castlegar. We took the opportunity to sleep in, relax at the AirBnB, and catch up on emails (and blogging). Eventually we went out for coffee & pastries at Crumbs, then to a park by the Columbia River (I was humming Woody Guthrie all day).
It was pretty cold, so we popped back into the Lion’s Head for some food & drink. Too much food, honestly — their portions are out of control. Bursting, we drove back to the AirBnB, drank a bottle of Tantalus Chardonnay, and tried to save up energy and luck for Thursday.
Thu Apr 16
We had a pretty sleepless night, honestly. We kept looking at weather updates and highway conditions and live webcams of Kootenay Pass. Around 3am Lindsay worked out a plan to avoid it, while I worked on plan C: abandon the south of BC and strike north for Revelstoke.
When we finally got up for good, we were pretty sure plan C was what we’d go with. But our Fernie AirBnB host messages to say their roads were fine, and we decided to go with plan B: take the Kootenay Lake ferry instead of driving over Kootenay Pass. We collected snacks and coffee at Crumbs, said goodbye to our safe haven of Castlegar, and drove north.
Driving along the Kootenay River was beautiful — it was hard to keep my eyes on the road. We eventually made it to Balfour, where the ferry crosses the lake. Unfortunately, the larger ferry was out of service, and we didn’t make it onto the smaller one, so we’d have to wait 90 minutes. Just enough time to eat some lunch at The Landing. When the ferry returned we got right on, and enjoyed a gorgeous 35-minute trip across the lake. Lindsay commented that it might have been a blessing in disguise to be delayed and rerouted this way — when would we ever take such a picturesque ferry ride again?
That’s not sunshine on the mountaintop. It’s last night’s snow.
On the other side of the lake we had a lovely, winding drive. Lindsay curated a mountain-themed playlist. We spotted lots of deer on the roadside. The weather was lovely, save one really bad spot along Moyie Lake between Creston and Cranbrook. Eventually we reached Fernie, grabbed food from the first place we saw (Subway), and got to our AirBnB. We drank a bottle of Nk’Mip Pinot Noir and slept like the dead.
Fri Apr 17
I woke up early, and caught a glimpse of the mountains before they became shrouded in fog. We packed up and moved on, grabbing a late breakfast on our way out of town at The Bridge Bistro.
We drove east, thinking it would be an easy drive, but once again hit miserable weather at Crowsnest Pass. Luckily, we got through it, and then stopped somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for decades: the Frank Slide. I’ve read about it. I’ve sung along live to the Rural Alberta Advantagesong about it. But it’s not the same as actually seeing it.
We drove up to the interpretive centre to see the slide from above. We didn’t go through the full tour, but we did chat with one of the guides for a bit, and go out onto the catwalk to see it up close. You can’t really grasp the enormity of it until you see it up close, and that makes it fairly unique in terms of natural disasters: explosions last for an instant, hurricanes pass, fires go out, etc. But this pile of rock would take a century to move, so there it’ll stay forever, reminding us of the town buried beneath it.
Anyway, somewhere in the snowy mess of Crowsnest pass, we’d entered Alberta. It was in this godforsaken province that our journey would end some 24 hours later.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 