Category: Trips

Dominion City

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I had a quick work(ish) trip to Ottawa this week. I was there for less than 48 hours and pretty busy the whole time so I didn’t even try making plans with friends there. I did get to try (and re-try) a few decent places though:

  • I tried to go to Union613 but it closes at 10pm. Because Ottawa. Instead I went back to my hotel, the Alt, and tried the Dominion City Earl Grey Marmalade Saison and then had a glass of Norm Hardie Cab Franc.
  • Bread & Sons for a very good cappuccino and a straight-outta-Paris croissant.
  • After a work(ish) dinner at Wilfrid’s in the Chateau Laurier I walked into the market and went to Brother’s Beer Bistro, my Ottawa favourite. I had last year’s Bellwoods Jelly King and it nearly melted my face with sourness.
  • Coffee at the newest (I think?) Morning Owl.

Calgary

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Last night I got back after a 5-day excursion to Calgary, ostensibly for work but with an extra 36 hours or so thrown in for a city visit. Little did I know I’d develop a sinus infection while there. Anyway, here’s the extracurricular summary:

Beer sampled: the rooftop at the National on 8th with my now-Cowtowner friend Andrea. I had a flight of 6 locals. Beer Revolution, where I tried two local pints while having an excellent (pizza) lunch with a colleague. I also had a coffee at Kawa which, once the sun’s over the yard arm, serves a very solid beer selection; alas, I was there too early.

 

 

Coffee drunk: I had a nice little espresso at Cucina, another at Kawa, a cappuccino at Phil & Sebastian‘s Simmons Building location, a latte to go from P&S which I drank sitting by the Bow River, and…like, 8 coffees over 3 days from Monogram, which happened to be right next door to my conference hotel.

 

 

 

 

 

Food scarfed: The Catch’s Oyster Bar for some crab cakes and oysters when I landed. CharCUT for dinner my first night, since it was in my first hotel. Small world confirmation: the bartender had also gone to Dal, and her boyfriend used to work at Bishop’s Cellar and, as such, has probably sold me booze at some point. My last night there I went to Modern Steak in Kensington, which was outstanding and had a nice Irish bartender. I walked home, along the Bow for a while and then across the Peace Bridge.

 

 

 

 

Movies watched: Sicario and Eye In The Sky on the flight there. Hyena Road and most of Stories We Tell on the flight back. I had to take my headphones out for the last twenty minutes of the flight because my ears weren’t popping (never did) and I was in such severe pain.

Random thoughts thunk:

  • The Le Germain is a much better hotel than the Westin.
  • Downtown Calgary is pretty compact, but the walkability is marred by highways and rail lines bisecting the core.
  • I skipped the private rodeo organized by the conference, partly for health and partly because I despise rodeos, and don’t regret it one bit.
  • While I generally prefer an aisle seat when flying, when flying into Calgary I will always try for a window seat so I can see the mountains when I land. We did this time, and I also happened to get a smashing picture of Winnipeg from the air halfway through the flight.

Costa Rica

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

SUNDAY

Screw the winter jackets, it was finally time for Costa Rica. We got ourselves to Pearson and got on our WestJet flight. The in-flight movies didn’t work, so I watched Coriolanus and part of Sin City 2 on my tablet. The baby next to me was teething but barely made a sound, so…thanks, baby.

We got to SJO, wound through a huge customs line, and were met by Esteban as part of our Airbnb service. Awesome guy. He gave us a primer on San Jose, showed us good places to eat and drink in Barrio Escalante, and dropped us at our Airbnb loft, which was awesome.

We walked — outside! in short sleeves! — to Wilk but it was closed so we went to Costa Rica Beer Factory instead. Not quite what I was hoping for, but we found some decent local craft brews. We ate a bit there, picked up snacks and travelers at the grocery store on the corner, walked back to the loft, had chips & beer and crashed on their couch. Vacation!

MONDAY

Truck horns woke us up. I guess staying near a hospital loading zone will do that. We ate our breakfast, cleaned up, and called an Uber. Not that we were anxious to leave San Jose, but we were very anxious to reach our next spot. Got to the airport super-early, as Nellie often likes to do. Took a 20-seat NatureAir flight to Quepos on the Pacific coast. 20 minutes later and we were landing on a small paved strip in a bunch of palm trees.

Our next place, Kura Design Villas, had arranged a driver to pick us up. One hour’s drive, and one VERY steep hill later, we arrived to…holy shit, the most amazing place we’ve ever stayed. Seriously. The place is stunning, from the rooms, to the pool, to the views, and all parts in between. We had a signature “Jaguar” cocktail, checked in, ate lunch, got to our room, changed, and spent the rest of the afternoon by the pool.

You can’t really see it in that last picture, but there was a stone parrot on the edge of the pool. Cool story, but you have to stay there to hear it. We had drinks by the pool and at the bar, courtesy of the amazing Simon. He made sangria (which I normally dislike, but this one…), let me practice my French, and tested a new rosé on us (verdict…we drank, like, all of it) and chatted with a couple from Texas. It’s easy to strike up conversations when there are only 10 people in the whole place. We ate dinner and crashed hard.

TUESDAY

Nellie’s birthday! We started the celebration by sleeping the hell in, since we’d imbibed a little too much in the heat and excitement of the day before. Then we had an absolutely stellar breakfast: fresh fruit, banana muffins, homemade bread with passion fruit jam, and coffee filtered through a cloth strainer, like an old-school pour over.

We spent the rest of the morning in and around the pool, enjoying the sun and breeze and water, and playing with a tiny visiting snake. We ate a light lunch of charcuterie and smoked wahoo (wahoo!) before I made it my mission to try all three Costa Rica Craft Brewing Co. beers on offer at the bar: the Libertas golden ale (which became my go-to drink all week), the Segua red ale (great, when I could find it), and their very last bottle of Malacrianza Scottish ale.

At some point in the afternoon we decided that we had to spend at least a little time on the awesome balcony just off our room. That’s where I gave Nellie her surprise birthday present: a trip I’ve already planned for this fall to see gorillas in Rwanda. She was more than a little excited about that.

We retired back upstairs to the main area where we toasted her birthday sunset with a bottle of Bollinger, watched two pairs of toucans in the nearby trees, and ate dinner alone on the rooftop, looking up at the stars.

WEDNESDAY

We got up early because our planned water taxi across the Gulf of Nicoya had been canceled due to high winds, so we had to go much further: up to Puntarenas to catch the big ferry. Not a nice drive, not a nice town, not a fast or exciting ferry ride, and not a nice drive from Paquera to our end destination: Santa Teresa. It was a tiring, boring trip, but at least we got to see some giant-ass crocodiles along the way.

We forgot the extra 3 hours of travel pretty quickly once we saw Latitude 10 though. It was a very different beast than Kura: right on the ocean, open air casitas with no locks, totally surrounded by trees and wildlife, but still with a high level of service. (It turns out all three places we stayed were part of the Cayuga collection of hotels.)

We had a quick lunch, dipped our toes in the ocean, had a nap in the hammocks at the top of the tide line, and watched the Pacific eat the sun.

Dinner was excellent: we shared a goat cheese salad, and had chicken and fish as our mains. We reconsider our plan to try a new place nearby each night; getting to town is a pain in the ass, and chef Mario has our full attention. The British couple staying there, usually as loathe to repeat dinner venues as we are, has already made the same decision. We take one last late night swim in the pool and we’re done, falling asleep under mosquito netting.

THURSDAY

We relax a little in the morning (leisurely breakfast; reading in hammock; swimming in pool; observing howler monkeys in nearby trees) before being collected for a zip-lining and canopy tour near Montezuma. There are no pictures because we looked like dweebs, but I can assure you that it was fun as hell. Along the way Nellie jumped in a natural pool at the top of a waterfall, we both got scolded a little for going too fast on the final line, I managed to knee one of our guides in the cojones (sorry mate) and we saw a white-nosed coati.

Afterwards our guide, Marcelo, took us to Montezuma where we grabbed some almuerzo típico (ceviche, mejillones, Imperial, Pilsen) by the water. He dropped us back at our place afterwards, where we rinsed off our sweat and jumped in the pool to cool down. We watched iguanas crawl around the trees by the pool, walked down to play in the surf, and had gin & tonic at sunset.


We had a few drinks before dinner with the Brits and a couple from Chicago on their honeymoon (who we totally sold on flying Porter to Toronto to try Jacobs & Co) before getting down to our own meals: we split a yellowfin tataki, then Nellie had the mushroom pasta and I had the steak with chimichurri.

FRIDAY

This was the kind of day vacation dreams are made of: after breakfast all four other couples left, and we had the entire place to ourselves for the whole day. We toyed with the idea of heading into town for lunch, but soon decided on the ambitious undertaking of doing absolutely nothing for a whole day. So we went for a swim. We read in the hammocks for hours (I finished Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys). We had a leisurely lunch. We walked along the beach for a bit and played in the surf. We watched iguanas and monkeys (including a tiny baby) be almost as lazy as us. We were enjoying one last sunset when finally another couple (New Yorkers, this time) arrived. Interlopers!

We got ourselves cleaned up before heading back to dinner, chatted with New York at the bar, and decided to eat dinner with them. Nellie had the chicken; I had this insane tuna steak. We all talked politics and entertainment news and health care and then had some local rum, then went for an after-dinner swim in the pool, dodging the swooping bats and comparing notes on constellations as seen from Central America. None of us knew what we were talking about, of course, except that Orion’s belt is obvious everywhere.

SATURDAY

Finally, we awoke to a noise we’d expected to hear all week: howler monkeys! They sound like a pack of angry dog-men, come for your soul. It’s good that the staff warns you in advance; if you didn’t have some context for that noise you’d have a heart attack.

We ate our last breakfast, hung out on the beach one more time, took one last swim in the pool, then packed up and said goodbye to the staff. The ride to Tambor airstrip was long and made Nellie kind of sick, and the wait there was about two hours longer than expected since our NatureAir flight was severely delayed. Luckily we had no connection to make, so we weren’t stressed…just hot and tired and very hungry.

Our flight finally arrived, and 25 minutes later we were at SJO. There we waited on the tarmac even longer than our time in the air while they figured out where to bus us. Luckily where they dropped us was where our driver was waiting, and he took us to our final home in Costa Rica: Finca Rosa Blanca, a coffee-plantation-cum-hotel in the hills north of San Jose. We had a quick snack at the bar, checked into our room, and enjoyed the view (and a cup of the house coffee) on our patio.

We ate dinner at their restaurant El Tigre Vestido that night, which was pretty good: Nellie had tomato soup and a huge sirloin; I had a roasted beet salad and the queen corvina with chorizo. It’s windy up in those hills, so for the first time on the whole trip we were actually rather chilly — Nellie brought a scarf, and we saw some (non-Canadian) people wearing coats.

Back in our room, we were pretty much done in. It was a late night after a long day of travel, so we just watched a movie (Adult Beginners) and conked out.

SUNDAY

I took advantage of our final day of warm weather by enjoying my morning coffee on the patio and waiting for Nellie to get up. We grabbed breakfast back in the restaurant (my pancakes with coconut syrup were especially delicious), packed up, relaxed for a bit, then got a ride to the airport. There were lines (airport exit tax: short; WestJet check-in: short; security: long) but we had enough time to grab a sandwich and beer at the Imperial pub and still get to our gate in time. I watched The Martian (still excellent) and Burnt (not bad) and almost finished Sin City 2 on the flight home.

It was shit-ass cold when we got off the plane, and reality began to sink in. We got home, unpacked, ordered pizza, watched The Walking Dead, and wished desperately that we were back at the Kura pool, or the Latitude 10 beach, or our Barrio Escalante loft.

We miss you, Costa Rica. Pura vida.

 

Cover photo by Dani Ihtatho, used under Creative Commons license

2015 Annual Report: Hyper-focus

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

If 2014 was the year when work became the primary focus of our lives, 2015 was the year where it more or less became the only focus. In short, this was the year in which we cut back on a lot of stuff we enjoy, either to focus on our jobs, or for other reasons entirely.

Which is not to say I/we didn’t consume a lot…but the volume seems to be continuing on a downward trend as work grows in importance. We watched just 44 new movies this year, down from 51 last year, and the fewest we’ve ever watched since I began tracking in 2004. I bought far more music though, partly because I’ve started listening to music at work more often and can evaluate more new stuff. I bought 22 new albums this year, up from 6 last year, and the most in any year since 2009.

What really suffered, though, was the reading. Books, especially — I can’t remember finishing a single new book this year. I started a few but never got more than a few dozen pages in. It wasn’t just books though: last year I ready eight books, blaming the low consumption on the time it took to read all my feeds, posts, and tweets. This year, though, I effectively stopped following Twitter sometime in the fall. Books, Twitter…one by one the distractions got eliminated.

It went further: we didn’t even bother booking Hot Docs tickets this year, for the first time since we started attending the festival. We didn’t get out to the wineries in Prince Edward County or in Niagara, except for a couple of stops on the way to our friends’ place. There were no summer trips up to Bat Lake, just a quick one in March. There wasn’t a big trip like in years past. No new continent explored. Not even a new city, except where work provided an excuse.

On the plus side, I also cut back in one other big area: my weight. As of this summer I started tracking what I ate, and I lost about 20 pounds. I’m not starving myself…I still eat and drink the same things. I just stopped eating the stuff I didn’t really want. I don’t even exercise. When could I? I’m working 70+ hours per week. [Note: I do not miss exercise and, on the whole, I enjoy my work, so…I’m good with this.]

Still, it’s not as if I’ve been living a secluded, monastic lifestyle. I mean, we traveled more than most people: New Orleans for Mardi Gras, Berlin (with Nellie, for work), Istanbul (without Nellie, also for work), an absolutely legendary 40th birthday trip to Quebec City and Montreal, and 18 hours to New York and back (again without Nellie, again for work).

We did a decent amount in Toronto too: the World Juniors, a Hip concert with CBGB, a beerworking event, the sixth Session beer festival, a Raptors game (which was unfortunately sullied by the presence of Stephen Harper), a Rush concert (one of their last, probably), a tiny bbq festival, the Rogers Cup final, a bourbon & chocolate tasting event, a craft beer boat cruise, a Rheostatics reunion performance, five TIFF screenings plus a gala, an epic Toronto sports evening, and Cask Days.

Trying new restaurants was still on the agenda too, like the newest location of Pizzeria Libretto, Rose & Sons, Roselle, Barberians, The Chase, the Every Time I… pop-up, Rasa, Alo, Rodneys, NAO Steakhouse, and Barque Butcher Bar for a wine(!) event.

We managed to get out of the city a little bit too, hitting Bat Lake with a crowd for the birth of 2015 and then again in March with a smaller crew; seeing friends in Barrie and going boating in Bolsover in the summer; and getting down to Niagara on the Lake with friends for a night.

So yeah, clearly it wasn’t a bad year. There were struggles and successes at work which I won’t talk about here, but which clearly put enormous demands on our time. Like I said last year, though: we chose these careers. And if working long hours* at a rewarding, high-paying job is my biggest complaint, then I’m doing just fine. The books can wait.

* I can’t say “working hard”; I grew up on a farm, so hard work means something different than sitting in an office or a meeting room

.:.

Cover photo by Dani Ihtatho, used under Creative Commons license

 

Cover photo by Tom Magliery, used under Creative Commons license

“It’s true. All of it. The Dark Side, the Jedi. They’re real.”

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We just got home from a vacation in NS a few hours ago. It was comprised of the usual eastern downtime: family, relaxation, food, drink, cribbage, dogs, driving, etc. It was like any other Christmas, except shockingly warm on the 25th (I walked across the yard in jeans and a t-shirt).

We did also manage to watch two new movies. Nellie and I already had tickets booked to see the new Star Wars on the 28th, but we knew we couldn’t wait that long, so we went in Truro.

I thought Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was fantastic. It wasn’t high art — it was largely derivative of the original trilogy — but it was completely necessary to restore people’s faith in the series. It was completely reverential of the original trilogy, and miles ahead of the three prequels. A re-watch of Revenge Of The Sith (the least bad of the three) just confirmed that.

We also watched Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which was surprisingly entertaining. Non-stop action, pretty good story. I’ll keep watching these until Tom Cruise is in a walker, as long as they’re like this.

.:.

Cover photo by Tom Magliery, used under Creative Commons license

Cover photo by Maggie Mbroh, used under Creative Commons license

How I commute now

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

I have a pretty easy commute to work each day. Most people in Toronto have to drive, or take a GO Train, or at least a long subway ride. Me, I’m about 20 minutes door-to-door: short walk + 7 subway stops + even shorter walk. I don’t know how people do an hour (or more) each way every day. I’ve never been one for needing a giant house (not having kids helps, I guess) so I don’t get the trade-off of spending that much time in a car or on a train.

I was thinking about some people’s long commutes earlier this week, when I flew home from New York. I was in and out of NYC in about 12 hours, just long enough to check in to my room, get some sleep, take care of some work things, and fly home. I flew Porter, naturally.

I didn’t even get to have a meal in New York, which just seems criminal. Worse yet: on my way into Manhattan my taxi stopped at a light right in front of The Pony Bar (one of my all-time favourite beer joints) and I couldn’t even go in. I just stared longingly through the window like a thirsty Garfield.

The next day I wrapped up my work thing at the Marriott Marquis, took a picture of Times Square from the 9th floor lobby, and beat it out of there.

Here’s the mildly-amazing bit: I left the hotel at 10:45. By 11:15 I was at Newark airport. By 11:20 the Porter agent had switched me to the noon flight. By 11:45 I was boarding. By 12:05 we were airborne. By 1:20 we were on the ground back in Toronto. By 1:25 I was clearing customs (well, a Nexus machine). By 1:35 I was through the tunnel and in a cab. By 1:45 I was home.

So that’s three hours from the door of my hotel room in midtown Manhattan to the foyer of my condo in downtown Toronto. I know people in the GTA who commute for three hours by car every day. I’m not sure whether to be impressed by the efficiency of modern air travel (when you get pretty good at it, that is) or sad for the people I know who spend 20% of their waking day fighting Toronto traffic.

Maybe both.

.:.

Cover photo by Maggie Mbroh, used under Creative Commons license

Herby, goaty business

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Beautiful weekends are made even better when your friends in Niagara-on-the-Lake invite you down for the night.

CBJ+M picked us up Saturday morning, and we drove to the Sunnyside Café for breakfast before heading down to Niagara. And by “heading” I mean crawling slowly through traffic jams. Eventually we made it to Beamsville for quick stops at Thirty Bench and Hidden Bench. We also stopped at Kew, and for the first time in four visits got to sit outside on their lovely patio.

We headed on into NIagara, picking up some beer at Silversmith and pie at The Pie Plate, and tasting more wine at the ridiculously grandiose Two Sisters. Finally, we arrived at Brian & Mandy’s for a nice afternoon swim, with poolside sparkling wine and crudités.

Our hosts prepared dinner: a vast pile of meat (steak, pork chops, and sausages) with beet salad and goat-cheese stuffed red peppers, along with bottles of 1999 valpolicella. A strawberry rhubarb pie procured earlier that day topped it all off.

We played bocce by car headlight, and some of us went for another dip. Brian and I were the two last standing, and ended the evening with a little Lagavulin.

The next day started with coffee, then another swim, then a fantastic brunch of bacon and herbed goat cheese fritatta, followed by yet more pie: a peach raspberry pie, to be exact. We played one bocce rematch, and then got on our way.

Stellar weekend, guys.