Category: Trips

Wake

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Another beautiful morning in Halifax, my last on this trip. In an hour I’ll have breakfast with Stanzi (in town temporarily herself), then head to the airport.

Last night I met up with friends at Salty’s for a few drinks on the waterfront. Somehow I ended up with a bottle of Moosehead…tragic. Anyway, some of us left there and had a fantastic dinner at Il Mercato. Knowing I’d have pasta the following night I stuck to seafood (never a bad choice in Halifax) and had shrimp & salmon…both fantastic. We knocked off a couple of bottles of Chianti Rufina (and a glass of white for my fish) and ordered decadent desserts. One of our party may have over-extended himself, but he recovered quickly.

Feeling poetic, we decided to finish off the evening at The Bitter End. It wasn’t a long night for me by any means though. One friend hit the wall and left early. My glasses of Macallan lasted me ’til around 11, but I needed some solo recharge time. I walked back to the hotel alone, suddenly reminded of how quiet Halifax streets (those outside the downtown core, at least) are at night. It felt peaceful. It felt right.

I was done. It was time to go home. Home home. I know I talked about Halifax being my spiritual home, if there is such a thing, but home is ultimately wherever Nellie is, and that’s where I feel like I need to be right now. I feel like a little chunk of me hasn’t lived there for the past four years…it’s lived in a text book or the computer or a hotel room during a week away on course. It’ll be nice to have that chunk back, and for Nellie to have it all there too, since she’s done without it for the last ~1400 days. What’s more, she’s been amazing about it. If she were anyone other than herself I probably wouldn’t have made it to yesterday.

One final, funny note: last night, sitting at The Bitter End, they were playing (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis. Odd choice, since it’s an old album…then I remembered something: after writing the last exam of my undergrad — which happened to be the very same subject as the one I wrote yesterday — I met some friends at the campus pub to celebrate. That day in the pub they played the fairly recent Oasis CD (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and we discussed the ridiculousness of the lyrics to “Wonderwall” over celebration beer. Twice in my life I’ve had that particular celebration, and each time I had the same soundtrack. The world’s funny, if a little precious.

[tags]halifax, mba, salty’s, il mercato, bitter end, oasis[/tags]

Smarter, relieved, sleepier

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While we’ve kind of had an Olympic theme running (ha ha) throughout our MBA program — we started in 2004, the year of the Athens games and we’re finishing just in time for Beijing — I didn’t realize the timing worked out so well. We actually write our last exam on one of the last days of the games, and the closing ceremonies will take place on the 24th…just as we close out our final MBA week and return home. I don’t think they planned it like this either; the class schedule’s been set since 2004 and I don’t think the Olympics schedule has been out that long.

On that subject, I guess I’ll miss the last week of the Olympics. But I guess I won’t mind that so much.

[tags]mba, olympics[/tags]

Oh sleepy day

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Been a busy couple of days…lots more family goings-on: visiting, singing, eating, celebrating, playing, and so on. Now it’s raining and gray, so we’re all hiding inside and lying about. I just had my ass handed to me at crib (skunked, narrowly avoiding being double-skunked) so I’ve scampered into the office to blog and lick my wounds. There may be a drive to find fried clams later. There may not. That is the extent of our planning and forethought this day.

[tags]family reunion[/tags]

Old Germany

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Last night some of us drove to Amherst, a nearby town, for some dinner. My brother had eaten at a new German restaurant in town the last time he was here, and he quite liked it, so we opted for that. It wasn’t a hard choice; there’s just never been a good restaurant in this town for as long as I can remember.

What a pleasant surprise the Old Germany restaurant was. We all left stuffed full of delicious food (enormous hunks of meat & fish, spaetzle, mashed potatoes, etc.) and proper (Lowenbrau! Erdinger!) German beer. The couple who owns the restaurant, one cook and one server, were very pleasant and friendly. It was extremely reasonably priced too: I had fresh bread, tasty garden salad, delicious Talapia in a mustard sauce, lots of mashed potatoes and two large beers for $22, tax in.

The ambiance is a little weird, since it’s built in an old Dairy Queen (and even still has some of the cheap plastic seating) but the food more than makes up for it. Anyway, when you have nine family members, three of whom are under the age of 10, you just make your own ambiance.

[tags]old germany restaurant, amherst[/tags]

Apres lunch, le deluge

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I’ve been back at the ancestral manse since about 1AM, following a pretty painless flight and drive with my brother, who picked me up. It’s been a nice quiet day, full of chores and playing with kids, until just now when copious amounts of relatives starting showing up. We shall soon leave them to their family dinner (just my mom, her nine brothers and sisters and their spouses).

It’s been nice so far. I get the sense, however, that four days of insanity are just about to begin.

[tags]family reunion[/tags]

Final thoughts about our trip

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

  • Pictures of our trip are finally in a Flickr set. I uploaded the 30 I liked the best. Somehow we managed not to take any pictures in Vancouver…I guess we were too busy drinking and cycling.
  • Speaking of drinking, up until the last evening (when we were all about Belgian) we managed to drink only BC wine & beer for the entire trip. Some favourites: the Mt. Begbie Tall Timber Ale, several Mark James microbrews, the Blasted Church Hatfield’s Fuse and the Sumac Rudge Meritage.
  • Google Maps puts the trip from Calgary to Vancouver at just over 1,000 km; including side trips we covered just under 1,200 km. We filled the gas tank of our brand new Toyota Corolla once, in Revelstoke, at a cost of $50. We pre-paid the fuel option on the car for $60 (so worth it…I would’ve paid more than that to fill it up since I brought the car in right at E, and I didn’t have to drive around downtown Vancouver looking for a gas station) so ultimately we paid just $110 for all that driving. Not bad, considering all the griping I hear from drivers these days.
  • Animals spotted: a bear (from the safety of the Whistler gondola), marmots, hares, several gophers / prairie dogs / Richardson’s Ground Squirrels / whatever they were, chipmunks, a pika, an elk & a few big-horned sheep crossing the Trans Canada.
  • The flight attendant I spoke to on the Toronto–>Calgary flight told me about her brother’s blog, where she said he talked about “weird” music. I was trying to describe to her what I usually listened to, and she said it sounded like what her brother wrote about. She gave me the name of his blog. I checked it out…yup. She was definitely in the right ballpark. Check out Everything is Pop.

So…where to next?

[tags]mt. begbie brewery, mark james group, blasted church, sumac ridge, toyota corolla, everything is pop[/tags]

Hoteliers: fear my web 2.0 wrath

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Random catch-up from the last week, including some highlights of the thousands of feed items I just blazed through:

.:.

George Carlin died last Sunday. I had no idea. That’s what happens when you’re out of tv/internet/newspaper range for 4 days. Carlin was an important entertainer, a rare animal indeed. Jessica Hagy from Indexed puts it nicely:

.:.

I watched three movies on our trip, mainly on the flights from and to Toronto: Charlie Wilson’s War (which I never did finish…our descent began before I caught the end, but I don’t feel like I missed that much), Ocean’s 13 (yawn…the last two have just been issues of GQ magazine put to celluloid) and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (and you shall know it by its bleak, bleak trail of dead…yeesh). Philip Seymour Hoffman was the best thing about the last, and the only good thing about the first. If that guy had “leading man good looks” he’d be a superstar. I suspect in about ten years he’ll be regarded as one of the finest actors of our generation, if not the finest.

.:.

Richard Florida pointed to the chart below, by Dave Lakeland, showing the cost of gas vs. the GDP per capita (all in the US) for the past twenty years. Very interesting.

.:.

I actually quite look forward to this phase of a trip, where we can finally see how all the pictures look (Nellie’s 22″ iMac gives a much clearer idea than my tiny little sub-laptop) and I can write reviews of the hotels in TripAdvisor. Three of the hotels will be getting rave reviews; one will get faint praise and one mild scorn. Mmmmmm, feedback.

[tags]george carlin, indexed, richard florida, cost of commuting, tripadvisor[/tags]