Under Niagara Falls - The Moistening

One of the things I really wanted to do was go Behind the Falls.  Since we were there on the off season there only a few other visitors.  At the entrance you could see the infra-structure made to handle huge lines though. So travel tip: go off season to avoid that nonsense.  Once in, you can go practically underneath the tons of white water careening over the precipice.

Tunnels led to outlooks right behind the water.  The spray was ever changing sometimes it came back through the tunnel enough to soak you.  It was very unpredictable.  The grey through the outlook below is a seething mass of water that was hypnotic in its intensity and nebulousness.

I had a great time at the lower outlook. You can get right up to the water and since the wind was strong and blowing in the right direction you need rain gear.  You get unattractive plastic ponchos (recyclable) to wear or else you get wet. It had a hood but I decided that hoods were for wimps and got happily drenched. Apparently the photo below does not capture my hilarious grinning according to a certain husband.  I was indeed laughing my head off.

Niagara Falls

I was finally able to visit one of Canada's most famous attractions. Maybe THE most famous thing to see. Geordie has seen it before but I was a first timer.  That is, of course, Niagara Falls.  The Canadian side of the falls on the far right of the panorama below is supposed to be the most spectacular.  It is loud, wet and mist shrouded.  I liked the American falls as well which are located to the far left of the panorama. 

Here is a closer view of the American Falls.  The reddish stairs on the bottom left are to the Cave of Winds which was closed because of a rock slide a few days before. Rock slides are common as the falls erode and move further back.  This was taken on Maid of the Mist which may not be operational in the future.

At night the falls are illuminated with colour changing floodlights.  I recommend seeing the falls at different times of the day in order to get a full view and experience of them in different light settings.  The constant mist makes the light diffuse in a very soft way.  Being there in the fall was great as there was no where near the crowds you get in the Summer.

Niagara Falls - The Side Show

On the way to the glorious bit of natural beauty that is the Falls is carny central.  I like Niagara Falls but could really give all the touristy midway crap a miss.  Tacky and kitshy.  But for others it's there thing so i guess I am stuck with it. It was neat for about 40 seconds and then got jarring.  That Toucan below has just removed your soul and stored it in his hat.

Full of haunted houses, 4D, cotton candy, souvenirs, fudge (which was totally bought) and other nonsense.  Below is a fairly typical scene.  It was off or shoulder season so it was pretty quiet.  I can see it really hopping in the Summer. 

No tourist trap area would be complete without a mini-golf course. Especially if it is dinosaur themed with a smoking volcano that periodically spouts fire.  T-Rex there ruled over the whole thing.  The falls were gorgeous but I feel like it detracts from nature's beauty having all this about.  At least it is not physically at the falls themselves, them being a short walk away. 

Downtown Toronto

I have to admit, I am not a fan of Toronto.  I find it a brown and grey concrete jungle with an over taxed mass-transit system and scary crowded freeways.  It is not being improved much with a huge condo boom going on.  It raises the questions: where are people going to park, live, commute.  The mass transit system is already overtaxed. 

Everywhere in and around the downtown core and elsewhere too, these huge condos are going up.  I guess there is a demand for them but it leaves the city feeling like its being built entirely out of identical glassy towers.  It sounds like condos aren't as expensive as they are where I am in Vancouver but its getting pretty close. Hope I don't sound hypocritical!

I wanted to at least go into Top Shop which is new in TO.  For reasons of a Mighty Boosh like nature. If you don't know what/who Mighty Boosh is consult your nearest BBC TV guide.  I did not go in because I think I was the only one who wanted to. I probably would not be able to afford anything anyway.  The downstairs window display was magnificent featuring a life-size orange spotted moose because of Why Not.

Sarah and Aric's Wedding

A few weeks ago Geordie and myself were honoured and privileged to be invited to his cousin Sarah's wedding to her man Aric.  It was a lovely and unique ceremony.  How often do you get to see two people tie the knot in a trolley car from 1952 moving through downtown Toronto.  Ding Ding!

And there is the really happy couple.  YAY!  Not too much to say about that besides heart felt Congratulations and of course Best Wishes!

So it was in our wedding best that we toured around Toronto before and during and after the ceremony until the dinner and reception.  It was neat to see friends and family dressed to the nines on the vintage trolly.  This was the first time anyone had done a wedding like this!

This Be Wine Country

Love at first sight. Unfortunately the luggage monkeys destroyed my huge tun of wine.  Well not really.  They were decorating a lawn (empty) but I couldn't help going up to one and hugging it in the glorious fall weather of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Now for the context.  Geordie, Peter, Sharon and myself took a drive around Niagara-on-the-Lake wine country.  Lots of orchards, nuts, cheese and a winery or two or three or thirty.  The different colours of the grape vines are different species of grape for different wine types.

This is a peek into one of the operating wineries.  This one is an ecologically run one that utilizes solar energy and no chemicals.  Very nice.  It smelled really good in there too.  It had a scent of oak casks mostly.  It was a great day driving about lovely countryside.

A Kathryn-A-Day Retrospective

 At the end of the year I did a quick name search in our photos and found that I have nearly 365 photos of Kathryn from the past year and thought I'd share a few from earlier trips that didn't get proper coverage at the time. Since we're still covering it at the moment, none of them are from the galapagos either.

This picture is from the beach Sechelt on the sunshine coast of BC with a weird purple seastar we found at low tide. That was part of a very nice trip with my parents along the coast to the north west of Vancouver.

 The old wall of Quebec City is studded with cannons and mortars as castle walls so often are, and since their days of potential violence are over, its great to see them put to use for recreation and fun. Below, Kathryn is relaxing and giving a quick shout out to Doctor Strangelove.

 While it is true that I love getting pictures of her patting statues noses, it is equally true that she's great fun to photograph wearing any sort of over-sized hat. The Ottawa War museum had a number of displays where you could try on different hats and helmets from the previous generations of our soldiers, and this pith helmet helped cast a bit of light on a very powerful but grim museum.

Looking through all my photos to pick this handful has shown me how tricky it is to pick my favorites and that I'll have another busy year ahead of me getting even better ones of her in 2012.

Panoramic Parliament

 One highlight of Parliament Hill for me was the visit of the interior. Since it was summer and the royals were in town there was no danger of anything being closed off to us as all the politicians were on break. All the pictures below are panoramic and can be clicked to enlarge.

The House of Commons has a green motif, likely as a throwback to the times when people would meet in the village square. At the back is a viewing gallery where the public and press can sit and watch when the house is in session. This is where our elected representatives endlessly butt heads.

 Below is the library with its huge selection of books. Each shelf has a provincial crest on it, and there's a statue of Queen Victoria in the middle since she was monarch at the time the library was constructed and since people seem to like wedging her likeness into pretty much everywhere. The most expensive book in there is apparently one of Audobons books of birds with original paintings.

 The senate is more regal and red than the house of commons and the walls are decorated with paintings commemorating the First World War. Again there is a viewing gallery at the back. The senate is appointed rather than elected and seems to primarily maintain the status quo to stop whatever party is in power from changing things too much and to take on real issues.

The Gargoyles of Parliament Hill

 Like any good gothic structure, the buildings on Parliament Hill are quite covered in gargoyles and grotesques of all sorts, both inside and out. The sunlight was more ideal than the dim interior lighting (I am pretty sure Harper would be destroyed by direct sunlight anyways) so they're all exterior pieces below but the inside stuff was very nice too. If you look at our previous post you can just make out 4 of these guys at each corner of the top of the Peace Tower.

 Not every piece is an 8-foot protruding epic either, this little dog/fish was only a few feet across with a little dragon opposite him by some of the archways at the ground level. Most of the smaller pieces were unique and unrepeated as well, making the hunt for their various faces all the more enjoyable.

 The crest of Canada was done up at the front gate with the lion on the left and the unicorn below on the right. I particularly like its dropped jaw and protruding tongue. Infact, looking at this image and the one above makes me think that most of the gargoyles posing for the building are actually just teenagers feel awkward about having their photos taken.

Parliament Hill

 Canada may not have many castles (as we have already lamented) but we have some pretty spectacular parliament buildings all across the country, and the gothic ones in Ottawa are no exception. Most of the original parliament buildings were actually destroyed in a fire in 1916 and had to be rebuilt.

 The main surviving structure from the original parliament buildings was the library, which was saved from the fire by a particularly quick librarian that managed to close some enormous doors and keep the worst of the fire from spreading to there. As any librarians will no doubt appreciate, fire is bad in a room full of books.

 The Peace Tower is the central tower at the front of the building and is worthy of a closer look. While the outside is dotted with gothic gargoyles of all types, just below the clock you can see a row of windows. There is an interior tour available that takes you to an observation deck above the bells. This includes a chance to see the Memorial Chamber which contains books listing all the names of soliders killed in Canadas wars since the First World War. Every day one of the guards turns the pages in each book so that every soldiers name has one day a year facing up to be remembered.

Zaphod Beeblebrox's

Summer on the west coast has been a bit of a chilly bummer, but around Canada Day in Ottawa it was a fiery haze of awesome. Needing to get out of the heat and rehydrate a bit, we managed to take in a drink at Zaphod Beeblebrox's, which gets its namesake from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and was high on Kathryns hit list for watering holes.
The bar itself was nothing particularly special or memorable, but the drinks menu made the trip worthwhile, Kathryn here is enjoying a Pangalacticgargleblaster, though perhaps not one as impressive as described in the books.
While not actually a referenced drink, I still found the Deep Thought to be quite good and since we were sharing drinks anyways it made sense to mix things up a bit and see how a few of them tasted. I will say they poured a decent drink for less than I had expected to pay.
So all in all, fun in a nerdy way.

The Canadian War Museum

In Ottawa we soaked up as many museums as we could fit into the time we had and one that we were both keen to see was the Canadian War Museum. It was redone in 2005 and is an incredibly impressive and well built museum. The exterior looks and feels like a bunker and the central gallery leads into sections detailing all of the major conflicts of Canada from pre-contact to Afghanistan.
We spent a full afternoon there and only managed to absorb a fraction of the details and stories available but it was entirely overwhelming. The World War 2 section had one of Hitlers cars which was a chilling artifact of an evil empire.
Ther was also a huge gallery off to the side of the main displays which was filled to the brim with every sort of field gun, tank, and artillery device imaginable along with an assortment of support and supply trucks. Strangely enough there was going to be a grad party there that evening which struck me as an odd sort of setting to choose while celebrating a coming of age, but whatever works I guess.
All in all a world-class museum and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone passing through Ottawa.

Eastern Buddies

We had time to visit a great group of people out east this summer. Anne and Yves were co-workers of mine in Winnipeg back in the Frantic Films days and they lived just up the highway from us in Piedmont. It was Anne that hooked me up with my gig out there and it was great fun seeing them both. They also have awesome cats. Swarms of awesome cats.
Natasha and Jason were kind enough to put a roof over our head in Ottawa. Jason is another ex-Frantic employee and he's been doing quite well at a game/database design company out there. They were real troopers about showing us around town and helping us get oriented for all our museum/landmark/transit needs, going above and beyond the call for putting up with people on Canada Day.
Carrie and Eugene are living in Montreal now but were also down for Canada Day with us. Eugene continued the theme of ex-Frantic employees on the trip and he's now cranking out excellent 3d models for Ubisoft.
Alex, Beatrice and Susan broke the ex-Frantic Films connection for the trip. Alex is an old friend who once ran the gaming group that Kathryn and I originally met through so he's certainly a big part of our history. Having a baby, we didn't get as much of his and Susan's time as some of our other friends, but we fit in time for a really nice visit and breakfast.All in all it was awesome to catch up with old friends and see them all doing so well in their own walks of life out east.

Blue Bloods

It wasn't a huge part of our plans, but yes, we did see the Royals while they were in town for Canada Day, so I'll share that bit of the trip right away for those of you that are into that sort of thing. The crowd on parliament hill is typically 100,000 to 150,000 on Canada Day but with those two in town it was estimated to be well over 300,000. Luckily we were persistent and able to worm our way quite close to the stage. Their seats were by the pillar on the right of the shot below.
They were also lucky to have a bit of shade, so while the rest of us sweated in the sun they were under a dias, though they did have to wear suits and be gawked at by thousands of people. This picture (from left to right) shows the Minister of Culture, the Governor General and his wife, the royal couple, and Mr & Mrs Darth Harper.
After all the concerts and speeches, everyone came out to gladhand each other for the media and we were able to get a few slightly better pictures.
I think William could sense that there was a lovelier Kathryn in the crowd and passed along a congratulatory wave to me as he came to terms with coming in second place in at least one thing in life ;)

Busy Spring

As anyone who has tried to check this blog in the last 5 weeks or so has been well aware, Kathryn and I have had a very busy spring with very few updates. The day after I finished OT work on my last Vancouver film project, my parents arrived in town and we all went up to the Sunshine Coast of BC which is accessibly only by ferry. We had a very pleasant week up there relaxing by the sea and taking walks in the forest.
A few days later we flew to Saint Sauveur which is a small town in the Laurentians where I had a short term work contract. While the money was a bonus, the real reason to take the job was to have a chance to explore Quebec and catch up with some friends. We lived in the countryside for about a month with the occassional day trip to Montreal and then spent a week going up the coast to Quebec City and Tadoussac afterwards.
Finally, since Canada Day is one of our favorite holidays and we have wanted to spend it in Ottawa for some time, we tacked on a quick visit out there to see some friends and take in the festivities. The royal newlyweds were in town as well which didn't really interest us, but certainly ratcheted up the crowds and craziness to make for a very memorable trip.
There will be lots more pictures and rambling about all three of these destinations in the coming months, but this at least offers a quick explanation for our overlong absence and gives you all an idea of what we have to share in the coming weeks.