Showing posts with label Beaches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beaches. Show all posts

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Darling It’s Better Down Where It’s Wetter

Under water, things are peaceful. All it takes to escape the noise and chaos of a community swimming pool during, say, a kid’s birthday party is a brief submersion. Under the water, we’re in our own private worlds into which it’s almost impossible for others to trespass. Sound fades away, while everything moves slower and seems more graceful. At least most of the time. There are some occasions when being under water is far from this kind of peaceful experience. Today’s activities straddled both sides of that line. Well, sort of.


Monday, August 13, 2012

A Thoroughfare for Freedom Beat

This is a public service announcement to all Canadian taxpayers: Your government has been stealing from you.

You pay the equivalent of over $4.50 a gallon for gasoline, much of it taxes, yet you have the highway infrastructure of a third world country. Either your government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse (more than even the US government), or the Trans-Canada Highway (which, as far as I can tell is not yet complete) is being built across the most hostile terrain ever encountered by road makers. I’m skeptical about the latter, since they manage to make roads out of ice every year. So boreal forest can’t be that tough to build on.

Yet there I was, paying $63 for a tank of gas when I’d never before paid more than $50, and yet every local road I took until mercifully limping onto the big 104 was as unpaved as unpaved could be. I’d call them dirt roads, but dirt would have been a welcome alternative to the ridiculousness I encountered.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

The World’s Your Oyster Shell, But What’s that Funny Smell

Whenever I’m on these adventures, as I think of something I want to remember to mention in that night’s entry, I use the iPhone Notes app to write myself… well, a note, as the thought hits me. The stuff left from last summer’s note includes “open space, self-determination, no deadlines, only chance.” Today, I only wrote down one word: “Punished.”

Saturday, August 11, 2012

You’ve Already Won Me Over, In Spite of Me

Nova Scotia, you’ve been holding out on me. After today, it’s clear that you’ve just been teasing me – showing me your less attractive features so that your best qualities stand out that much more starkly.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Pack the Car and Leave This Town

For the most part, this was your typical “driving day.” In a nutshell, I went the 410km (which I assume is about 975 miles) from Halifax to Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. However, since it was an international driving day, there were some extra added dimensions to this leg of the journey.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Hello City

I awoke this morning to the dulcet tones of some horrible bird-rodent shrieking in a tree above my tent. This was followed shortly by what I thought was a raccoon stealing the sealed screw-top bowl of Gordo food I’d accidentally left on the picnic table. Much to my surprise, when I peeked out to see how many of the diseased monsters were working on this half ounce of dry dog food, I instead saw a chipmunk trying to drag the bowl up a tree. You know, the way an ant would drag something, if it didn’t have that super ant strength. Rather than throwing my shoes on an chasing it away (I knew from Bryce Canyon trail mix experience that he’d only come back with reinforcements), I feebly tried clapping once to scare it off, and went back to bed. I figured that if it was able to get something larger and heavier than itself up a tree, it deserved the dog food. An hour later, I was a little disappointed to find the bowl still on the ground, but twisted open and emptied of its contents. I’m still not sure how many dozen of these creatures lacking in opposable thumbs it took to open it.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Running On Empty

Today, my 3-day adventure to the land of the Mainiacs ended in grand fashion, with the best weather (and not coincidentally, the best pictures) of the trip.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Waterworld

Water, water everywhere. Except I’m really not that thirsty.

If Captain Planet were real (don’t tell Don Cheadle it’s not), the girl with the 4th ring would have loved today, because it was all about water. It made its presence known before today technically began, by way of a massive rogue thunderless storm whose path was trained directly on Mt. Desert Island from 10pm until about 3am. I know because it woke me up and kept me nervously checking the corners of the tent for the water that never did manage to get inside.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Lights in the Darkness

In New England, if you don’t like the weather, just wait an hour. Even though I hear it all the time, whenever I visit one of the region’s natural landmarks (Cape Cod, Mt. Washington, the Berkshires…) it seems to go out of its way to affirm it.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Spinning On Our Heels, So Far Away From Real

Let’s say that this trip is like a relay race on Field Day in elementary school. If that’s the case, then today I touched the cone on the far end of the field, so that I could turn around and complete the lap. Except instead of a field it was… well, I guess a field, just a really big one… that my car ran across. And instead of a cone, it was the Pacific Ocean.