arc of time

we are out of jasper now and in banff for the next several days. it feels a bit more like civilization here; larger, chicer and with starbucks.

am not sure i am all okay with that, but i plan to do a full day hike with one of my days here so that should help keep me out of civilization some.

i am in a second cup coffee which looks to be like some sort of canadian starbucks stealing wifi from someone.

pictures of the last few days later; they still haven’t made it off of the camera.

we’ve been in canada now for three nights, and i am going stir crazy not having access 24/7 to the grid. i am writing this offline because i really have no other choice. it’s 8:15 am mountain time on monday morning.

a few things i neglected to mention in my last post that i thought i would bring up here. first, sleeping in an r/v with four of your family members gets cramped, especially if you are the one at least in your own mind that is always right about everything. i will say, though, that i am rather surprised by how little conflict there has been so far.

yesterday was pretty incredible. we went to the miette hot springs and actually swam in forty degree weather. that honesty took most of the day so by the time we got back to camp it was close to dinner time.

the real cap to the day though were the five adult and two baby elk we saw just past out campsite after dinner. i took a ton of pictures of the elk because they just floored me. not sure why but i am obsessed by wild animals and one thing jasper national park has got is about the most unfettered access to wild animals you can find.

i’ll link to some more pictures of the elk once i get everything loaded up to flickr.

in the meantime, i suppose i will get this posted whenever i can convince the family to drive into the town of jasper to feed my net addiction. and it better be soon, i really need to know how the three psycho dogs did yesterday….

okay, well it’s nighttime on the night that i wrote the above and i still haven’t managed to get on the net, so i am just going to go ahead and add more here.

today was one of those days that you dream about, or at least i do.

let’s start with the bears. now there are signs warning you about bears just about everywhere you go around here; bear poles in campsites, bear-proof trashcans, bear spray in the stores, but yours truly was absolutely convinced that we were in no way shape or form going to actually see any bears on this trip.

well call me stupid.

we were about halfway down our drive from the town of jasper to the icefields center at the columbia icefield/athabasca glacier when we saw a car stopped on the side of the road. we pulled over to see what was going on and sure enough, there on the hillside was a mama bear with three cubs.

it was the first of three sets of bears that we would see throughout the day. there is just something so mesmerizing about seeing bears and other wildlife in the wild just doing what they do. the last bear we saw on the way back form the icefield we had such a great view of the bear eating that i had to be literally ordered back to the car by my family.

the icefields themselves were pretty spectacular. we took a big, all terrain vehicle right onto the athabasa glacier and had a good twenty minutes to walk around on the glaicer itself. abby and i walked pretty high up on the glacier, even approaching the wall of the columbia icefield. i have to say that staring at the peak of mt athabasca from the glacier and knowing that just over those two walls of ice stood a landscape reminiscent of the antarctic, i have now been possessed with a strong desire to climb mountains.

we finished the day up with a tram ride to near the peak of the whistlers mountain, which is right near our campsite. the tram takes you ‘above the treeline’ as they say here, which mean up into the upper reaches of the mountains where the trees don’t go – the alpine region. from the upper tram terminal there was a ‘trail’ that would take you to the summit of the whistlers mountain. i put trail in the scare quotes because it really was just a worn pathway in the rocks, walking up the ridgeline of this mountain. i got to what i thought was the top and realized i was just at a subpeak. the trail continued on and up to the real summit which was cloaked in snow.

i soldiered on, deciding if i had gotten this far i needed to get to the summit. the one group of people still with me was a german couple with their baby and they dropped off at the subpeak. but i did it. i walked through snow packed hard and deep and got to a sign telling me i had made it to the summit.

it was different up there, more than 7,000 feet up. the air was super thin and i was breathing like crazy trying to catch my breath where there was very little oxygen. by the time i made it to the top it was cold and windy and the clouds had rolled in again. i couldn’t see much, but i made it. i could only begin to imagine how difficult this would have been if i was still smoking. i suppose getting up there is really no big deal, but to me it seemed liked something really special.

i didn’t have a ton of time up there because i only had 30 minutes to get back down to catch the last tram down the mountain. since there was no one else around, i snapped my own picture, took some video and began the descent.

it was incredible up there. the solitude, the height, the thin air, the knowledge that no matter where is stepped it was going to be down – now THAT is enough to make me want to climb a mountain. then again i already did….

well, you will have to excuse me for the lack of posting but i am on vacation with the family and we are currently in an rv park in jasper national park without any internet access (well, that’s not exactly true, i am in the black sheep cafe in jasper, alberta using some wireless.

my family, by the way, is finding my desperate need to get on the internet rather hillarious and reminiscent of the obsession my sister had with finding a television when we were vacationing on cape cod years ago.

oh well, i say, it’s all about fantasy baseball and the three psycho dogs must be managed.

the trip has been incredible so far. the picture above was taken outside the fairmont lake louise. it had to be one of the most stunning settings i have seen in some time.

i went for a run this morning in the cool mountain air and couldn’t have had a better time.

so cheers, eh! and i will write more soon.

back in canada at the radisson near yyz for a trade show. it reminded me of this screed i penned a year ago when i was stuck once again in canadian immigration.

no such misfortune this time as i breezed through immigration and customs.

considering this trip and the trip megan and i made up here in the fall maybe i have dropped off of whatever list i was on.

as much as i love toronto it’s cold and rainy here and the city still pretty much sucks in march.

i’ve been meaning to post about me and my trip to toronto and of course i just haven’t gotten to it, but i am finally going to try.

i had to go to toronto for a pretty boring conference so i invited the gf to head with me since i knew she had never been and i also knew how much she loved to travel. i’ve been obsessed with patricia shultz’s great book 1,000 places to see before you die (get it, seriously, you won’t be disappointed) since me showed me her copy, so now whenever we are about to go some where we always consult patricia shultz to see what we should see.

(as an aside, patricia did not put the butchart gardens on her list, which if you read my dispatch about victoria you will know i found crazy, but i digress)

one of the the few things listed in the book by schultz for toronto was dinner at the restaurant truffles inside the toronto four seasons. what the heck, i thought, plus it’s in canadian dollars (which when i filled out my expense report i realilze means nothing now) so i went ahead and booked us a table. we’ll get to that a little later on.

the first and most amazing thing i will say about our trip is that i did not get stopped at customs at l.b pearson airport, which as some of you may remember is a big deal for me.

we checked into our hotel, the fairmont royal york which is one of those grand, stately old hotels that is classic and beautiful but desperately in need of an upgrade. my meeting was in the grand ballroom which felt almost in place in versailles.

we spent our first afternoon in the city at the cn tower. the cn tower blew my mind. it’s the largest manmade structure in the world and the views of toronto is just about out of this world. it’s not for the faint of heart but the view is unforgettable. you can actually see the specks of private planes taking of from toronto city airport. there is also a part that has a glass floor, where you can just stand and look down at 100 stories below. you really have to check out the flickr photos to see what i mean.

that night we hauled off to the keg mansion for dinner. i love the keg, canada’s steakhouse chain. of course we made the mistake of thinking we could walk there, with yours truly in the boot, but by the time we made it i was famished and devoured the best chain restaurant steak in the world.

the next day i worked and me explored toronto, walking around queen street and seeing what she could see. and then that night was the grand event.

dinner at truffles ranks either one or two on the list of my best meals of all time. i don’t even know how to describe it. the tastes were so intricate and amazing they were seared into my mouth. we ordered a five course taster and split a foie gras appetizer. the foie gras was the best i have ever had. rich, creamy and prepared immacuately.

i can’t even begin to describe the whole meal, but here are a few things i will use to try to describe it. we got a terrine that was prepared so perfectly that if you held it on your tongue long enough the taste would change into a different flavor. at there were granules of salt places on the crust of the terrine that you would hit every few bites that just changed the whole complexion of the taste. it was perfection.

our fish course was served with a mustasrd buerre blanc. this sauce changed they way i will look at sauces forever. the whole way it was put together with the tartness of the mustard and the texture of the mustard seeds with the creamy texture and flavor of the butter was one of the most amazing things i have ever tasted.

so truffles lives up. clearly one of the best restaurant i have ever been too. we ate for two hours, had incredible service and left feeling almost on another planet.

the next day i worked again, and me explored, visiting several of toronto’s museums (pix in the toronto flickr set). that the ate at the motorcycle cafe in the queen street district, having great, light bar food. it was the perfect complement to the night before’s food orgy.

we finished up walking through the queen street area and then up to the lakefront. if you have never sat on the shore of ontario at night and looked up at the cn tower and the rogers center you are missing out.

we flew back that next afternoon.

our flight was absolutely unreal. we had an old woman who spoke no english sitting in the gate. she was yelling, “MY TICKET” to the agent at one point. and then when i got up to go to the bathroom, apparently someone had placed her walking cane on the back of her wheelchar and she couldn’t find it, so she started yelling, “MY STICK, MY STICK.” then they asked her for her boarding pass and she started yelling, “I GIVE YOU. I GIVE YOU.”

i wish you could hear the accent because it makes it all the more funny.

so we take off. after a long delay. since our plane had had problems in atlanta. of course.

our flight goes pretty uneventful until we are on approach and actually landing. at that point, stick woman decides she needs to use the bathroom. so she is walking down the aisle and the flight attendant is coming from the back of the plane and she stops her and says, “ma’am you cannot go to the bathroom. we are landing.”

stick woman doesn’t get it, and you can see her almost trying to do a running back fake out to get around her. the flight attendant starts pointing down to the ground saying, “we are landing. l-a-n-d-i-n-g,” and basically muscles stick woman back to the plane.

so we land and get on the taxiway and this old black man decides he has to go to the bathroom. so up he gets from his seat and heads to the bathroom.

on come the flight attendant onto the pa and basically says,. “we are on an active taxiway, you must return to your seats.”

well bathroom man sits down and someone says, “i think she way talking to you.”

and he responds, in a danny glover, color purple voice – “well, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

seriously, the flight was just absolutely unreal.

so that was toronto. canada was great the second time around. even with the crazy flight.

seriously, do i look like either? i must to the canadian authorities because it seems like every other time i come to this country i run afoul of somebody at pearson airport. today was no exception. not only was i selected for additional questioning by the immigration authorities, but this time i was even selected for additional questioning by the customs authorities.

a first.

maybe the read the arc of time and love richard dawkins. beats me.

by the way; its cold and snowing here in toronto and i love it. sometimes i really wish we could just pick atlanta up and move it north to the north coast. we ate at the keg mansion tonight, and while i am normally opposed to chains, the keg mansion gets a pass because the building is so sweet. we checked out an interesting place called the reservoir lounge before finally heading back out to the airport and the hotel.

i like canada. i think i would like being canadian. i have no idea why they give me such a hard time about entering their country.