Summer turning over

My summer is drawing to a close, although the weather is still lovely and I’m only easing back into work.  Coming off ten days in Ontario where I was at my sister’s wedding, enjoying some extended time with an extended family that lives all over the world.  We only come together for weddings and funerals and this is the far better reason of the two.

The wedding was in Thornbury Ontario, where my parents live, in the heart of Ontario’s apple growing country.  From there we went down to Peterborough where my new brother in law Steve Weir is from.  It was delightful cruising around a town I lived in for five glorious years, from the age of 18 to 23.  It was in Peterborough that I met my wife Caitlin, and it was really fun to take our kids to the exact spot where we first met one another, in the exhibit space of the Peterborough Art Gallery.

Last night we stayed in Toronto and visited a little more with my brother’s family.  We went downtown to Yonge and Dundas Square to see a movie.  I was shocked by the changes there.  I used to hang around Yonge and Dundas back in my high school days and it looks more like what my brother calls “a poor man’s Times Square” now.  With the buckets of warm rain coming down it reminded me starkly of Bladerunner.  The city I grew up in is gone.

Heading west this morning first to Vancouver and then on to Anchorage.  I’ll be there for a couple of days and then a couple out in the Aleutians in Unalaska aka Dutch Harbor.  I’ve never been out there before, on a thin island between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.  It’s my first of two far north trips this month, with another going to Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, northern Quebec later in September.

Back to the arts of travelling, hosting, reflecting, and blogging.