The thesis defense was just one of a series of events that took me back to Burlington. I was also attending the wedding of two great friends of mine, Lydia and Martin. Lydia and I were classmates in the UVM geology department and I met Martin through her and we all played on the same intramural broomball team and sometimes played racquetball together. More often than not, however, we were likely to be seen downtown at a live concert at Nectar's or playing darts at Ake's or cornhole in their backyard while grilling out. It was a beautiful wedding weekend for the two of them and some other friends and I joined them for their ceremony and reception at the Stowehof Inn and Resort up in the mountains just outside of Stowe. The weather was beautiful, the company was fun, and the wedding couldn't have been more picture perfect!
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| My friend Lauren and I at the wedding. We coordinated oranges. |
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| Tigger, the ring bearer |
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| The newlyweds after the ceremony! |
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| Our geology group at the wedding: Will, Luke, Lauren, Jamie, and myself |
I spent the next week house/pet-sitting Lydia and Martin's dog and cat, Tigger and Gobi, respectively, while they were on their honeymoon and while I completed up one last and final week of lab work at UVM, finishing up all the work I started when I went to Germany and continuing the work that took me to Australia and Greenland.
But then the week was over and I needed to start heading back to Muskegon. Instead of driving straight back, though, I decided to take a detour and since I am currently unemployed, it didn't really matter how long my detour was! I decided to make the first leg of my trip home a jaunt up the Trans-Canadian Highway up to Sudbury, Ontario.
Why there? One of my really good friends from UM's geology field camp, Camp Davis, was from Halifax, Nova Scotia and now works for a mining company in Sudbury, Ontario. Linette is an outgoing, friendly, personality, and it had been nearly four years since I last saw her. Needless to say, I was excited! But the tricky part was getting there. I say it was tricky not because of the French-language highway signs in Quebec or the 11-hour drive to get there, but because along the way the highway follows alongside the Ottawa River, which makes the northern Ontario border with Quebec.
The river valley is beautiful, I'm sure, but I've never had a good experience to see it! Whenever bad weather comes through the area, it kind of gets stuck in the valley and makes for terrible driving conditions. I first met this phenomenon a few years ago when I was driving back to Burlington after Thanksgiving in Michigan. On that day, I filled up my tank with gas in the little Ontario town of Spanish, near the northern waters of Lake Huron, and when I got to Mattawa, one of the last outposts of civilization for a few hours, I still had a quarter-tank of gas. It was enough to get me to the next town, according to the map. What the map didn't tell me was that the next town, nor the one after that, nor the one after that, would have open gas stations (or even gas stations) during that time of year! To compound the fear of running out of gas, a snowstorm was blowing through the river valley and at times I couldn't see very far in front of me. It's possible I drove right by gas stations without seeing them, but I eventually coasted into a little gas station in Point Alexander, Ontario - for I had necessarily gotten into the habit of putting my car in neutral as I went down hills to save on gas!
Needless to say, it was a close call, but I filled up and was soon on my way. This time, going on that stretch of the TC Highway, I made sure to have a full tank of gas. So while gas was not an issue, I was starting to worry about the weather again. My dad told me over the phone, right before I crossed into Canada, that in Michigan that morning, they got dumped on with rain - not a constant drizzle, but a wall of torrential rain. And I was running into that now. At least five times, I had to pull off the side of the highway and wait for the rain to pass because it truly was a wall of rain that rendered my view of the road incapable of determining in which lane I was driving!
I eventually pulled into the town of Mattawa only to sit in construction traffic for another half-hour, but once through there the weather cleared up, as did the orange construction barrels and I was soon driving into Sudbury. I never have my phone on in Canada and was stopping at regularly spaced McDonald's restaurants to use their free wi-fi to let Linette know where I was. As I pulled into Sudbury, I checked Facebook to get her address, and committed it to memory...or so I thought. I drove to the address I remembered but it didn't look anything like she said it would, and after checking the names on the mailboxes and talking to a man who lived there, it was confirmed that Linette did not! Not knowing what to do, I drove down random busy streets in hopes that I would run across another McDonald's and check my mail again. Wouldn't you believe that of all the McDonald's, the closest one to Linette's house didn't have wi-fi and neither did the Tim Horton's or the KFC next to it. So I did the next best thing, and drove all the way back through Sudbury to the first McD's I stopped at, only to realize I committed the wrong address to memory and that the address I was supposed to go to was two doors down from the one I visited initially!
I walked in the door to find Linette napping on the couch but was ready to forgive my hour-long tardiness! We started catching up over a cold beer and then she took me out to a fantastic little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called The Laughing Buddha, that had tons of beers stocked and delicious pizza and nachos. Sudbury is a town famous for its mining industry, and though you can see remnants of a past existence in luxury for the town, it has since become a disheveled and sooty destination. That's not to say it isn't nice. In fact, Sudbury seems to be in the midst of a re-emergence into the world of the living. While the downtown is not lively, per se, there is a large lake in the middle of town surrounded by green parks and dotted with boats of various kinds, under the watchful eye of a shiny new-ish medical center. To me, and I could be wrong, but it seemed as if a lot of young professionals, mostly employed in the mining industries, are breathing a hip new life into the city!
At any rate, Linette and I had a great time catching up, albeit briefly (she had to get up for work the next morning at 5am!), and we were sure to make plans for our next get together, which includes going to the Calgary Stampede, basically cowboy Oympics. Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos with Linette while I was there, but here we are at Camp Davis in 2007:
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| We haven't changed too much :) |
I was going to make one more stop in Canada before coming home. An hour outside of Sudbury is a little town called Espanola, which I drove through to get to a marina where I met my Uncle Jim and Aunt Sandee. They own a summer camp on an island in McGregor Bay, a little inlet off of Lake Huron, and they have been trying to get me to visit them up there for years! And for years, things just didn't work out, but this time, it worked out perfectly and I spent the next two days up there with them in the peaceful, sunny, rocky, watery, beautiful solitude they experience every day for three months out of every year! Both days I was there we went for Sea-Doo tours of the bay and all the little islands within it.
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| I took a nap the first day out on the hammock while the monstrous dragonflies rested nearby |
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| We went to a place called, The Potholes, a little inlet of the bay where, when glacial meltwater was rushing through here entrained large boulders in eddies and carved out deep, perfectly circular holes. |
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| Me sitting on the edge of one of the potholes |
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| A view of Lake Huron (at least a small inlet of it!) |
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| Water lily at the potholes |
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| Beaver dams were everywhere and they even use old boat docks as the foundation for their homes! |
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| A small flock of cormorants flying over the bay |
But then early on this morning, after breakfast, it was time to go and Uncle Jim and Aunt Sandee dropped me off at the docks so I could get my car and they could get groceries. It was definitely too short of a visit and I will need to go back, but not before I have time to read up on the real geology of the area up there!
It was a good few days in Canada and I think I'm beginning to embrace this whole not having a job, thing! I'm able to do so many things, it seems, when I'm not on a regular schedule. But sleep is soon coming and I'm having a hard time keeping my eyes open! More stories to come soon, but this is it for tonight!
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