On the Labrador

I'm back in the Valley for a couple of weeks. I foolishly brought the cool wet weather here with me.

It's nice to look around. Things haven't changed much in the last three years but things seem smaller than I remember them. Especially the grocery stores.

Time is flying.

Of Skywalks and Frogger

Looking at my post of yesterday I'm having trouble explaining the anti-Ottawa west rant. I am trying to think of how it is significantly different from Ottawa east. Orleans was also obviously built around the automobile and, if anything, has recently become worse than Ottawa west in terms of blatant consumerism as the 10 kilometres of big box stores that line Innes Road has supplanted Kanata Centrum as the region's largest temple to Mamon. And, as far as I know, Orleans doesn't have nearly the recreational trail system of Kanata.

But then I guess that's exactly it. Kanata has recreational trails but almost no continuous sidewalks. It gives me the feeling that in the west end walking and cycling are meant to be hobbies not transportation. Orleans has few trails but most streets have separated sidewalks which implies to me that it is perfectly acceptable to walk (or bike) to the store.

For example, scads of people live within a half hour's walk of the Eagleson Park and Ride but I don't see any good walking routes (at least not from my side) and so I get to dodge on-ramp highway traffic not exactly dangerous but not exactly encouraging either. In the east end they have over-the-highway walking tunnels to get to the transit major stations.

So if any city planners out there want to green-up their towns take note of the things that create an atmosphere that encourages walking and cycling as a practical way to get around not just building an obviously secondary network of recreational paths.

And what does all this have to do with taking a long hike? I guess it's my feeble attempt at an excuse as to why I haven't been focussing on fitness like I'd planned to do when moving to the west end. Obviously I have no excuse. I'm just in lazy mode.

Schedules are evil

I'm trying the bike in, bus home, bus in, bike home, idea. AT the moment two 36km rides a day is too much biking. It would probably be fine if they were good clean rides like the 24km ride I sed to have down Innes Road but they're often not. Downtown is a mess to bike through, much worse than I recall. More congested and the "free money being spent to delay the collapse" construction only exacerbates matters.

Living here has also revealed to me why I have never been comfortable with western Ottawa. Don't get me wrong, staying with the Running Man Clan is great, it's only when I leave the house that it bothers me. I've concluded that Ottawa west wasn't built with human beings in mind. It was built on a basis of automobiles and consumers. If, when I leave the house, I get in my car everything is fine. Driving is good, wide open boulevards lots of parking. There are also lots of recreational trails but it's all constructed very much the idea that walking, running and cycling are things you can choose to do as hobbies. If you want. Just stay out of the way of the consumers driving their Explorer's to and from. If I try to do something without using my car there's this pervasive aura of "you don't belong here bicycle as transportation man".

But I'm off topic. I'm here today to rant about schedules. Why post a schedule if you're not even going to try to follow it? Yesterday I bus home. I want to run a quick errand downtown so I decide to change buses there. I get off my 95 bus and lo and behold there is a 96 right in front of us loading. 96 is the route I need from here. A quick look at the schedule says the 96 comes by every 6 minutes. Excellent, I'll quickly do my business and catch the next 96. I get back to the stop after about 3 minutes. After a 23 minute wait a 96 arrives and I'm wondering what happened to the three route 96s that didn't show up in the meantime? At least when this used to happen to me years ago with the 95s all four buses would show up at the same time as a violent reminder that light rail is long overdue.

This morning I catch a 96 in Kanata a little later than I'd like my fault. According to the schedule it's 36 minutes to Hurdman station. In real life, during summer vacation light traffic and on far from packed buses it took a little over 50 minutes. At this point I'm too afraid to wait the "15 minutes" for the 190. If it's anything like the 96 I'll be over an hour late for work. So I take the next bus I see headed east and walk the last 15 minutes to the office.

How, I ask, can the government expect people to take public transit under these conditions? Is it reasonable to ask people to replace a 45 minute commute by car with a 120 minute (just in case a driver calls in sick) public transit ordeal? Not until the oil runs out.

All this to say the guy who invented the clock should be even more ashamed of himself than the guy who invented the calendar. I am so looking forward to passing my days by rising with the sun and walking until I get where I'm going that day.

I'll ett when I'm hungry,
An' I'll drink when I'm dry,
An' if moonshine don't kill me,
I'll live 'till I die!

Book update

In the book Bob makes the Camino sound pretty social. He has a regular cast of characters that he keeps meeting up with, passing them one day and getting passed by them on another only to meet them again a week later. This could be a problem. The Boss is a very congenial person and I occasionally get visions of us trekking from town to town with an assortment of cheerful English speakers trying to make a party of the whole thing. The whole being a Canadian thing is probably not going to help either.

Of course the same risk would probably apply to the AT to some degree.

As I'm getting on in the book and Bob is getting on in the trek I notice there are ever more references to blisters and leg aches and people dropping out or feeling plane ticket pressure. Blisters and achy knees I have accepted will just have to be part of the "fun". Dropping out is not an option for me since I don't expect to ever be able to go back. A period of rest might be required but not dropping out. This brings me to the last issue of plane ticket pressure. I need to figure out some way to avoid this that doesn't involve spending a lot of money on a last minute or open date plane ticket or the possibility of two weeks of hotel fees and meals.

Any suggestions?

Car "Camping"

I went car camping with the Boss this past weekend. It's been so busy ever since this is my first chance to post about it. Car camping is not like real camping. You get to bring almost all the comforts of home and get pretty much none of the benefits of real camping. We had an ulterior motive in that we were at a campground in the middle of where we want to buy some land and the days were for scouting.

I borrowed a nice stove from Heavy-C (thanks again) which made cooking a breeze so combined with the Boss' culinary expertise I ate like a king a weekend! Not at all like real camping when I mostly eat gruel fancied up with artificial meat flavours. We sort of lucked out weather wise as it was a mostly sunny four days in a very rainy summer. We did wake up one morning to discover the tent leaked but a quick tug under the ubiquitous overhead blue tarp that signifies an occupied campsite in Ontario solved this issue.

The flies were cruel which I guess is due in part to a cool wet summer so far keeping them out longer and the fact that Silver Lake Campground in a triangle of dry dirt between Silver Lake, Highway Seven and a swamp.

The neighbours weren't that noisy but honestly, I don't get the whole going off to the park to drink beer thing. At least not once you're of an age to have your own apartment.

So basically car camping to me is most of the negatives of camping, rain and bugs and critters stealing your food but none of the serenity and non-pollutedness (less pollutedness?) that makes camping great.

We did get a lot of looking done, didn't find the dream location yet but that's probably for the best.

And the lake was nice.