Posts under ‘Trips’

Nearly every year Nellie goes camping with her girlfriends. She has a special affection for sleeping in a tent and drinking from tin cups and sitting around a campfire. In recent years those girl-camping excursions have become less frequent, and last year she didn’t get to go at all. Since I couldn’t bear to see [...]

Coming to Niagara back in May might have been a mistake. I fear I’m hooked now. Friday after work Nellie, T-Bone, The Sof and I drove to Niagara-on-the-Lake to begin a weekend of good food and flowing wine. After fighting off traffic we had a drink and some lobster poutine at the Shaw Club hotel’s [...]

No blogging for the next few days as I’m off for a weekend. If you’re looking for me I’ll be with Nellie, T-Bone and The Sof, seeing Beamsville and Niagara from their lovely tasting rooms, celebrating the end of my 35th year as a human. Cheers, everyone.

I don’t know when I started enjoying wine. The last few years, certainly; I distinctly remember not drinking wine until at least 2001 and wouldn’t have started enjoying it until much later. It probably coincided with Nellie discovering  good wine, whatever that means. Nowadays, while I’m hardly an aficionado, I quite enjoy it. I know [...]

Further thoughts on our trip to Halifax this past weekend: Hard to believe now, but on Friday morning the G20 seemed like a non-event. We left super-early for the airport and got there in six minutes. Fortunately, waiting in Porter‘s lounge is a lot better than waiting around at Pearson: free drinks, shortbread cookies, wi-fi, [...]

Just back from a semi-whirlwind trip to Halifax for a friend’s wedding. In addition to the ceremony itself, which was a ton of fun, we also squeezed in brunch with friends at their beautiful new home, dinner at Bish with my parents, brother and sister-in-law and even some down time on a few patios. Aaaaaaaaaand [...]

On Friday I’ll be flying to Nova Scotia. While I’m happy to get away, to see my family and celebrate a dear friend’s wedding, I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed to be missing the G20, though I suspect it’ll all just fizzle into a big billion-dollar pile of nothing. Then again, with [...]

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve lived in Toronto since 1997 and I’ve never seen Niagara Falls. One of the natural wonders of the world ninety minutes away and I’d never gone to see it. I’d also never visited the Niagara wine country, but that’s a little less shocking since it was [...]

Wow. What a game. Tense. Awesome, but tense. This past week was frenetic; I’ve definitely earned my day off tomorrow. We’re headed out for a wine excursion in Niagara-On-The-Lake, the first time we’ve left the city since we went to France last fall. The weather is supposed to be shit but I don’t care. I [...]

As readers of this blog would know, I’ve been trying over the last couple of years to gain a better understanding of the two world wars. While I often marvel at the spectacle of war, the notion of it makes me sick…old men sending young men to die for ridiculous ends, equating war-making with jingoistic [...]

DAY 11 So much for sleeping in. The alarm went off at 6:45, and a room-service breakfast later we were picking up RER train tickets at Musee D’Orsay. About half an hour later we’d reached the Chateau de Versailles. The teeming throng leading up to the palace should have been a warning. It was…well, a [...]

DAY 9 We left Manoir de Montflambert right after breakfast, taking a bottle of their champagne with us. We saw a fox not long after leaving the manoir, before we got back on the highway, pretty much our only wildlife spotting of the trip. No wild boars, boo. Carmen took us down a bunch of [...]

DAY 7 So, here we were in Champagne. What to do first? First order of business was to have a look around the manoir where we were staying, to see how it looked in the daylight. Okay, so that’s pretty nice then. That established, we set out. We had it on good authority that the [...]

DAY 5 Mylene’s breakfast spread was a bit more elaborate than the others, and the dogs joined us as we ate, which I loved. We said our goodbyes and got on the road early. Today, we decided, the toll roads would be worth it. We had a long way to go. We had no plans [...]

DAY 3 We had a few nervous moments with the car but, after a tasty (local and organic) breakfast we got underway with all systems go. Knowing we might not have time to stop for lunch (or, if we do, much time to eat dinner that night) we swung by a Leclerc store and bought [...]