We took a pair of ferries north to Kingston today. I got a haircut, some used books and a Canadian Beer that cost $6.20 plus tip.
Between the ferries is Wolfe Island, which had hundreds of windmills to catch the breeze off Lake Ontario. My barber moved here in 1963 from Greece. He suggested Steam Whistle as a good Canadian beer.
My cousin's wife, Midge, gave me a nice reference bible back in Watkins Glen. I think maybe that it has something for everyone. It's a very strange, ancient and interesting book. I plan to read the whole thing....
I was especially interested in Ecclesiates 8:15. " ..A man has no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry; for that will abide with him of his labor the days of his life...
Then I found Ecclesiates 9:7. " Go thy way. Eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart..." and Ecclesiates 9:9. " Live joyfully with the wife whom thy lovest ..." Cool stuff... great advice...I'll read more...
We returned to Niagara to find that we had somehow left one of the refrigerator doors open during the trip to Toronto.
Worse, the lemons I bought for the blueberry pies went bad and the RV is swarming with little black fruit flies that are driving Mrs. Phred crazy.
We've made some fruit fly traps. One is a bowl of water, vinegar and dish washing soap. The other is a glass of wine covered with Saran wrap with holes punched in the top.
We woke up early and checked out of the Victoria Hotel. We took our clothes to the car in the parking garage. The hotel was a great location in the center of Toronto.
We started our walk by trudging two miles East to the old distillery district. The Canadians have always made good whiskey, but now the old district is full of art, shop, high condos and restaurants. They've recycled the old distillery buildings.
We turn back and walk eight miles West down Queen street, passing again though downtown and getting into some seedy areas making an interesting comeback.
We take a detour though Chinatown. My feet are hurting after the ten mile hike so we stop a a little bar for a Molson draft.
We find a streetcar going back to the parking garage and talk the conductor into accepting a combination of American and Canadian currency. It's hard to remember that public transit always requires exact change.
These guys are right outside the art gallery we hiked ten miles to see. It was closed between exhibits. Actually, it's not the destination, it's the journey. Toronto is a lovely, booming city. We saw town homes, big condos and office buildings...a mix of old and new...we could live here a month or so to check it out.
The 80 mile drive this morning was in steady downpour on the busy QEW Highway. It was a good decision to come into Toronto on a Sunday with only light heavy traffic.
I used Booking.Com this morning to find a room in a good hotel with a reasonable price, free Wi-Fi and breakfast (I think)...no parking but they directed us to a relatively reasonable parking garage a few blocks away.
Today we hiked several miles to see the Royal Ontario Museum. They had the Chinese Terracotta soldiers, lots of dinosaurs, oriental stuff, bats, birds, Native stuff, and a little room that randomly makes odd sounds.
Tomorrow we'll do a walking tour and boogey on back to the RV about 80 miles south in Niagara.
There are dozens of good restaurants just outside the door. Maybe we'll hit a few bars first.
The trouble with taking pictures in the rain is raindrops on the lens.
Sometimes songs stick in your mind. I think there may be a word to describe the little musical earwigs that burrow into your brain. Mrs. Phred has been singing the same song in the morning for at least a week and it's got a hold on me too.
Yeah they're out there a'havin' fun
in that warm California sun
Sometimes I'm thinking the lyrics and she bursts into them. It's a little like a computer virus.
We took the off ramp on the Robert B. Moses parkway to get here. As we pulled around the ramp we faced a bridge that said maximum clearance of 12 feet. We pulled over and reviewed our paperwork. Nothing there about height. I think we had a sticker once which Mrs. Phred pulled off and threw away.
We called the manufacturer who first told us 11' 4'. We cranked up to move but then and got a frantic callback saying 12'10' was the real height.I broke out the tape measure and pretty much confirmed that. Then we called the New York highway patrol who arrived with lights and sirens flashing. They told us that there was actually a 13 foot clearance on the bridge if we stuck to the middle.
Next we got a really snotty Canadian border guard. I hate crossing the border either way. You put yourself at the mercy of some officious red-headed nitwit with a pistol on her belt that you wouldn't even have to speak to in a normal business or military situation because they would be about seven notches in talent below anyone you would normally speak to unless they were in an big auditorium listening to your wisdom. Next time I'll do better. It's not all that hard to handle little people. They don't need that much.
The falls were stunning. We went down the elevator to see the falls from the inside and later to a little town called Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Niagara has a lot of casinos, tattoo parlors, massage parlors and "gentleman's clubs"...we call them something else in Key West, but my grandchildren might read this someday...there was a Margarittaville...
In the morning, we leave the RV for a couple of days and check into a hotel in Toronto to poke around a couple of days..
I had a dream last night. It was about three dimensional shapes passing though a two dimensional universe. The dream started very easy with a sphere which appeared as a point in the plane and then a circle which grew and shrank back to a point and winked out of existence. The dream became about a cube which took on many different triangular and polygenic shapes as it rotated though the plane.
Then the dream was of a four dimensional cube, it called a tesseract, rotating though a three dimensional space. In my dream this appeared as a solid horse's head and then a horse's tail..there is no explaining dreams... I awoke and reached for my dictionary. The dictionary did not include the word tesseract, but when I looked it up online, it was defined as a four dimensional cube which has angles that go off at 90 degrees from the eight corners of a cube in directions that our eyes are not wired to be able to see. These directions are woalf and dirkit.
The City of Ottawa has about 850,000 people. They have a good bus system and park-and-ride parking lots that shuttle you downtown for $3 Canadian. We took the bus and went to see the changing of the guard, Parliament hill and the market section. We also went to the National Art Museum. The Art Building was impressive, but the collection was lackluster.
We also drove around to view some quaint little Ontario towns: Westport, Merrickville and Perth. We had coffee and pastries in Perth.
My impression of Ontario is that the speed limits are set very low and generally universally disregarded by the population; driving the speed limit results in a succession of people attempting to drive up one’s tailpipe. Driving 10% over the speed limit doesn’t help much. I’m ready to pop back over the border.
A developer in Edmonton has come up with a poker playing program that wins against championship players. It’s version 2.0, at least, and learns by watching its opponent’s behavior. This is quite an advance in artificial intelligence. It deals with a game of imperfect information, unlike the relatively simple chess playing programs where everything is known.
This development marks the beginning of the end of human poker players, at least the online variety. There are many skills that have been obsoleted by developing technology. Once I was a great navigator, but now that’s a skill you can’t give away. The computers are insufferably superior to humans at navigation.
Fortunately, many human skills contain much more imperfect information and physical skills than poker so that humans can still shine. I would include engineering, loan-sharking, house painting, database design and farming among many that professions are currently unsuitable for a smarter AI.
We spend two days in Vance’s on the North Channel of Lake Huron. They park us right behind the office on a grassy spot.
The satellite tuner got wet again and shorted out. My database of altitude and azimuth observations has gotten big enough that I can easily find the satellite now without it by getting the latitude and longitude off one of the GPS devices. Mrs. Phred watches the Wimbledon finals.
We rent a boat Sunday and go fishing for Walleye. I troll slowly with a spoon lure. There are no hits, but we enjoy the scenery anyway.
Gene and Marilyn are from Cincinnati. They spend four months a year here. They’re both 75 this year. Gene explains that the walleye ate all the food in the channel and left Saturday for parts unknown. He says they’ll be back in September. Gene gives us six walleye fillets. Gene seems quite knowledgeable about walleye. He shows me the jigs he likes to use.
It’s about 300 miles to Ottawa. Mrs. Phred wants to spend two full days there and then arrive in Burlington, Vermont on Friday to spend the weekend with our old friend, Judy, so we’ll have to leave this morning to meet her schedule.
On July 4th, We’re camped on the north shore of Lake Huron in the Thessalon Municipal RV Park. The municipal tennis court behind city hall is paved with a strange rocky composition, apparently left over from a road project. The balls take on a strange spin when they hit the gravel.
We do some light maintenance, replacing a taillight and several other light bulbs. We’re roaming here so we turn off the cell phones and use the air card sparingly.
If you drive north from Thessalon on route 129, about 40 kilometers, you come to Wakomata Lake Road which leads to Camp Snowshoe. The camp, five kilometers down the road on a big isolated lake, rents cabins, boats, ATVs and snowmobiles. It stays open all year for ice fishing and snowmobiling.
The people in this area of Canada seem very friendly. We ask about renting a canoe and the owners tell us that they only rent to guests, so they offer us the use of one of their canoes at no charge.
If you want to get away from things any time of year on a lovely Canadian Lake, I can highly recommend Snowshoe Camp. They’re nice people. To make a reservation, call 705-206-0447 or go online to Snowshoe Camp.
