Category Archives: city

Canada, city, roadtrip, travel

Back in Canada!

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Back when I had a list of places I wanted to spend a week or so visiting before I eventually head back to New Zealand, Boston was high on that list. If one is going to go to Boston, one may as well get there for a New England fall – many months ago it seemed like a good idea to book a trip to the USA (the fourth in four years, who’d have thunk?) less than three weeks after getting back from the RVO & Africa. Along the way it transpired that it was much easier to get nice flight times in & out of Toronto than Boston. As I’d never visited eastern Canada while I lived out west in the Rockies, it seemed logical to tie such a visit in with Boston and make a mini-roadtrip of it – after all, driving around North America is such fun. Mid-year the list went out the window as I realised I wanted to ride my bike more…

Well, as I got back from the RVO & Africa and straight back into a demanding month-end at work and then got a cold – none of this seemed all that sensible. Not to mention two inter-continential vacations almost back-to-back seemed just a little self-indulgent – thankfully the spring & summer through which I took no time off work was a cracker and let me ride a lot. Consequently, & very strangely, I wasn’t particularly excited by the prospect of more travel so soon – I managed to keep the trip pretty quiet by only letting on if asked rather direct questions that I couldn’t worm out of – so I didn’t have to talk about it & pretend to be wildly excited. Of course, through all that, even if I wasn’t excited I knew I would love the trip and all doubts would disappear as soon as I landed in Canada – I mean, I’ve loved each of my previous American road trips & this would be same with Ottawa, Montreal, Boston & Niagara Falls being the main destinations to string together.

By some fluke of timing, very good friend of my sister & the family, Jane was due to land in Toronto for a year in Canada only twelve hours or so after my arrival. First store seen on landing at Pearson – Tim Hortons, of course. After deciding a Fiat 500 is a ridiculous vehicle for a American roadtrip & that I should upgrade to a small SUV, I was straight back to driving on the other side of the road. Once safely & comfortably ensconced in my airbnb room, it was time to head out & wander. I was not far off Lake Ontario, & like Lake Michigan earlier in the year, it’s hard to believe a lake can be so big – or Great if you will (the five Great Lakes have a surface area less than ten percent smaller than all of New Zealand). I’m not sure if it’s just a reflection on Toronto, but I don’t have a single photo of the city. Nonetheless I was loving just wandering the city blocks, seeing buildings & stadia I’d previously heard about; being Wednesday night, half-price wings with yam (sweet potato) fries & a beer seemed entirely appropriate.

Picking Jane up from her friend’s house (disturbingly both she & her friend thought I sounded English, which is just weird – they definitely had Kiwi accents) we hit the road east with many hours to catch up on news as we got off the freeway as soon as possible to drive around the lakeside. Most facilities had closed for the season, but the Thousand Islands area was rather quaint. To officially be included in the group, an island must be above the lake level all year long, be more than one square foot and have at least one living tree – so there are some pretty small islands to see. What was surprising was just how small some of the islands were that had proper big houses on them. But I never quite captured those well when we were driving – so imagination needed below.



Wow, there are photos of me on this trip – well, a few

The fall/autumn timing was already paying off as the countryside was littered with very pretty foliage in the midst of changing colour.

city, travel, USA

A little bit more of Chicago

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I know I said I’d post more on Chicago, but more photos will have to do.  As good as Chicago was for two days, Utah was exceptional & I’d much rather talk about the best holiday & mountain-biking I’ve had in ages than prattle on about a rather neat city.

From Willis (Sears) Tower

Downtown Chicago

Watching the tourists in a R44 watching us on the viewing deck

That’s a hundred-odd stories down

Wandering under the L on the way back from Wrigley

More photos of trains

Sue – the largest T-Rex

The infamous Tsavo Lions

Random sculptures near Grant Park

city, travel, USA

Chicago briefly

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So I’ve been back in the land where everything is big, bold brash & in-your-face unsophisticated for a couple of days now & I still love it. The streets take twice as long to cross, the trucks/lorries/semis are the proper size, I still recognise the different-to-Euro-spec cars, one can buy root beer & pink lemonade and most of all, it’s warmer than home. Needless to say, this two day stopover in Chicago has been a great start to a holiday that is much needed & promises more.
This will be just a brief post as I’ll soon tire of my phone keyboard and most of my photos are on a real camera. Landing at O’Hare it was no surprise to find it’s huge – being one of the world’s busiest airports. The L runs all the way into town and its trains are delightfully all stuck in the late seventies as far as decor & finish go – even the new ones.

Chicago is not as easy to walk around as European cities due to the vast amount of space that was available to take up all the people – but with a 3 three day CTA pass I had a pretty good go at walking my feet off. Highlights were going up the Willis (Sears) Tower on Sunday morning before the crowds, admiring the architecture & the parks, riding the L a bit out of town to Wrigley Field (home of those perennial losers, the Cubs) and eating an awful lot.

With a six hour time difference from home I’ve been sleeping & eating at weird times, but that’s all part of the fun. I had most of today before I had to head out to O’Hare, so spent almost five hours at the Field Museum (and saw about half of it)- which has quite a natural history collection. In the Museum Precinct on the shores of Lake Michigan it is vast building displaying only a small part of the collection. The taxidermy is extensive and very impressive considering it’s mostly a century old – although never as good seeing animals alive in the wild. The Tsavo lions are there, as well as a fascinating exhibit about wolves in Idaho. There’s a fair amount of Egyptian relics, but after the Christmas trip they failed to capture my imagination. The replica and exhibit of the Lascaux cave paintings is really good too, especially since you can’t even go in the real caves in France anyway.

They also have, in the atrium, the biggest T-Rex skeleton ever found. The biggest surprise however was stumbling across a wharenui (a Maori meeting house) all the way from the East Cape of NZ via Hanover in the nineteenth century.  So that’s enough about Chicago for now – here are some of the few photos I did take on my phone:

I ordered a burger and got this – it was fantastic

My fascination with old signs painted on buildings continues while riding the L

The wharenui at the Field Museum from Tokomaru Bay

city, Europe, family, food, travel

Windy, chilly Amsterdam weekend

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When I booked a weekend away at the end of March with cousin Trish, I was expecting winter may have been receding for a few weeks.  Alas, winter had not loosened its grip on the UK & western Europe last weekend.  But it was still a good weekend to be away, as however bitterly cold & windy it may have been in Amsterdam, it was dry and therefore better than being at home.

Flying in from Southampton, it turns out Schipol Airport is massive if you’re in a little turboprop that takes an age to taxi to the terminal.  With only a vague idea of which trains to take to our airbnb accommodation (go to Central & get the metro), we fortuitously got off the train at the first stop (after overhearing advice given to other tourists) and eventually managed to get on the metro and cut quite  a bit of time off our journey.

The first thing noticed while walking in the dark was of course all the bicycles still out at that hour of the night.  We managed not to get knocked over by any and find the apartment OK.

After a good sleep, for me, and the start of mass-cheese-consumption-Saturday at breakfast (bread, ham & cheese) it was a short metro ride in to town, then a walk west admiring the old buildings and canal towards the Jordaan area and Anne Frank House.  It was well worth waiting for over an hour (we got up a bit too late) in the wind and occasional sun to get in to see such a reminder of those dark times in Europe’s recent past.  The warehouse and offices do well to hide the small annex at the back in which eight people managed to hide for two years with the help of Otto Frank’s office staff.

The rate (number over time, not price) of admission was such there was sufficient space to linger and contemplate without feeling rushed or that there were too many people around.

Royal Palace from Dam Square in the centre of the city

The front of the Anne Frank House complex

We spent much of the afternoon wandering around the old suburb of Jordaan following a walking tour, popping into various little squares hidden in the centre of blocks of houses, looking at the rather higgledy-piggledy skinny houses. When the cold got a bit much – popping in to various cafes and bars for beer, lunch, hot chocolates and gargantuan pieces of apple pie.

Note the protruding beams at the top for lifting furniture up, to circumvent the narrow staircases

A city with the wisdom not to rip up its tram tracks, there were still plenty of trams around.  As dusk started to draw in, we jumped on the first tram we saw as we walked out of Central Station to rest our legs and generally speed up the wandering.  I think we went all over looking at canals, bikes, and whatever street scenes happened to pass by.

The third, final and best cheese meal of the day was the three-cheese fondue served in yet another bar somewhere in town.  Walking back to the metro there was that often-present lingering smell of weed before we inadvertently wandered through the red-light district copping much too much of an eyeful.

Excitingly, there was even a bit more sun as we took the tram towards the National Museum.  The guide we were using told us that it was under renovation & only partially open.  After walking all the way around, we can confirm that it is completely closed.  At the least, I got a token photo of the sign below.  We followed the red rope up at streetlight level to the van Gogh exhibition at the Hermitage.

The small part of the van Gogh exhibition that is temporarily housed at the Hermitage was well worth seeing – even if I was a little underwhelmed by Sunflowers.  We crossed the Amstel a few times over the course of the afternoon before more food – I had delicious snert (pea soup).

Trying not to look too cold above the Amstel

A great weekend away from England, the first for quite sometime – since late January I think.  Unfortunately back to a four-day week in which I tried to cover three different roles at work and went in to Easter exhausted.  So my first weekend at home in five weeks is much needed – thankfully only one more week until a proper holiday.