The North, Eh
Hey everybody,
Things have been relatively quiet for the last week or so, mostly because I’ve been staying with friends and have therefore not had the solo time to think of anything stupid. I spent over a week in Canada, most of which was hosted in Kingston, Ontario by Cari and Rich. Most of you may not have heard of Kingston, which sounds about right. Kingston has a university, a prison, and a population that generally veers toward the husky side. I bombed into town on the day that Cari gave her two weeks notice at work… Rich’s unemployment aura finally got the best of her, though I came to find out that this is the first time in the 6 years I’ve known Rich that he has a job (working remotely of course). Strange times indeed, though as you can see he can still bust out his signature move at will.
We roamed around Kingston for a day or so then headed to Crow Lake where Cari’s family runs a campground. When I say campground I mean RV trailers with cabins built around them. A couple of days barbecuing, loitering around campfires making s’mores, having a few beers, writing songs about Jeremy, and fishing. I caught my first fish ever, which was pretty exciting. It was a dolphin. There’s no proof of this because I had to let it go for fear it would telepathically assault me. I watch a lot of movies.
We also spent a day in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, roaming around various government buildings. There’s not much else to do in Ottawa, which explains the unusually high number of randomly drunk people loitering outside grocery stores. The weather was fairly unpleasant anyway so we had to keep ducking in and out of pubs. Had to.
After an evening at Tammy’s where her mom cooked us a fantastic dinner, I said my goodbyes to Kingston and temporarily to Rich and Cari (whom I’ll be seeing in Thailand) and headed west to Toronto to meet up with Pete. I’d been to Toronto once before in 2007, but the only things I remembered about it is that I liked it and that I saw Edward Norton, who is a lot taller than I expected. He has to be about 6’2”. Anyway, that’s also the last time I saw Pete, who is not 6’2”, but he did organize an informal brewery tour of Toronto on a Monday night, and for that he is awesome. Maybe not Fight Club awesome, that’s tough, but definitely 25th Hour awesome.
Here’s one thing you may not know about Canadians: They are really nice. To people. They say hello and they make eye contact and it almost sounds like they mean it. When they ask how you’re doing it does not sound sarcastic. It’s kind of creepy sometimes. Well, except for the border guards anyway. We had just missed the tour at the first brewery we stopped, Steam Whistle, so the guy behind the bar just gave us the entire low-down on the brewing process and then gave us two free beers and also free passes to a future tour. In case you’re interested, Steam Whistle only produces one (1) beer, a Czech-style pilsner, and follows German beer purity laws by only using four ingredients (water, hops, barley, yeast). The next brewery was Amsterdam Brewing, where they were only open to sell bottles (the tasting taps were closed), but Nick (the guy working the retail shop) brought out four beers from the fridge for us to sample and then told us they were on him. See what I mean? Nice! Free beer is nice! I liked Toronto. Not just for the free beer or good company, but because it has some pretty cool, walkable neighborhoods with small storefronts and a variety of things to see and do. There is a huge, and I mean huge, housing boom going on right now judging simply by the incredible numbers of condominiums that have been recently built or are under construction. I just wouldn’t want to be there in the winter.
From Toronto I continued west and stopped for a couple of hours at Niagara Falls. The pictures will tell most of the story on that, though I don’t know if they’ll properly convey the scale. The horseshoe falls on the Canadian side are much more striking than the straight falls on the U.S. side. The mist rising up from the power of the falls reaches all the way out to the parking lot 200 feet away. Unsurprisingly, it’s a pretty touristy area, but luckily it wasn’t too crowded on a Tuesday morning. I don’t think it would ever be possible to have some alone time contemplating the falls anyway, even in the middle of the night, due to the sheer number of of hotel rooms in the city.
I was a little concerned about the border crossing back into the U.S. I usually have a hard enough time coming back into the country at the airport so I could only imagine what they had in store for me at the land border. I handed my passport over at the booth and the guard looks at it, then looks at me, then says, “Looks like all the hair went from your head to your face.” Then he laughs. Turns out he’s from Modesto so he asked me a couple of questions about the Bay Area then says, “Do you have any Cuban cigars?” I laughed and said, “Naw, I don’t smoke.” Then he smiled and waved me on.
Detroit Rock City was next on the itinerary where I stayed with my bro Dave and Mai, who were extremely happy to see me, I think mostly because they are desperate for company. They only recently emigrated to Detroit Rock City so Dave could take care of his real estate business which gives him some fairly unique insights on the city. After a couple of hours talking to Dave you learn a lot about how hard the economic downturn hit an already depressed area, about economic and racial divisions, and about how the streets dividing Detroit and some of its adjacent suburbs are patrolled as if by border guards. It’s a remarkable thing to see when you cross over from one city to another just by one block and the houses, businesses and storefronts go from well-maintained to run-down. We drove around a few of the neighborhoods looking at the rows of brick bungalows that have remained relatively unmodified since they were built in the 1930s. Since all the houses look the same, the way to judge the relative affluence of a particular neighborhood is by the number of burned out, boarded up vacant houses in the area. In some areas it’s so bad that entire blocks are vacant. Dave told me that in certain areas if a tenant leaves and the house is not boarded up within 24 hours it gets completely stripped… appliances, fittings, copper piping, everything gone. That’s not to say that Detroit is entirely post-apocalyptic. There are a ton of huge skyscrapers in the downtown area, and quite a few restaurants and bars in the renovated area near the ballpark. The city is surrounded by affluence in suburbs like Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe, so somebody must be making money somewhere doing something.
Anyhow, the journey continues west next week where I hope to end up at Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone at some point. Watch out Lincoln… I’m coming for you!
Take ‘er easy,
Dave