Canadian blood donor

We did an overnight canoe trip in Algonquin park north of Toronto, which was probably the best part of our Canadian trip. The park is pretty amazing, with thousands of small and large lakes available to explore by canoe. We chose a fairly easy route with only one 300m portage. We pretty much had the whole area to ourselves because it was black fly season. We camped overnight at a beautiful campsite on a point in a bend of Little Doe lake.

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Mr. DEET was our friend on this trip. From the moment we stepped out of the car for the next two days we were all covered head to toe in 40% DEET insect repellent that I bought at the hunting store. I also had the 100% DEET vial as a backup, but I was scared of it :)

A liberal application kept the black flies and mozzies hovering in a cloud about 10 cm from your exposed skin. The black flies are sneaky little bastards though. They landed on my back and crawled up under my T-shirt to give me a ring of bites around my waist. Nasty! They inject an anti-coagulent so the bite continues to bleed for quite a while after the bug is gone. Still, the bite isn't itchy so I'd take it over a mozzie any day!

Apparently all the moose (meese?) try and get away from the lakes during black fly season (they don't like them either!). Sure enough, we met one on the road on the way back to return the canoes. Cool!

Niagara

Niagara falls is amazing. We did the 'Behind the Falls' tour which takes you through tunnels behind the falls to where you can look out into a wall of white and hear the roar. You also get a great close-up profile view. After that we took the Maid of the Mist for a close-up soaking. Lots of wearing disposable raincoats :)

Toronto, I won a....subway ride?

Toronto is a cool city. Like all the Canadian cities we went to there were bicycles everywhere, which is something I really miss from home. They built this gigantic tower right in the middle of it that is ridiculously taller than every other building in the city. It has a cool glass floor - it was entertaining watching em trying to walk on it and chickening out :)

Both Toronto and Montreal have the strangest subway ticketing system I have ever seen. It's a gigantic scratchie!?! How the hell am I supposed to fit that in my wallet? And every time I want to use it I have to go through the booth where everyone who doesn't have tickets is waiting on the cashier. Jeez, get it together Canada.

We went out with our friend Katrina who took us to the Wayne Gretzky bar for the Stanley Cup final. Sweet!

Vibram five fingers: Coolest shoes ever

I have got to get some of these babies. Garth, I think these shoes were made for you.

HOV lanes grow slugs in DC since 1971

You may remember I blogged about the petrol price craziness back in January. That was nothing. Now, every single day there are radio, TV, and print stories complaining about high petrol prices. So much so, that news networks are struggling to find ways to make filming a petrol pump look interesting.

The prices have risen dramatically - when we arrived in September 2007 we were paying about $US2.70/gallon, now we are paying about $US4.00/gallon. Of course it doesn't worry us too much because we have probably the second smallest car in America.

It seems this latest set of rises was finally enough to force concerted action in America. Some (most?) of the reactions are stupid - a summer petrol tax holiday (aka vote buying), stopping strategic petrol stockpiling, "gas price guarantees" from car manufacturers for their gas guzzling vehicles, and some good - massive demand and pressure on manufacturers for hybrid and highly efficient vehicles.

I'm still yet to hear a story about the government having the foresight to spend more money on public transport or people moving closer to work.

I also just found out about "slugging" or "casual carpooling", which is an interesting symptom of the carpool lanes in DC that has been going since 1971!!! This is how it works:

The system of slugging is quite simple. A car needing additional passengers to meet the required 3-person high occupancy vehicle (HOV) minimum pulls up to one of the known slug lines. The driver usually positions the car so that the slugs are on the passenger side. The driver either displays a sign with the destination or simply lowers the passenger window, to call out the destination, such as "Pentagon," "L’Enfant Plaza," or "14th & New York." The slugs first in line for that particular destination then hop into the car, normally confirming the destination, and off they go.

Interesting that people would be scared for their lives hitch-hiking around the US, and yet they are happy to pick up random strangers to save a few minutes on their commute!

Playoff Beards

I was just watching the Hockey Stanley cup and saw this little box pop up on the screen that said something about "Playoff Beards". Buh? Then I noticed all the wildman faces under the helmets. Awesome. Sadly Movember will never will never achieve the same popularity here, because half the male population are already sporting dirty dirty Mo's.

Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson - Mr. Universe 1861

Bec, Rob, and 3yr old Max turned up fresh from Disneyland, complete with Mickey ears, to stay with us for two weeks. We headed down to Shenandoah National Park and stayed in a cabin there, did some walking, and tried to stop Max torturing various forms of wildlife - mainly ladybeetles and worms, no bears this time.

We also checked out Lauray Caverns, which are some of the best caves I have ever seen. The photo on the left shows what look to be like a city of delicate stalagmites but it is actually a reflection off perfectly still, clear water. This cave is a serious money spinner - it has a shopping mall size carpark and the whole cave is wheelchair accessible!

On the way to Shenandoah we checked out the Civil War battle site at Manassas. This was the first major land battle of the Civil War and the place where Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson earned his nickname.

If you believe the statue (see photo), Jackson was Mr. Universe for 1861 (look at those arms!), and rode around on Farlap. We got a awesome walkthrough blow-by-blow of the whole battle from a ranger, while we walked in the soldiers' footsteps out in the fields.

Civil war and eating my weight in crab

Mum and dad stayed with us last week, which was fun. On the weekend we got our history on, starting with a visit to Harpers Ferry on the border of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.


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This was where John Brown did his thing, which helped set the country on the road to civil war, and Harpers Ferry continued to be a flashpoint during the civil war. After that we headed up to Antietam (said An-tee-tum), which was a civil war battlefield, and holds the depressing title as the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history, with 23,000 casualties.

We went out to dinner with mum and dad a few times - my favourite was when we had the seafood buffet at Phillips in the inner harbour. I ate nothing but crab legs, which meant it took about three hours of hard work before I was full, but it was an awesome dinner :)

I think this is pigs ear....NY take 2

We had our second visit to New York on the weekend, and caught up with Lyd who was in town for work. This time was a bit more relaxed since we had ticked most of the tourist boxes last trip. Here are the highlights:

• We did the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, and saw the drinking holes of various literary giants like Edgar Allen Poe and Louisa May Alcott. It was pretty fun, although the "facts" were fairly dubious - the guides had to frequently refer to their script, which looked suspiciously like a whole lot of stuff they had printed off the Internet :) Sadly most of the historic pubs are going out of business due to the ridiculous rent.
  
• Mary Poppins on broadway. Awesome. They even did a good job of the English accents (well, at least to my colonial ear)
  
• Went on a quest to find H&H Bagels, which Lonely Planet was billing as the best in NY. After finding the store in a fairly dodgy semi-industrial area, we decided we would much rather have gone to a nice cafe with mediocre bagels :)
  
• The Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit at the Guggenheim was awesome. His medium of choice is gunpowder :)
  
• Lyd and I went to the Museum of Modern Art, while Em headed to the UN. MoMA was also amazing, they had a special exhibition Design and the elastic mind, which was one of the best museum pieces I have ever seen. One guy was making smiley faces out of folded DNA(!?), and someone else has written a computer algorithm to construct impossibly complex origami. Awesome.
  
• Dinner in Korea Town. I love having to ask how to eat food. I think I might have eaten pigs ear...
  
• Subway rat count = 4
  

Stormtroopers Garrisoned in Philly

Philly is cool. It had a good vibe, nice bars and restaurants. We went and saw the Star Wars exhibit at the Franklin Institute. It was pretty sweet - lots of stuff from both new and old movies, and an entire stormtrooper garrison were wandering around, you can see them on the steps in the photo (see flickr for better photos). The guys who do this pay about $1200 for full stormtrooper outfits.

My favourite was the stormtrooper who was pretending to be a statue inside the exhibit who would wait for people to get accustomed to him then suddenly move, and freak out adults and kids alike. It was also pretty funny seeing a random stormtrooper here and there in the parks near the museum just walking around or sitting on the edge of a fountain.

Other notable bits:

• The Mutter Museum. A fairly nauseating but fascinating medical museum featuring many different skulls of murder victims, deformed foetuses, and dried corpses. I thought the case with hammer/anvil/stirrup ear bones from lots of species (including human) was amazing.
  
• Liberty bell - big crack, no ringing.
  
• Reading Terminal Market (sadly no Obama or Hillary present, they have been hanging out there drumming up support for the Pennsylvania primary)
  
• Independence hall. Our tour guide seriously hated the National Treasure movie with Nicholas Cage, which is party set at independence hall. I got the feeling her job changed from answering questions about the declaration of independence to answering questions about which brick Nic Cage pulled out of the wall in the movie...