Nefarious made these videos on the indoor waterslide at the Belleville Ramada Inn of herself, Caitlin, and I… We had so much fun on it. They also have a decent outdoor pool (which is quite nicely heated) and a sauna. I recommend this hotel for the slide alone if you (or the little one you’re travelling with) are into such things… Up a notch, I totally want to go to Great Wolf Lodge some time — everyone I know that’s stayed there with their kids has loved it. This was shot with my Olympus Stylus 1030 SW by the way, a camera which has served me very nicely. Unfortunately we forgot to turn the audio recording on, so the clip doesn’t include Nefarious’s charming narration.
We just got back from a five day road trip through Ontario. We went to Ottawa to visit my brother and Nefarious’s cousins, and then went up to Lake Dore near Algonquin Park and also stopped to see the Bonnechere caves, and then went to Belleville for some back-to-school shopping and then further south to Prince Edward Point which has beautiful flat stones stepping out into Lake Ontario, where we saw a few water snakes and Nefarious caught a number of frogs, and we climbed Macaulay Mountain as well. Lots of swimming and exploring and a ton of driving. That’s the very short version of course, but I wanted to get a last road trip into the summer before Tuesday’s surgery. After that there’s the CNE and school starts again…
I filled up the squirt gun with food colouring for the girls to play with, and they had a great time colouring the wall of our laneway, and were even joined by our neighbour (whose noisy band I have occasionally whined about here) who took a turn spraying. It fades amazingly quickly, so even if it doesn’t rain in the next few days as expected I can’t imagine it being very visible by the middle of next week. Annoyance about noise aside (although I’m happy to say that’s an issue that’s mostly resolved and there’s a decent middle ground in place now), one of the things I love about living in a place like this is the freedom to do harmless yet often-not-tolerated-by-landlord things like this.
Other than that I have been looking at all of the wonderful retro pictures on Cerebral Museum, perhaps my favourite tumblr blog so far (which I found following links from Crappy Taxidermy), and chuckling about the “Gog and Magog” story from Chirac (in which he claims that George Bush asked him for help in 2003 defeating the agents of Satan in the Middle East).
Since people said to start a blog on the subject, I fired one up. So say hello to DamnDirtyDoctors.com. I need your help getting content for the site of course, so please pass it on to anyone who you think can help, or take some “spy photos” of your own. If there’s an interest, I’ll gladly maintain the site and keep it going (and make it look a bit nicer than it does now).
All submissions are anonymous of course. I would hate to see someone lose their medical care because a pissed off doctor gets angry when their negligence gets pointed out. Let’s hope I don’t get sued BTW… Doctors — and their insurance companies especially — have deep pockets when it comes to legal bills.
Oh, and I added some “ducks” yesterday as well. Both sites could use your help of course, as both are reader-written… you decide which is more important to you!
Nefarious, Caitlin, Saira, Michael, and I rented a car for the long weekend and went “park hopping” (the rental was a funny experience because Discount, where I had the reservation, unexpectedly had all their cars locked up in the body shop next door, with the owner of said body shop out of town for the weekend, and they had to drive me and their other customers down to Enterprise to rent there instead).
On the first day of our trip, Sunday, we hit Presqu’ile (near Brighton), which was a little mucky and murky green but had great waves. We spent the night in Belleville, which meant more swimming at the hotel pool, and better yet, it had an indoor two or three story high spiralling water slide — Nefarious and I got lots of exercise running up and down the stairs to it for about an hour before going back to the room and watching a movie (The Land of the Lost — meh) before bedtime.
After having the treat of room service breakfast in bed the next morning — which was the tenth anniversary of the drowning death of our mutual friends Todd and Scott Fox — we first went to one of the beaches on the road to Salmon Point (roughly where they drowned), and then drove down to the Black River Cheese Company for ice cream (which is where we bumped into a family of four touring The County on their awesome Russian Ural motorcycle with sidecar). Next was the Little Bluff Conservation Area, just down the street, which is a wonderful and historically under-appreciated beach (although there are more visitors every time I go). Finally, we went to the “Outlet” section of Sandbanks, a giant sand dune beach that is very shallow and warm, so you can walk out quite far.
Oh, and we ate at the Milford Bistro. The meal was nice but nothing that really blew me away (the place in the area that I particularly recommend if you find yourself in the Picton area is Michael Potters’ Harvest which is really amazing) — the meal’s thrill was saved for desert, where Nefarious and I split cheesecake and a fresh blueberry icecream that they made there that was incredible… Anyway, here are some pictures, in the order that I’ve mentioned the beaches above. Tomorrow is back to flight school, so hopefully all the exercise (and driving) will earn me a good night’s sleep.
