I’m going to have to be more selective of which overalls I wear on these outings. I’ll be designating a few pairs specifically for photography, because I find myself going down on one knee a lot, and I don’t want to damage the knees of my favorite vintage pairs, like this pair of Dickies.
Heavens, I think I may be actually getting better at this photography thing! I know it’s only been a short while with this camera, but I’m getting to the point already where carrying this camera around feels natural. Looking around feels natural. Thinking in terms of, “How can I capture this? What’s a neat way of looking at it?” is becoming natural.
Or…at least more natural than it used to feel.
This past Sunday morning I ventured up to Chestnut Ridge for the second time in three weeks. (Titling this post “The Ridge, again” might be a bit confusing, since I didn’t post my thoughts on the photos I took that day yet!) What’s nice about Chestnut Ridge, which is by area larger than Central Park in Manhattan, is that you can go multiple times and not visit the same areas. This time I walked along a different stream, one that has a spot where it tumbles down probably twenty feet or so of incline over a few hundred feet laterally, making for a series of neat-looking miniature waterfalls. This is a spot that ends in a large pool about four-feet deep. Farther upstream the bed is lined by large moss-covered boulders. Here are some of the photos I took that day; more are in a Flickr album, here.
Meantime, here are some of the shots I took the other day. I like how many of these turned out.
Pump House, and Pump House Roof Detail.
I love how these old pump-houses are left to slowly crumble in the forests of Chestnut Ridge. The overgrowth around them and the moss on them really make them feel like something out of the backgrounds in a Hayao Miyazaki movie.
Stair-stepping Stream, the colors of the pool, and life in and atop.
Note to self: Visit this spot in late Spring or early Summer next year, when there is more water flowing. Still, this is a nice bit of flow; I’ve seen it in August with half as much water.The reflected colors of the sunlit forest on the surface, plus the colors of the bottom below, make this almost like an Impressionist painting.Note the fish! and the sunken leaf…and the bubble floating….I’m thrilled I got this as sharply as I did! You can’t really see the water-striders all that well, but they’re not actually my subject here: the shadows on the bottom of their footprints ON the water are.
One thing about deciding to take photography seriously at this point, after years of snapshotting, is that I already have a pretty good sense of what my usual subjects will be and what styles of photography I will gravitate toward. In this case: when I’m around water, I almost get twitchy if I can’t take a photo somehow. Lakes, rivers, streams, cataracts, pools, puddles, the sea: it’s all fascinating to me.
Rushing water: using shutter priority.
These next three photos involve ongoing experiments with Shutter-priority mode. Managing shutter speed is another way of regulating light that reaches the camera sensor, and shutter speed in particular affects how motion is captured. A very fast shutter speed freezes action, while a slower shutter speed allows for blurring of the action. In the case of flowing water, a slower shutter speed turns the same rush of water over some rocks into something gossamer-like, looking like a veil of water rather than a distinct flow. You can see the difference in the next two, taken of the same spot but with different shutter speeds:
This one, I did not get a comparison shot; I just really like how this turned out. Could it be sharper? Sure, as I was free-handing the shot at this point. When shooting with slower shutter speeds, vibrations of the camera itself actually show up in the image as blur, which is why tripods and timers and remotes are tools that help with this sort of photography.
I’m not sure what this rising steam was! Another hiker had passed through just a few seconds before I saw this mist, and I wondered if he had dropped a cigarette there, but I checked and no, he did not. So I suppose this is the mist of water rising from a dead and fallen tree trunk. Getting this was pure luck.
Mossy rocks and the stream. I think, if I were to do this one again, I’d shoot lower–maybe even set up a tripod in the water–so the framing of the shot would eliminate the fallen tree. Fallen trees are a major feature at Chestnut Ridge. They are always in evidence.
Buffalo-Niagara from the Chestnut Ridge Hill
This is one of this region’s best views. From the sledding hill facing north, you can see Buffalo (at right) and, at left in the distance, Niagara Falls, ON. In these two photos you can see two different approaches to editing: the first dials back the saturation while increasing the shadows and highlights, making the area of sunlight in the foreground pop a bit. The second photo is not zoomed at all, showing pretty much the entirety of the view from the Ridge. This one I brightened and dialed the saturation up, quite a bit more than I usually do, even.
By the way, that’s only 13 of the 30 shots that are in the Flickr album linked above…and the Flickr album only contains 30 of the more than 80 photos I took that day! I used to think it was all a matter of composing your perfect shot and then taking it, so you only end up with those perfect shots. It turns out that photographers take many, many more shots than they ever end up using…and that’s OK. It just means I didn’t understand that part of the process. Now, I’m on board.
Well, may I present the Formerly-Named “Hulk”. (We’re working on his new name. Stay tuned.)
It’s funny how when you lose a dog, people wait a respectable amount of time before asking, “Hey, do you think you might get another?” We held off a bit because we didn’t want memories of Cane to color our expectations of and relationship with any new dog; plus, we figured that Carla had her own process to get through. Cane’s passing was a deeply difficult time, and we didn’t want to fall into any trap of failing to honor him properly by charging full speed into a “replacement”.
But, at the same time…eventually you just have to get back on the bicycle, you know? So eventually, earlier this year, The Wife reached out to the local greyhound adoption group. We were on the wait list for a while, but eventually a few dogs started trickling back into the area. It’s a lot harder now to adopt greyhounds, now that greyhound racing is down to just five states where it’s a thing. (They are Iowa, Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, and of course, Texas.) We brought one in as a foster…and it turned out that he was not going to be cat-safe. He was around for all of one weekend, and then we had to move him on. Other than that, he was a really nice dog and I’m sure he landed in a perfect home someplace.
A few more weeks went by, and another opportunity to foster came up: a full-brindle boy, just over two years old, who had a mediocre racing history and was now fully retired. His full racing handle was “V.J. Hulked Out”, with a call-name of “Hulk”; as we were fostering him, we were required to call him by that name. So we’ve talked about what to make his actual name once the adoption goes all the way through. I pushed, a little, for Vijay; those first initials made me get all geeky, because one of my favorite supporting characters in any James Bond movie is a guy named Vijay in the India sequences in Octopussy. My family didn’t warm to “Vijay”, and I didn’t feel strongly enough to push hard for it. You have to pick your battles, and “Vijay” was not a battle I wanted to fight. That would have been cool, though!
Since we were actually fostering “Hulk” for the last month or so, there were certain rules the adoption group required us to follow, all of which seem perfectly reasonable. The big one was that we weren’t to post anything about him on social media, until his adoption became official. Well, earlier today we filled out the paperwork and made a nice donation to the group, so now he’s properly official. He’s actually a member of the family now! Huzzah!
Oh, and how is Carla liking having a brother again, albeit this time a younger brother? Well, so far, so good. She’s teaching “Hulk” how to play, how to bug us for treats, how to pace about to let us know he needs to go outside…she’s teaching him to dog, basically. He’s got a good teacher.
Oh, that photo up top? Good picture, innit? I took that just this afternoon! After a few weeks with us he finally felt comfortable enough in the back yard and with us to start running, and he’s really fast–much faster than Cane was, which ought to be interesting if/when I take him to the big fenced dog run at Knox Farm. Unfortunately for him we had to get him neutered the week before last, and part of his healing regimen was no running for 10 to 14 days. Today was Day Eleven and he has shown zero ill effects or discomfort following the procedure, so today we let him have a run. And who just happened to be there with his camera, just waiting for a good opportunity to practice photography in shutter-priority?
More photos to come, obviously. As I write this the Flickr app on my phone is being picky about uploading, so some of the shots that I really want to share will have to wait. Soon, though! You haven’t heard the last of this guy, not by a longshot.
This, from 2011, is still my favorite of all the photos I’ve taken there over the years. Maybe I was a budding street photographer all those years ago, and I didn’t realize it!
Your Humble Narrator, with his trusty Nikon Coolpix L840 digital camera. Taken October, 2020.
“But you know how it is. It’s like a hobby. Once you take up a hobby, the more interesting and fascinating it becomes.” –Tony Wendice (Ray Milland), Dial M for Murder
It may seem a bit weird using that quote to talk about my growing interest recently in photography (if you missed it, check out Part One of this series!), since in the movie Tony Wendice is referring to his growing fascination with the daily comings-and-goings of the low-life guy he’s soon going to be kind-of blackmailing, and kind-of paying to murder his wife, but the sentiment applies to all hobbies, doesn’t it?
Like most people, my “photography” consisted of snapping shots of things: places we went, stuff the cats and later the dogs were doing, and so on. I just…snapped lots of photos along the way. Sometimes I’d take something and say, “Whoa, that turned out nice!” Most times, though, my photos were strictly utilitarian, and if we were in particularly notable places that lots of people frequented, I suppose I ended up with lots of versions of the same photos that they were taking. And no, there’s not a thing wrong with that. And if I wanted to dress the photos up a bit, filtering apps like Instagram or Prisma came in handy.
But a while back–and I’m not even sure when, exactly–I found myself watching a video by a creator I like, who posts regular slice-of-life videos from her own daily existence, and she made casual mention of wanting to buy a new camera because her old one still worked but wasn’t really giving her the results she wanted anymore, given how technology has progressed along with her knowledge of how to make videos and such. And that point stuck in my head, because I thought of my old Nikon Coolpix L840 that I bought back in 2015. I’d used it a lot, and was still using it, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to get a whole lot more out of it.
So I did a quick search on something along the lines of “What camera should I buy”, and you know how you do one search and then all of the content you see online pertains to that? Yeah, that.
I didn’t choose a camera quickly, but I did suddenly start seeing tons of photography-related content. “What camera to buy?” will, on YouTube, pull up all manner of such videos, many of them made by actual photographers, and not just advertorial articles that seem to make a good case until you realize they’re written by and for the company that’s selling the thing recommended in the article.
We like to complain about how a single search fills our social media feeds with crap related to that one search, but sometimes…sometimes, that single search will make the stars align in a certain way that’s actually helpful.
Actual photographers started showing up in my feeds, most usefully in my YouTube feed. Suggested video after suggested video after suggested video, all from photographers offering various teachings on the subject of photography. I watched a few of these, and…I was ready to take the bait, particularly after one thing one of them said. Roughly paraphrasing:
“Do this week’s photos look an awful lot like last week’s photos?”
That was said by a creator named Simon d’Entremont, a professional wildlife and nature photographer from Nova Scotia. I watched some of his videos, and I’ve now subscribed to his channel and look forward to his content, even if not all of it applies to what I’m doing (more on that later). One thing that I’ve discovered in the online photography community, at least the small bit of it that I’ve encountered thus far, is that everyone seems more than willing to share their tips, tricks, and acquired wisdom because they love the craft and they want to see it spread and to have people succeed. M. d’Entrimont closes each of his videos with the hope that his advice can help you go out and take marvelous photos, and the words, “I know you can do it!” I love when people providing informational and educational content take that attitude. It reminds me of Martin Yan’s old cooking shows, in which he always signed off with, “If Yan can cook, so can you!”
More on other specific creators later (in another post). For now, I’ll just say that I did some research on a camera to buy. I thought about taking the full plunge into a DSLR, which would be my first, but I backed off for several reasons. First, my understanding (which may well be misplaced!) is that DSLRs are slowly being edged out by the newest technological advance, “mirrorless” cameras. (Here’s an explanation.) DSLRs still exist but mirrorless cameras are taking over, and I’m not educated enough in photography to know if the mirrorless tech is totally established yet. A major technological paradigm shift is a bad time to jump into a new hobby!
Secondly, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are the types of systems where you buy a camera body and then lenses to use with it, switching out your lenses depending on what you’re doing. That means a lot of added expense; good lenses can run into four-digit territory by themselves! Now, I know that photography isn’t a cheap hobby, but it’s still one that…well…put it this way. At this point I am not comfortable enough with my knowledge and skill to justify spending a significant amount of money.
And there’s still a whole lot to learn! See, my good old Nikon Coolpix L840 takes nice photos and video (more on that below), but everything it does is through established modes and pre-programmed scene filters. And that is the biggest area of learning opportunity for me right now, when it comes to photography. In addition to continue challenging myself to compose my photos more skillfully and put some real thought into what kind of photographic content I want to create (and more on that in the next post as well!), I also need to learn the actual nuts-and-bolts of photography. I need to learn about the “exposure triangle”, about things like ISO, aperture settings, and shutter speed. I need to learn how to use those tools and manipulate them to get the image that I want…and I also need to strengthen my photo-editing chops as well, beyond applying this Instagram filter or that Prisma artwork AI application.
I took a lot of really good photos over the years with that trusty L840…but I wasn’t going to get better.
And since I decided there’s more than enough to learn without going fully into changing lenses and all of that, I decided to buy a bridge camera. What’s a bridge camera, you ask? It’s the in-between camera. A bridge camera is more capable than a simple point-and-shoot camera (which have become pretty damned capable in themselves, let’s be honest), but it’s not the full changeable-lens, shoot-in-manual-RAW camera either. (Well, it does those last things, but bear with me.) In short, a bridge camera is the ideal tool for me at this point in my decision to learn more about photography.
But which bridge camera to buy? Well, that took some research. I had a great experience with the L840, so when I need a new thing to replace something that worked well, I’m usually likely to look at the same brand again. And I was very tempted by the Nikon Coolpix P1000, a true behemoth of a camera that apparently boasts the biggest zoom lens in the bridge camera market. I mean, look at this camera! All together now, Star Wars fans: “Look at the size of that thing!”
Why didn’t I get that one? Size, basically, and a number of reviews indicated that if you need that much zoom, you’re really better off with a good DSLR or mirrorless system and a good, high-quality telephoto lens. And the P1000 apparently weighs more than three pounds, which is a lot to lug around. While I haven’t totally settled on the kinds of photography I want to do, I’m likely to be a camera-lugger. I’m wanting to travel more in years to come, and a 3.5lb camera isn’t the best travel option out there. I’ve read good reviews of the P1000 and I’m sure it’s a very fine instrument, but I decided it wasn’t for me.
I seriously looked into a camera by Sony, the RX10 IV (stay tuned another time for my extended rant on naming and numbering conventions for electronic devices; this shit is getting confusing), but while reviews of it seem to consistently rank it as the best bridge camera, it’s also expensive enough that if I’m spending that much, I might as well spend a bit more and commit to the changeable-lens game (which might well be in my future, but not for a while yet).
Through all this I found myself gravitating toward the Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 II, and when I found one on sale in a package deal on eBay that included a small camera bag, a cleaning kit, a pistol-grip tripod, a Gorilla-style tripod, and a couple of other goodies for a hundred dollars less than the camera’s suggested retail price, well then. That was the play.
And here it is, sitting alongside the old L840.
Oooh! Aaah! (Funny that I’m taking pictures of my cameras with my phone.)
Kind of reminds me of Star Trek III, when the Enterprise is dwarfed by the Excelsior! (Yes, I can make anything into a Trek or Wars reference. Anything at all.)
Oh, on video: one thing that I always found disappointing about the L840 was the video quality. Not the video itself; the footage looked great, and I thought at one point about using that camera to film videos if I started adding “vlogging” to my roster of content-creation habits. Sadly, the camera’s microphone wasn’t up to snuff for me. If recording inside, it was OK but not great, but recording outside wasn’t great at all. It would pick up wind noise something awful, and there is some footage I took with this camera that simply isn’t useable because of the wind noise the camera picked up. (Yes, one of these unreleased videos involves pies.) Worse, the L840 has no provisions for connecting an external microphone, so the workaround was to either use the L840 in conjunction with my phone, which does allow for external mike, and then sync the sound together in the editing process…or just use my phone for the entirety of whatever video work I wanted to do. I found that deeply disappointing, for various reasons. (Now, at the time I bought the L840 I wasn’t really thinking in terms of video, so I never looked into the microphone situation. I can’t blame the camera for not being great at something I didn’t really intend to do with it when I bought it.)
The FZ1000 II, however, does take very good video footage and it takes an external microphone, if desired. So I’m covered there. As of this writing, I have not looked into video recording yet…but I will. Oh yes, I will. Indeed!
I’ll wrap this up here, as this is getting long. Next time I’ll discuss and present some results from my first month or two with this camera. But before I go, here are two photos I took at Knox Farm State Park, where I went to do my first real “shakedown cruise” with this camera. This is a demonstration of the camera’s zoom, which is considerable, if not quite as jaw-dropping as the adore-mentioned P1000. For both of these photos, I was standing in the exact same spot.
Yes, that is a new camera. A Panasonic Lumix FZ1000 Mark II, to be precise.
What brought this on?
Well, I’ve loved taking pictures for years. I suppose I got bit by that particular bug in college, when all my friends had cameras. Growing up, my family was not much at all for picture-taking. I remember the last camera we owned being the kind that took the plastic film cartridges. Remember those? All-in-one cartridges so you didn’t even have to feed the film yourself at all? My memories of the camera itself are very vague, as I wasn’t allowed to use it (probably with good reason). We didn’t even get prints made when we used that camera; I remember that we had a slide projector so we’d get slides made, and once in a while we’d break out the projector and look at the slides on the wall. (No, we didn’t have a screen, so a white wall–which was usually textured–served as the screen.) Sometimes when we were on trips my father would buy a strip of pre-made slides from wherever it was we were visiting.
I don’t think we used that slide projector at all after our last move, the one to Allegany, NY in 1981…I don’t even know if the projector itself made the move with us. I know it wasn’t the kind of slide projector with the carousel in which slides traveled; ours had little cubes that held the slides, I think. It’s entirely possible that my memories here are completely bollixed, but the point is, I didn’t want a camera until I was in college. I asked for one for one of those Christmases, and my parents obliged; and thus I joined my classmates in chronicling my adventures on film.
Even then, though, I was just taking snapshots of stuff here and there. I had no interest in photography, much at all. This remained the case into our entries into the digital camera age. I bought our first digital camera in 2004 or 2005, roughly; being able to take pictures and transfer them to the computer without scanning them first was pretty amazing, as was the idea that you could see instantly if your photo sucked. Of course, we upgraded that digital camera, then we upgraded it again, and yet again. We went from an Olympus in 2004 to a Kodak in 2007 to a Canon in 2010 and finally to a Nikon Coolpix in 2015.
Along the way, of course, came our phones, which also took digital photos with increasing quality. I shudder at the terrible resolution of that Motorola Razr phone, all 1 megapixels of it…followed by a phone whose brand I don’t remember, followed by my Samsung S4, then my Samsung S8, and currently, my Samsung S21. When I bought my current phone in fall 2021, I wanted to upgrade my phone’s picture-taking as much as possible because of our then-impending trip to Hawaii, and this decision has served me well since.
Well, as my gear has improved over the years, so has my interest in taking better pictures–if not quite an interest in photography. I think those two things aren’t quite the same, to be honest. But…over the last year…I think the former has become the latter.
This newfound habit of mine, in which I post here on Monday through Thursday and then don’t post at all Friday through Sunday, is not an intentional habit at all; it’s just one of those seeming habits that gets dictated from without by external realities. In this case, it’s that we left town Saturday and did not return until Sunday. The reason for our trip was our annual visit to the Sterling Renaissance Festival. I took a lot of photos on this trip, and you can see them all at the Flickr album here (I’ll have more to say on the general topic of photography later this week, I hope), but here’s a small selection:
God save the Queen!The Falconer’s owl
Melee!I think this photo captures best the feeling I love so much about the Renaissance Festival.The jousting fieldEnd of Day Revelry: the pub sing!I got NO sauce from my turkey leg on my white shirt. Victory! (And no, I didn’t get any on the overalls, either.)
The Sterling Renaissance Festival remains one of our favorite getaways of the year, and this year’s was especially delightful because we all hadn’t been able to attend since 2019, before COVID. The Festival was canceled in 2020 and I’m not sure if it happened in 2021 or not, but that year we couldn’t go anyway, because of Reasons. In 2022 we were able to go and we pre-ordered three tickets, for The Wife, The Daughter, and myself–but then The Wife had ankle surgery in early summer, and that ruled out her attendance. The Festival is a ton of walking, and it’s rustic walking, with the Festival grounds occupying the side of a forested hill. Getting around the Festival for an entire day is tiring for a fully healthy adult, believe me!
We did notice that the Festival is showing some signs of wear around the edges, if that makes sense: buildings in slightly greater disrepair than usual, some decorations in desperate need of re-painting, and some vendor booths and buildings actually empty (though some of those boasted signage that their particular vendors would be joining the Festival later in the year). And the crowds were definitely smaller…but that did make for a bit more enjoyable time. I do hope that none of the above was indicative of a Festival in decline, and that they’ll be back up to full strength moving forward. It’s a quirky and fun way to spend a day, even if it costs quite a bit of money. Most things do, nowadays.
Instead of driving all the way home, we stayed overnight in Palmyra, NY, after having dinner at our favorite fried chicken joint in Webster, NY. One note about staying overnight in Palmyra: that town is literally holy ground for the LDS Church, so you will almost certainly be surrounded by Mormons. This doesn’t bother me particularly, but it might bother some…and who’s to say if I bothered the Mormons! I’m not usually attuned to people staring at me, but it was hard not to notice some of them being somewhat flummoxed by a long-haired bearded guy in overalls and a poofy-sleeved shirt walking through the lobby of the Best Western by the Hill Cumorah site.
Anyway, getting out of town and doing something fun was a delight–and as it happens, this year it felt like a necessary delight. (More on that…someday, perhaps.)
(NOTE: I am aware of the controversy that has erupted in recent weeks surrounding the Sterling Renaissance Festival, the people who own it, and one employee there. My comments section is not the place to litigate that situation, and I will approve no comments referencing it.)
Highmark Stadium and the city of Buffalo, looking north from Chestnut Ridge Park
For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.
Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges through which streams run. The most famous feature in Chestnut Ridge Park is the Eternal Flame waterfall, which is just that: a waterfall behind which there is a small grotto into which natural gas seeps from underground. This gas is almost always aflame, and if it happens to be out, you can literally reach in behind the water and relight it, if you’ve brought a lighter with you.
Chestnut Ridge was a common destination for Cane and I in our weekly nature walks and hikes, and we covered a great deal of the park’s terrain and trail system over our years of trekking there. My last visit to the Ridge with Cane was last July, I think…which was therefore the last time I was there at all. Shortly after that visit he started limping slightly, and that was the beginning of his end.
Yesterday was my first trip there alone in many years.
Being up there yesterday was many things. It was beautiful, obviously, and being in nature was honestly what the doctor ordered after what’s been a trying few months recently. I kept thinking, though, of the presence I was missing; I’d walk a hundred feet and suddenly realized that I hadn’t had to stop three times for a greyhound to smell this tree, that bush, this patch of dirt, that rock. When you’re used to walking those trails with one hand always holding a leash, it’s a bit strange when that hand is unoccupied. And when I made my way down to the side of the stream at the bottom of one of those gorges, there was no watching as Cane found a deep spot to lay in–you know, to cool off–and to drink.
I won’t be staying away from Chestnut Ridge this long again…but it’s not going to feel the same there again, is it?
Photos:
Stream in Chestnut Ridge, from a bridge. It’s been very dry the last six weeks; usually there’s much more water than this, this time of year.
The trees that I call “the Fallen Sisters”. Again, note how dry the stream is. This time of year that whole streambed is flowing.
Inside an old pump house. The pump is long gone.
It was a good day, a good walk in the woods. There was even time for a touch of whimsy, like plucking a few wildflowers and wearing them in the bib of my overalls. One should always strive for a touch of whimsy. At least, that’s how I see it.
A couple of weeks ago The Wife and I enjoyed a weekend getaway to Toronto! I’ve already documented Day One; now here’s a brief rundown on Days Two and Three. (By ‘brief’ I mean…not very brief.)
After the difficulties we encountered in getting around Toronto on foot on Saturday, I reworked our plans slightly for Sunday, eschewing the GO Train to Union Station and a subsequent jaunt to the subway for simply driving a bit farther from our hotel to an actual subway station near the Yorkdale Mall, which we rode into downtown proper, thus cutting out one entire mode of transport and need to walk from one station to another entirely. Our plan here was to go to a taco joint we’d read about for lunch, which had a location very near one of the TTC subway stops, and then to proceed to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which was a few blocks away. This we’d be able to reach using transport, if necessary, via Toronto’s street-cars.
Well, here was our first hiccup (and really, thankfully, our only hiccup of the day): it turned out that the taco joint we had planned to visit is in the food court of a really big downtown Toronto hospital, and the hospital entrance that’s on the street we were on was actually closed for construction, so we’d have to walk all the way around the hospital to the other entrance to get in. At this point, The Wife was still really tender from the overly-strenuous walking of the day before, so we bailed on that plan…which is how we ended up in the downtown of one of the world’s great cities, eating lunch at a Chipotle.
Sometimes, that whole “Any port in a storm” thing is very, very real, folks.
After that, though, everything went very well. We walked down to the streetcar stop, boarded, and rode it the five blocks or so to the Art Gallery of Ontario, which turned out to be a wonderful museum just packed with amazing art. Here are just a few samples:
Claude Monet, painted on a door panel from a place where he was staying when he was near Etretat, whose cliffs are depicted in his painting.
Not only did we love the art, but it was also more comfortable for The Wife, as I actually rented a wheelchair for her to use (rented is the wrong word since they’re free, come to think of it) for the duration of our time there. Plus, after the hectic packed-with-children atmosphere of the Ripley’s Aquarium the day before, it was lovely to roam the halls of a more quiet art museum. There were lots of people there, but it wasn’t noisy. Art museums are a delight, once you get to the point in life where you know how to enjoy them.
No idea why I’m looking so jaded here; we really did love the Art Gallery!
After the museum, we took the streetcar another few blocks down the street to a restaurant called Almond Butterfly Bistro, which is (a) gluten-free and (b) delicious. It’s a lovely little place and we had a great time there.
By the way, this particular restaurant is a good example of something I noticed in several places we visited on this trip: there were restrooms for patrons, but none of them were gendered. There were simply several separate washrooms, and that was it. No “men’s room”, no “ladies room”, just washrooms. This seems to me one of the more obvious ways that we should be dealing with the whole folderol about gender in public places: simply stop making it an issue that doesn’t need to be, in any way. Obviously this would be a big shift for lots of existing places, but I’m thinking more and more places should adopt this approach moving forward. Our current model of “a big room with stalls” labeled by gender seems increasingly out of step, to me.
Oh, what did we have? She had fish-and-chips, I had a grilled cheese. Both were terrific.
No, that’s not fish-and-chips, that’s onion rings. Gluten-free onion rings are an infrequent find!
After dinner it was back to the hotel to use the pool and relax; and then the next day it was Monday morning and time to start heading for home.
On Monday, we rose and checked out of the hotel and headed for home…with a few stops first, like a big shopping mall with a big bookstore and a really nice anime-and-comics store and a few other places for The Wife, where among other things, I picked up books and a few gifts:
That Funko Pop of Daryl from Letterkenny was my gift for The Wife on this trip. I usually default to jewelry, but I never really saw anything that caught my eye. As we are both Letterkenny fans, this is perfect for her!
Note that yes, he’s holding a f*ckin’ Puppers.
We also stopped at a grocery store, because we wanted to see what a good Canadian grocery store is like. It was a Loblaw’s, and we did buy some stuff, mostly some snack items that are hard to find in the US.
After the grocery store, we started for home, driving westward down the QEW (that’s the Queen Elizabeth Way, the main expressway connecting the cities of the Golden Horseshoe, as the Canadian region around the western end of Lake Ontario is often called). We stopped for lunch at a taco joint in Burlington, Ontario, and then we stopped at a winery near Niagara-on-the-Lake (a charming old-timey village) where we picked up a few more souvenirs, before finally heading for the Lewiston Bridge to the United States.
The winery was a bit more pretentious than we are generally used to; the Finger Lakes wineries we tend to visit are usually more laid-back places (though they take their wines seriously!). This place really played up its “connoisseur” air, with our server discussing the finer points of the glassware and the styling of the labels on the bottles. I don’t want to make it sound like this was uninteresting and unwelcome, though! I actually found the idea of glasses for sparkling wine, with nucleation points for bubbles actually etched into the bottom of the bowl, pretty interesting. We have already consumed the one bottle of sparkling wine I bought from there, and it’s on my list to stop and pick up more when I can.
Niagara-on-the-Lake feels a bit curated, if that makes sense; the town feels a bit hand-crafted to be touristy and quaint. But in all honesty, I have zero problem with that. It was a nice place to wind down our Canadian weekend.
Returning to the US made me sad. I can’t lie here: it’s not just that the trip is ending and you know it’s over once you’re past customs and you’re measuring in miles again. In all honestly, I always find that Buffalo feels rather small and provincial after a trip to Toronto, which is, after all, the fourth-largest city in North America by population.
We’re going back, someday. A hell of a lot sooner than twelve years.
