Category: Travel

My actual travels, those I aspire to, and those of others

Careful on your bikes everyone!

The weather is starting to get nice, but I am wary of breaking out my bicycle.

9 months and 22 days ago, I hit a pothole on my bicycle, flew forward over the handlebars, crashed into the pavement, and broke my collarbone. If I had landed differently, I might have broken my neck. As it was, the recovery was long and difficult and I am still not quite at 100%. This is my third serious bicycle accident in Ottawa. Back in November 2007, a turning car forced me to brake urgently on Rideau Street and made me fly over my handlebars. Another time, a turning black pickup truck actually hit me, as I was headed up Somerset Street.

Cyclists like to pretend otherwise, but cycling in the city is dangerous. Even without the menace of cars, you can kill yourself by hitting a pothole, going over a railing, or getting your wheel caught and being thrown into traffic.

Friends and family members who cycle, please be careful! Wear lights and reflective clothes at night. Avoid the temptation to talk on the phone or listen to music while cycling. Even with a headset on, holding a conversation is as poor an influence on your reaction time as being drunk.

International storage services

The longer one stays in a place, the more material goods one tends to acquire: everything from clothing to furniture to photo albums. One problem with this is that it inhibits a person from taking advantage of distant opportunities, particularly those that are temporary and ill-paying.

One may to reduce the extent to which possessions are anchors would be to have a company that specializes in managing the personal possessions of mobile people. Say you were leaving a city where you had worked for a few years, in order to try something new elsewhere. You could box up all the things which you did not expect to need immediately and put them in the keeping of the company. They would keep track of your boxes along with those of thousands of others, and could send you things as requested. Similarly, you could submit additional materials to be added to your archive.

This would save you the bother of setting up storage space in various cities – which can be hard to administer from afar. It also reduces the burden of moving. You may not need your Ottawa winter clothes for a temporary position in San Francisco, but you can pretty easily set them aside somewhere safe for later access if needed. The same goes for books, furniture, art materials, etc. Customers could produce electronic records of what was inside of standard storage containers, then request them when they were needed. Rather than having to travel halfway around the world to pick up some desired books and a photographic enlarger, you could just request that the appropriate boxes be shipped from the storage site where they have been kept.

Another advantage to this system is that it would allow people to invest in higher quality possessions. Rather than buying terrible pots and pans (probably soldered with cadmium) in each new city, people could purchase a decent set and have it shipped whenever they expected to be in one place for a long time. In the event that a person’s possessions became unwanted, the storage company could auction them off and retain a portion of the revenues.

The service would also be useful for people who want to travel. You could spend six months or a year exploring the world, without having to sell off all your possessions beforehand and buy replacements after.

Because the firm would specialize in storing and shipping personal possessions, it could operate at a lower cost than individuals trying to undertake these tasks themselves. There would also be opportunities for diversification – for instance, coordinating the subletting of apartments, or even the exchange of pets between those who are moving into circumstances that are not pet-friendly.

Home for real

With work resuming tomorrow, my month of wandering is now truly at an end.

Many thanks to all those who hosted me: Meaghan in Hamilton; my aunt, uncle, and cousins in Bennington; and my cousins and Tristan in Toronto. My appreciation also goes out to all the friends and family I was lucky enough to see over that span.

With my life returning to a state of greater regularity, people can expect more regular updates here, with photos from the various journeys forthcoming.

All told, my time away has reinforced my desire to move to Toronto – or at least away from Ottawa.

2010 happenings

Some of my more notable 2010 undertakings and experiences:

  • The end of the Low Carbon Cross Country Trip
  • Two new jobs
  • The transition from beardedness to beardlessness
  • Time with Emily
  • More than 12,000 photos taken
  • Photojournalism and documentary photography course taken
  • Several Montreal and Toronto visits (one wedding included)
  • Collarbone breaking and partial healing
  • Improved health
  • BuryCoal launched
  • Visits from some friends not frequently seen
  • A solid number of books read
  • Several concerts attended
  • Camping with Rosa
  • New York with Kai
  • Multiple Vermont visits, Christmas included
  • Blogging out loud
  • Dozens of cans of kidney beans eaten
  • Many kilometres by Greyhound
  • A departure from my current home, nearly completed

The priority for 2011? Find a job in Toronto and move there.

Heading home

Tonight, I saw the Coen brothers film True Grit and found it quite interesting and enjoyable. Hailee Steinfeld is very entertaining to listen to, and her character reminds me of Lyra from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. That said, the film did leave me wondering why a young woman of such premature sophistication would maintain such a simplistic attitude about the desirability of revenge. Seeing Jeff Bridges play a hardened ranger was amusing, though also a bit hard to swallow after having been frequently exposed to him as a pot smoking bowler / detective.

Tomorrow, I will be taking a Greyhound up to the border, across to Montreal, and home to Ottawa.

[Update: 29 December 2010] I was amused by this text message, which I received from Fido upon crossing the border into the United States:

Fido welcomes you abroad! Our Travel Packs help you save http://fido.ca/m/usa (data fees apply) Regular roaming rates: $1.45/min, $0.75/txt, data up to $0.03/kB

First, I found it funny that they use the term ‘abroad’ to refer the the almost trivially routine transit across the 49th parallel. Second, I found it curious that their chosen form of ‘welcome’ to a new place is exorbitant roaming rates.

Hamilton to Albany

The voyage from Hamilton, Ontario to Albany, New York is about 550km. At 3:30am, I caught a cab to the Hamilton GO train, in order to begin the journey.

Normally, the border is the most challenging part, crossing in a Greyhound bus. Either you get stuck in a substantial queue of other buses and need to wait hours to even get to the checkpoint or someone on your bus strikes a border agent as suspicious and they hold up the entire vehicle for hours. This time, however, the border went smoothly.

The trouble began in Buffalo. There, the bus driver decided to wait for the next Greyhound from Toronto to arrive, so that they could consolidate passengers and save some money. This meant sitting motionless in Buffalo for an hour beyond our scheduled departure time. As a result, I got to Syracuse 15 minutes too late to catch my connecting bus. The next bus, they told me, was at 5:00pm, arriving around 8:00pm.

In what I thought was an act of cleverness, I checked with the attached Amtrak station and found they they had a train leaving around 3:15pm. It was originally scheduled to be an 11:00am train, but they were confident it would actually arrive around three and arrive in Albany about two hours later. The train did arrive at about 3:40pm, and only sat around about twenty minutes before starting. Somehow, however, it managed to take about five hours to traverse the 250km to Albany. Part of the delay arose because the train had no heat and everybody was shivering in their outerwear. To correct that, they spent half an hour replacing one of the power cars. Nonetheless, the journey took about twice as long as advertised, even ignoring that delay.

As a consequence of all this, my uncle and cousin ended up waiting for me for hours in Albany, in order to drive me to Bennington. At the end of eighteen hours of continuous travel, I was particularly glad to see them and to have their help and company for the last stage of the voyage.

In the future, I will try to stick with the more straightforward Ottawa-Montreal-Albany route, rather than the seemingly more problematic Ottawa-Toronto-Albany route, with Hamilton thrown in as an enjoyable side-journey.

Montreal Port

One interesting thing about ports is the way in which they accumulate obsolete vessels and buildings. In Montreal, there is a stretch of waterfront in the old port area which has been enhanced for tourists, but which is nonetheless situated alongside old grain elevators and other bits of industrial refuse.

70mm 1/130″ f/8 100ISO

Here, light reflecting off parked cars was illuminating the shadowed side of the motorway.

200mm 1/130″ f/8 100ISO

This prominent sign has a dedicated art project online. Since 2006, the ‘Farine Five Roses’ brand has apparently been owned by Smuckers.

200mm 1/250″ f/8 100ISO

The City of Montreal has gone to considerable lengths to exclude urban explorers from these old grain elevators. That’s probably quite sensible, given the hazards that are almost certainly inside. Nonetheless, I did see some urban exploration photos from inside this complex during my weekend in Montreal.

70mm 1/200″ f/8 100ISO

In particular, I would be anxious about using any of these rusted overhanging walkways.

70mm 1/320″ f/8 100ISO

I have always enjoyed the interesting textures that are produced by rusting metal.

70mm 1/200″ f/8 100ISO

Similarly, the contrast between the increasingly oxidized iron and the blue sky is attractive, when these old towers are viewed on a clear day.

120mm 1/100″ f/8 1600ISO

Between two of the moorings for large passenger vessels, a pair of old steamships are currently tied. Quite possibly, they are destined to be sent off for scrap.

93mm 1/80″ f/8 800ISO

Whenever I see a catenary, I am reminded of the various ‘Connections’ television series’ hosted by James Burke. Like making pigments from coal, the caternary form is a connection that arose again and again on the show.

190mm 1/160″ f/8 2500ISO

Most of these photos were taken using Canon’s 70-200mm f/4L lens. Nearly all were shot at f/8, with the ISO setting and shutter speed adjusted to take into consideration the amount of ambient light, the degree to which I could brace the camera, and the relative brightness or darkness of the subject.

180mm 1/200″ f/8 400ISO

The original purpose of both ships was obscure to me, though they were clearly designed for some industrial use, rather than the transport of passengers.

200mm 1/200″ f/8 640ISO

Despite that, some details of the ships provide insight into how their crews would have experienced life aboard them.

185mm 1/40″ f/8 800ISO

Perhaps something about the redox interactions between the different structural elements of the ship explains this pattern of rusting.

110mm 1/60″ f/8 800ISO

I suspect these are bow thrusters, used to manoeuvre ships in relatively tight quarters.

Small cameras versus big cameras

When I went to visit Toronto this past weekend, I had to lug a suit bag with me. The idea of bringing along my Canon 5D Mk II digital SLR (dSLR) and associated gear and lenses was too daunting, so I brought along my little Canon A570IS point and shoot (P&S) camera instead.

It has been quite a while since I used a point and shoot, so the experience felt novel to me. Those little cameras certainly have a few things going for them:

  • It can be carried in a pocket and easily held with one hand.
  • Since the camera fits in a pocket, you don’t need to constantly advertise that you are carrying it.
  • It can fit into small spaces, allowing for unusual compositions.
  • Subjects are not intimidated by such a small camera.
  • The tiny shutter is very quiet.
  • The relatively low value of the camera makes you less worried about loss, damage, and theft.
  • There are fewer condensation problems, since the smaller camera and lens have less thermal momentum.
  • The camera takes ubiquitous AA batteries, rather than expensive proprietary cells.
  • The camera can automatically detect faces, and focuses on them.
  • For a small camera, a small tripod is sufficient for long-exposure shots. It is also easier to brace a small camera on most horizontal surfaces.
  • The camera is so light, there are no problems with carrying it around everywhere, for hours.

Of course, there are a few reasons why I missed my 5D. By far the most important is image quality. The sensor in the A570IS is small and produces visibly noisy images at 200 ISO, and ones that are terrible at 400 ISO and up. By contrast, images from the 5D look very decent at 2500 ISO. Because of the superior lenses, shots taken on the 5D also look better in more subtle ways. The 5D also has a more accurate viewfinder; the shot that ends up on your memory card looks much like the one composed through the viewfinder, with minimal cropping and parallax problems.

80% of the time, the ideal option would be something that is about the size and weight of the A570IS but which has the image quality of the 5D Mk II. The rest of the time, the size and weight of the 5D would actually be preferable. In particular, all the dedicated controls spread across the 5D body make it easier to choose the ideal settings for a particular shot quickly.

Alas, for the foreseeable future there will always be the need to choose between convenience and quality.