Checked in for the night before an early morning departure.  I have a good sore muscle burn going on right now, it was a great couple of days of seminars, got through the two sets, Rino’s school is full of great and fun people, we all had a blast.  And you know it’s been a good workout when you arrive at the hotel and realize that due to the time zone change you have now one extra hour for sleep.   Shaolin dreams…

Gone through Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, back to NB…

getting ready for the kung fu seminar I’ll be teaching this weekend.  It’s fun to be hanging out with a KF brother, went to a couple of his classses last night, we’ll be training a bunch tonight and it’s onto teaching 9 Province staff on saturday.  I’m as giddy as I was before getting on the train.

I’ll have to post a trip recap when I return — I’ve gotten less time and less net access along the way than I thought.

Train hard!  (ooo, a pun…)

Ahhhh, Quebec City, perhaps the closest one can get to Paris in North America.  At least le vieux Quebec.  Been a great two days here, much fine food, great atmosphere, lots of history, and, of course, staying at the Chateau Frontnac.

Had been some 20 odd years since my last visit here.  And now the last leg of the rail journey, on the way to Halifax.  Another excellent sleeper car night.  And sure to be another different landscape when we awake… happy halloween!

About to literally pass through my hometown of Bowmanville, riding the rails with the grand fun bonus of wifi.  Hehee… trip onward from Winnipeg was great, very fun to eat on the dining car, the landscape continues to change (warmer down south here, still lots of colour on the trees!).  Next stop… Montreal for a quick quick pause before boarding the train to Quebec City.

Some distance has certainly passed since the last update… 2500km or so.  I’m here at the Winnipeg train station, broadcasting from the Via1 wifi connection.  The times on the train have been great – after I closed the netbook in Vancouver and went out on the platform to wait I was positively giddy with anticipation.  The sleeper cabin is very neat, the food’s been great, the dome cars awesome, the scenery of course fantastic and changing and our two night stay in Jasper was very fun.  We did some hiking, some dining, some swimming, some relaxing, some more hiking, and took in the very beautiful landscape that surrounded us.  If anything, this trip is about being immersed in beauty.

Wildlife encountered so far:  squirrels (red), bighorn sheep, caribou, elk, deer, ducks and a bear hanging out at the side of the tracks.  Provinces stepped on so far:  British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba.  Landscape travelled:  West coast rainforest, foothills, rocky mountains, prairie.  Nifty people encountered:  plenty.  Seems I’m not the only one fulfilling on a long dream to do ride the rails on a journey such as this.  I’ve met many cool people on the train, had some fun conversations, and really enjoyed the different pace that is a train ride.  If you’re on the train, chances are you’re on it for the journey – less rushed, less intensity.  (Of course, I had a great conversation with someone on the second leg of my flight up to Vancouver too, so it certainly isn’t exclusionary)

Next few days see the landscape change as we hit northern Ontario, then down into the urban Toronto-Montreal corridor and we’ll end up in la belle ville de Quebec.   All aboard…

Here we go!

Awaiting boarding onto our train… only a single night onboard for this leg, as we go to Jasper for our two night stay.  Mmmm… excited!  Trip up here so far has been great, met someone cool on the flight up, had a great dinner with Dave’s sister and her husband and son last night (and ate a tonne of sashimi and more), spent the day checking out the Vancouver art gallery and Grandville Island, and now we are here!

Silver & Blue class, sleeper car… alas leaving at night, so we won’t see much of the majestic landscape until tommorow morning (and we’ll pass over the infamous Cisco bridges sometime around 3am, so definitively not seeing those, again, alas…).  I love the train and I love the thought of the sleeper car.  Woo!

Boarding soon… more from accross the land…

I had an interesting learning experience today.  I went to work to do some architecting (ooooooo…) and oddly my car wouldn’t lock using the remote.  So I locked via key and thought little of it, figuring the battery in the remote was dead.  Turns out not so much… for the car itself wouldn’t start when I returned.  All the lights would come on, but the engine wouldn’t even pretend to turn over.  As I awaited my housemate to pick me up I checked the fuses and lo and behold a fuse was burned out.  What I therefore learned was that the fuse that regulates the key beeper alarm thingee also controls/interrupts the whole ignition.

Thankfully a new fuse bought and installed and I was off.

The whole of the Robotech series is now available for viewing in its entirety, legally and for free on Hulu and Youtube.  Woo!  Alas it seems to be some version that was remastered or something, and as part of that they chose to dub in new sound effects, such that now there are a whack tonne of sound effects for every.single.little.thing, often loudly (plus they removed some of what I considered ‘classic’ sound effects).  I’m not thrilled with the result of that dubbing, cool as it remains to have the episodes available as they are.

Picture if you will… Kannik, kitchen towel over his shoulder, pot rack overhead, pound iron wok on the gas stove, cutting away with fresh produce… yea, tonight was the night to initiate my long-unused wok on the gas stove.  It’s been ages since I made a stir fry, and the first I’ve made on a gas stove.  It went pretty swimmingly, I learned pretty quickly how much ingredient wise I can put in the wok before it cools down too much (our stove doesn’t get uber hot).  I’m hooked again though, I’ll definitively be woking more often once again.

Wow, this is one amazing video, recorded from a helmet cam as a heli skiier sets off an avalanche, gets burried by it and is luckily rescued about four minutes later.  All from their POV… intense stuff.   I’d reccomend reading the accompanying text first and then watching the vid.

So I’ll throw out a shiny link of excellence:  D&D Camp? Apparantly so… !

Heard this on the radio, worth re-sharing… an observation by someone:

“I am so glad that the public library system exists already.  Could you imagine trying to get it passed through Congress nowadays?”

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