Our mountains are very pointy
Our prairies are not
The rest is kinda bumpy
But man do we have a lot!
—The Arrogant Worms, Canada’s Really Big
A week ago I came back from a trip back east to visit family. It was tons of fun—flitting back and forth between Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City—and I got to see some relatives I hadn’t seen in years. Plus, I hadn’t been back east in the summertime in ages. As much as I enjoy a white Christmas, going outside without freezing my tail off is nice too.
The best part about my flight? I had a window seat, and since the weather was excellent for the most part I got to take pictures of this fair land of mine, from the Rockies all the way to Toronto. After that the weather got too bad, with too much turbulence. And I’ve got to admit: it’s not nearly as boring as I used to think. Sure, the Prairies are flat as anything, but they contain some interesting lakes, rivers and towns. Towns I’d never heard of and probably will never visit, but that’s what makes them interesting. Manitoba and Western Ontario, for their part, are a chaotic maze of lakes and rivers that, well, got a bit boring after a while though I never stopped taking pictures.
I felt like I was exploring Canada with Google Earth, except I couldn’t control where I was going. On the bright side, there was no server lag and the landscape was clear as a bell. The real fun came later, when I looked up my photos on Google Maps. Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you spent hours desperately hunting for weird lake formations in western Ontario.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Doing the tourist thing in Quebec City was awesome. I hadn’t been there since that trip I took shortly after coming out almost seventeen years ago (gawd, time flies), and I’d forgotten how beautiful the city was, from the ancient stone buildings of Vieux-Québec to the bucolic Île-d’Orléans… and Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. Which will be the subject of another blog post soon.
