Back on the Train

A wet spring and a recent stretch of intensely sunny weather has made southwestern Ontario lushly green. The promise has been realized. I spent my train trip gazing out the window. On the bottom left picture, you see the Grand River, and hugging its bend is the little town of Paris, Ontario. At least until a few years ago, there was a small cafe that looked out right over the water. It was called Café de Paris! I hope it's still there.

Bruce and I caught up on magazines and celebrated that Parenting magazine has given Ugly Dolls a Best in Play award. Good for kids... and middle-aged, er... characters.

Spring Came Suddenly

Spring came overnight it seemed. One day I was on a train, and things looked like this.



The next day, it looked like this.


 Although... my iPhone claimed I was in the middle of Lake St. Clair, so maybe it was all a dream.

More Views From a Train

Beautiful, monochromatic wintery scenes, flying by my train window. The skaters brought Bruegel to mind.

 

Pictures from a Train

More pictures from a train, this one from a four-hour journey in early January. It snowed after Christmas. The fields looked huge and empty. The one below had as solitary tree right in the middle of its huge expanse. My picture doesn't do it justice. The journey was, as always, deeply enjoyable. My lunch even more so, and worth the eight-hour round trip.

Eleven Moving Pictures

A couple of years ago, I took a picture of dawn from the train leaving Montreal. This time it was sunset. Gazing out of moving windows is one of my favourite things to do. When the crescent moon appeared high up, I watched it almost all the way back to Toronto.

Hipstamatic Adirondack

My dad makes a good point. We've come so far with digital and photographic technology... now there's an app to take photographs that look like they were taken in the 1940s. He asks, "Why?"

Because they're so cuuuuuute!

I took these on the Adirondack train from New York's Penn Station to Montreal a couple of weeks ago.

June Trip: The Adirondack

The Adirondack is the train from Penn Station in NYC to downtown Montreal. Ever since reading about it on this excellent blog, I knew I had to try it. And I knew it would take 11 hours, so figured it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime, in that I wouldn't want to do it again. I was wrong. It felt more like five hours, and I'll certainly do it again.

And once again, my company was excellent. You meet the best people travelling alone by train. This time it was a phD student on his way to celebrate the end of the school year by blowing off some steam at the Montreal Grand Prix.

After the frenzied wonderfulness of New York City, I had 11 hours of water (Hudson River, Lake Champlain), trees, clouds, wetlands and orchards... heaven.