§ Driving home east from Tadoussac we visited two more cities, staying one night in each.
First, Montréal. On the way we stopped in Côte-de-Beaupré to see one of the world’s largest cycloramas built in 1895. Our guide was generous enough to give us a behind-the-scenes tour of the building which was incredibly cool to see. In Montréal we had a great dinner at Stash. Polish food on a French menu—fun!
Leaving Quebéc, we spent our last night in Fergus. A charming small Scottish town in the middle of Ontario. It is a town with a striking number of festivals. We had just missed their medieval festival two days prior but might have to come back for their steampunk festival in September which promises to be huge.
§ After spending the night in seven different hotel rooms over the past eleven days it is nice to be home. A few final travel thoughts:
- Before arriving in a new city, pick out a few restaurants near your hotel. There is nothing worse than trying to find somewhere to eat while hungry and tired in an unfamiliar city.
- Bring more ziplock bags. They are always useful to have on hand.
- Granola is a great hotel snack. Yogurt too if you have a fridge.
- Spending seven days in French-speaking Québec taught me more about the language than I learned in two years of classes. Still, almost everyone spoke better English than I did French which was a little embarrassing but made for the perfect learning environment.
- The lack of billboards along the highways in Canada makes drives feel much more peaceful.
§ While we were out of town entropy—and by “entropy” I mean “deer”—got the better of our vegetable garden. The tomato plants in particular seem to have been a favorite.
§ Iconfactory released their first beta of Tapestry and Silvio Rizzi has been steadily improving his new Reader app. Both take similar approaches to combining all of your disparate social feeds into one unified timeline. In the course of trying them I’ve come to realize I prefer inboxes over feeds.
Inboxes are optimized for triage. Standing in line at the grocery store I can quickly archive any unimportant items and leave a shortlist of only the most interesting articles to read when I have more time. Feeds, on the other hand, are fixed. You can’t read the top of the feed without loosing your current position.
The closest analog to my current strategy possible with these new apps is to “bookmark” interesting items as I stroll past them, adding each to a “read later” list. Where my preferred approach feels like separating out the wheat from the chaff, this feels more like assigning myself homework.
§ Following the recommendation of Robin Rendle I’ve been reading Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
An obvious comparison is House of Leaves—another novel set inside of a mysterious house of seemingly infinite size. Piranesi exudes a similar atmosphere but is far less gimmicky, considerably more straightforward, and much shorter.
The first chapter didn’t grab me straight away. It look me a little while to get into the rhythm of the writing and of the titular narrator’s particular voice. I soon found him charming though. Smart and analytical and brimming with maybe a little too much innocent curiosity.
§ Maybe half a dozen people, independently, over the past couple of weeks, have started gushing about how much they love Moby-Dick when I brought up our plans for to go whale watching in Tadoussac. So I think that might have to be next, after Piranesi.
