Last I wrote, I was blowing through Edmonton, on my way to the Canada-France math meeting in Montreal. I must say, the first two days were a total write-off. There is something about travelling for four days that saps one's strength and intellect. I really felt the full brunt of this when I got to Montreal.

Of course, the first thing to happen, it turns out, is that I should put up my poster and talk to judges about it, so it's a good thing that I'm used to making reasonable-sounding things up as I go along, and I think that at least some of the judges were fairly impressed. And then I was done! All that I had left was to actually go to a talk or two, and I found some interesting things. There was a nice talk about something close to my research, so that was good, and we had a nice chat afterwards. I also quite liked the talk on tidal power in the bay of Fundy, which sounds like a great idea. For an imperceptible change in the tides, they could get something like two nuclear powerplants worth of electricity out of it.

Montreal was good, but we did end up travelling in packs to bars. I like the people that I went with, but the mood changes when you show up with a dozen or more people, and herding them to get there can be a chore. But we had excellent food (smoked meat) and great beer (the Imperial stout I had was fantastic - and they had a combo with creme brulee!) I did have a plastic bottle thrown at me from a car while I was biking, so my impression of Montreal as a nice, relaxed place to hang out may have been tainted. I shall simply have to return to check it out again, shan't I? Life can be tough some times.

Now, after the conference, Hannah, Memmett (after much deliberation), and I set off on our velocipedes to Ottawa, a scant 200-some km away. I had found an excellent set of trails called La Route Verte, one part of which went exactly where we wanted to go. It was such a relief to be on the road, biking, where things are simple. My tire got a flat and my rack broke (and I was carrying my laptop from the conference) but, hey, you fix these few simple things well enough so that they work, and you just keep going. It was really nice to get to hang out with Hannah and Memmett without having to worry about the whirlwind that we make our lives. If only we could have escaped the heat so easily!

Ottawa, our destination, is the quiet place that I'm used to it being. Hannah flew back almost immediately, and Memmett stayed at my aunt's place with me. My aunt, Audrey, has recently (actually) retired, so now does all the things that she really enjoys which also take up too much time to do before one retires. Examples of this are: needlepoint, painting ceramic, hiking large distances in segments, and landscaping the back yard. My cousin was recently graduated with a BEng, so now they're both in Ottawa, napping when it's too hot in the afternoon, and reading voraciously.

We visited Andria out in Kemptville, which is a town 50 km south of Ottawa. Seems like a nice place, and there was a quite reasonable music festival on too! Country life does seem nice; it's quiet, one gets away from so many people, etc. The flip side of that is that there aren't as many people nearby, so one may get fewer visitors than one wishes. I'm never sure where I'm going to end up living, but, unless it's very special for other reasons, I don't think that it's going to be the country. Despite all of my travels, I a city boy remain.

~malcolm

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