The Roquefort Files

We took the cheap, roomy Go Train from Pickering to Union Station in downtown Toronto. The weather was balmy and warm, and we could see from our map that the hostel was only a mile at most from the station, so we set off at a brisk pace. Half an hour later and seemingly no [...]

On the road to Kingston, we stopped in the town of Gananoque to have some lunch and to take a short boat trip around the Admiralty Islands just off shore in the Saint Lawrence. Gananoque is another eerily Amity Island-alike place, quiet in the off season and with the locals looking slightly askance at us [...]

I was shocked to read that Colin McRae has died in a helicopter crash. I don’t think I would call him a hero of mine, but I was certainly in awe of him to a certain degree when I was a kid. My dad was one of the organisers of what was then called Special [...]

After a few days pottering around Peterborough* we borrowed Ash’s parent’s car** and drove off northwards into the Ottawa valley to visit some of her mum’s family, before turning east for Ottawa itself. The scenery went from forest to highland to farmland, and after a stop for an amiable family lunch we hit Ottawa in [...]

Ash’s parents graciously made the two-and-a-half hour drive from Peterborough to pick us up from Hamilton. “It’s nothing,” they insisted, and I suppose when your province (let alone your country) is 1000 miles wide, they’re right. It took an hour just to cross the hybrid urban/green belt of the GTA, which coincidentally has rather a [...]

we left Niagara behind us to head back to Hamilton to meet up with an old uni friend of Ash’s and later to drop off the car. Hamilton is a grimy, industrial place with an honest to badness ‘hood surrounding the downtown. For a short, worrying period we wandered around the city centre trying to [...]