The Roquefort Files

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 [...]

Nous sommes arrivées, as the almost-locals say. We caught a relaxed flight from Glasgow to Hamilton in Tuesday, with some notable and pleasing departures from our usual travail arrangements: no leaving before dawn or sleeping in airports on this trip, with the added bonus of a rental car that didn’t offend by automotive sensibilities (a [...]

we found Ash’s rucksack missing from her bed and replaced by a sleeping girl. Good God, I thought, what next? Ash started looking for her stuff amongst the rest of the gear strewn around the room while I went downstairs to talk to the duty manager. It turned out that after we’d moved our stuff [...]

Okay, I exaggerate. Our experience of it mostly sucked. The queue of cars and coaches backed up behind the accident started moving maybe three hours after it had ground to a halt, and we crawled past the rather disturbing wreckage of the crashed coach, pushed off to the side of the road. (I found out [...]

bound for Whistler, a little fearful of taking out my shiny new Mac laptop. I’m not worried about being mugged – this bus is, as with everything Canadian, exactly like its American counterpart only much nicer – I’m just worried that I’d disappear in a puff of bourgeois smoke if I did so. We arrived [...]

is now fully transported to Stockbridge. We moved over the weekend with some able assistance from both Jeff (cheers!) and the Trøll, and it all looks suspiciously like it went without a hitch. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to call a flat mine – ours! – that it’s still slightly unreal. This [...]