For Frequent Fliers, is Paradise a Parking Lot?

"Getting away from it all" is one of the main reasons for travel, and "it all" normally includes work, urban sprawl and the weather. Human Canadians who annually escape the harsh northern winter for sunnier climes are known as "snowbirds," and just like these natives, they always come home to roost. Canadian geese are found all over North America, but their adaptability makes them one of the most recognizable urban birds. Migrating flocks are a common sight in spring and fall, noisy v-shaped formations reflective of the order and free discourse of the Canadian people, and its willingness to stay in queue.

Picture of the Moment - Follow the Yellow Brick Road

When you come across a sign for the Yellow Brick Road, you follow it. We didn't see any munchkins, and these Oz friends are obviously disguised as homo sapiens from the "Red Green Show," but we did see a little bit of gold over the rainbow. And I discovered an affectation for show tune choreography.

Looking westward, in the far distance you can see the headframe of the David Bell gold mine. A staking rush after discovery of the Hemlo Gold Camp in the early 1980s was Canada's largest since the Klondike. Taxes from locally-derived gold bricks have paved plenty of roads in the thirty years since. I visited here in September, 1994 as a stowaway with the Queen's University Minex program's annual field trip to major ore deposits of the Canadian Shield.

While the rest of the group were busy looking at rocks, three friends and I organized an impromptu homage to a different kind of treasure. If memory and character placement serve, I'm the Scarecrow on the far left. The other two gentlemen were Best Man and a groomsman at my wedding two years later. I've only bumped into "Dorothy" once in the ensuing twenty years. The name of the poor photographer is lost to history.

The Yellow Brick Road is located near the Hemlo gold camp, about 55 km east of Marathon, off the Trans-Canada Highway (17), halfway between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

Picture of the Moment - Avoiding World Record Traffic in Toronto

There will always be an argument about what city has the worst traffic. But Highway 401 (officially the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway) running between Windsor, Ontario and the Quebec border is the busiest roadway in North America, and it is arguably the world's busiest, with locally more than 18 lanes of idling cars. If you like superlatives and travel to Guinness-book sites, it's a must-see vacation destination.

When traffic is flowing, it's a poor man's thrill ride.

An office transfer off the direct mass transit routes made taking the GO train system an impossibility for me last year. Heavy city congestion meant a creative commute and work-from-home hours, and I learned from experience that driving from the city during peak rush hours (not shown here!) could make my 42-kilometer commute from Etobicoke (north-western Toronto) to Burlington take over a hundred minutes on the less-heavily trafficked Queen Elizabeth Way. That was on a good day. Google Maps tells me I could cover the distance in 32 minutes without traffic, but there's no sense in waiting for the Apocalypse. Torontonians are aggressive drivers as a whole, and not enough would be taken up in the Rapture.

To use pivot tables and breakdown statistics by weekday or route; that thought makes me weak-kneed. Since I left a regular technical role for Management, I am now absurdly pleased when I have the opportunity to make a chart or X-Y plot of anything, however banal, on personal time, hence my daily commute illustrated here. To decide between a linear trend line or the third order polynomial, that's a moment of near nirvana.

But independent variables like weather, accident, school-year traffic, teenagers, dubious third world driving licenses and sunspots wreak havoc on the best of plans. I modelled my commute in both directions over a calendar year with 3rd-order polynomial regressions, and both have very poor correlation coefficients below 0.35. But I dared not tread the main rush hour waters (4-7 pm) for a better spread of data, particularly in the afternoon, based on the hard lessons I learned before I started plotting.

Now I travel the lonely highways of northern Minnesota, and my commute is a unvarying flat line at any hour. Perhaps the end is nigh?

Picture of the Moment: GPS in Cottage Country

These days there is technology available that keeps you from getting lost in the woods.

Pictures of the Moment - Niagara Falls

A "Maid of the Mist." The Canadian side has gone over to Hornblower Cruises and red ponchos, which sounds jarring considering 168 years of history. But the next generation won't know any better. If only there were only boats.

Niagara Falls is a natural wonder spoiled. It's a challenge to take any picture of the falls that doesn't include a high rise or a casino, let alone a wax museum, though well-positioned mist helps.

The Wall in Fermont, Québec: "taking the black flies" in a north wind

One of the perks of the geology profession is travel to places that other people aren't rushing to visit. These backcountry outposts can be the most interesting destinations. You experience real culture in rural places, not the optimally-commercial faces painted by tourism marketing. And lines are short.

One such place I've spent a lot of time at recently is the "company town" of Fermont, Québec. Above the 52nd parallel, it is one of the most northerly French-speaking communities in the world, incorporated in the 1970s to exploit vast deposits of iron ore. Fermont's dominant feature is "the Wall" (le Mur), a single, self-contained apartment building--stretching a length of 1.3 kilometers (4300 feet)--that purposefully shelters most of town from the cold north wind. The building contains the police department and hospital, a bowling alley and city offices. Lucky residents of the windbreak can also enjoy shopping, restaurants, schools and a swimming pool all without having to leave the building for nine months of winter. The liquor store and bars are well-frequented.

Pictures of the Moment - Grand River Country

The mighty Nith.

You can almost see the real Canada from Toronto. For me, the authentic experience means getting off the main motor route between Detroit, USA and Montreal. My own little bit of Canadian paradise is in the orderly farmlands of southern Ontario. To find this treasure, just exit Highway 401 anywhere in the greater district of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, set your GPS to avoid highways, head opposite of any signs leading to box stores and explore.

Pictures of the Moment - Highlights of Big Nickel, Sudbury

The largest city in northern Ontario, Sudbury is a city of superlatives.

I'm in town for a few short days on a business trip to Laurentian University.

One of the local features I immediately sought out was a first hand view of shatter cones resulting from an extraterrestrial impact approximately 1.85 billion years ago. These horsetail-shaped, shock-related geological structures only form in bedrock proximal to meteorite craters or underground nuclear explosions, radiating outward from the source of the shock-wave in concentric patterns. The Sudbury Basin is the erosional remnant of such an impact crater, the second largest on Earth. A catastrophic global-change event even larger than that responsible for the Chicxulub crater in Yucatán, Mexico (which is widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs), the Sudbury impact was directly responsible for the metal-rich impact melt that now makes Sudbury one of the word's largest mining centers. Mines of nickel and lesser copper have operated continuously since the beginning of the 20th Century.

A Day at Toronto Zoo

Zoos are controversial places these days, though not to the same extent as theme-park aquariums. For me, the benefits of a well-managed zoo outweigh the negatives. Without them, many species that are critically endangered or extinct in the wild would be gone forever. Modern civilization may be better than asteroids at killing off other species, but late 19th and 20th century creature comforts conversely gave us time to develop conservational values that are unique in human history. Ancient peoples living communally in nature didn't try to save the moa, the mammoth, or trees on Easter Island. At least we feel guilty about extinction now when clearing habitat for malls.

Toronto Zoo is divided into a separate Discovery Zone for children and six loosely-themed "zoogeographic regions" or domains representing regions of the world: Africa, the Americas, Australasia, Eurasia, Indo-Malaya, Tundra Trek, and the Canadian Domain. There is a lot to see, but the typical visitor--who doesn't read every informative sign in depth--can get through most of the displays in 5-6 hours. Unless bear connoisseurs, North American visitors who have been outside of a city may wish to skip much or all of the Canadian domain. I've seen enough deer looming in my headlights.

This Apple Will Keep the Doctor Away for a Lifetime

There's another Big Apple. It's located in Ontario...and it really is a big apple! The Big Apple in Colborne is a highway landmark east of Toronto and the biggest "red delicious" in the world. It's one of those curious, over-sized monuments to a local specialty that are particular to North America and Australia. After two decades of regularly driving past this landmark on the way to Kingston and the 1000 Islands (and my parent's home in upstate New York) and back, we finally stopped today to try one of the apple pies.

Along with a country-style cafeteria and gift shop, the enclosed bakery floor has large windows that allow visitors to watch the pie assembly. While my wife looked through an assortment of pies, the kids and I wandered the country store and and looked at displays of antiques.

Outdoor activities were obviously curtailed during our early-spring visit, while we were still under the thumb of the polar vortex. However, the website lists complimentary outdoor attractions including 18 holes of mini golf, shuffleboard, bocce, ping-pong and a kid's train ride. There is also a picnic area and a petting zoo featuring an assortment of farm animals. There are public restrooms, including a family washroom, inside the main building.

The Big Apple in Colborne, Ontario. I photographed from the back to capture the way it used to look. Now there's a big smile on the front side.

Open all year from 8:00 a.m, - 6:00 p.m., the Big Apple is located about an hour east of Toronto on Highway 401, just off the freeway and exit 497. It would certainly be a good rest stop heading eastbound after a hectic drive through the greater Toronto area. We enjoyed the apple pie!

The Weekly Snack Run

Every place I live -- and there have been many across this continent and beyond --  we always seem to establish that one weekly ritual stop for a taste of the good life. When I was growing up on Long Island, it was Family Deli in Bohemia. There always seemed to be a good reason to stop there after church. These days in the Toronto area, our go to destination is the Monastery Bakery in Oakville, Ontario.