Toronto, One Month Later

On the first night of the Stanley Cup Finals, it seems appropriate to finally wrap up the trip that included my encounter with hockey’s Holy Grail itself. So, on with the trip-reporting excitement.

The Drive Up

Leaving from Christiansburg following a post-Wesley Weekend lunch, I didn’t hit the road until 3 PM for my scenic 10.5 hour drive through almost the entire North-South length of West Virginia (save the Northern Panhandle), along the western border of Pennsylvania, then from Erie to Toronto via the rough S-curve of I-90, I-190, the Peace Bridge, and the QEW around Lakes Erie and Ontario. Fun times:

• Goal 1: make sure my brand-new E-ZPass worked: SUCCESS. It doesn’t do anything for me in Virginia yet (Smart Tag facilities will be integrated by the fall), but it saved me at least 10 minutes northbound and 15 minutes southbound on this trip.
• Goal 2: avoid stopping in West Virginia: SUCCESS. After last year’s ACC mess, I wasn’t eager to leave my Hokie-plated TDI unattended in WV, especially as I-79 took me through Morgantown. I managed to clear the state by 7 PM, and stopped for dinner outside Pittsburgh.
• Goal 3: survive PA roads without major trouble: NEUTRAL. It was foolish of me to hope for smooth sailing through that miserable state, but even though 79 narrowed to one lane in each direction for about ten miles around Grove City (halfway up), I managed to hold the 45 mph speed limit through that section.
• Goal 4: make the border by midnight: SUCCESS. Even better, the Canadian border agent gave me no trouble at all. It was a bit worrisome that he didn’t ask for a bit of ID: no passport, no car registration or insurance paperwork, NOTHING, but I wasn’t going to complain (besides, all that stuff was sitting on my passenger seat in plain view).

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The World Makes Me Wonder...

Ben Wright has a cool post over at Occasionally Wright: Do I Wonder? Apparently Not, based on Howard Hillman’s list of 100 Wonders of the World.

So, in the continuing search for cheap-‘n’-easy content here at BTN, I bring you my scorecard.

• I was pretty disappointed with my empty slate through the first column, but then I hit the second column and chalked up #43 The Louvre. Without Rick Steves, I’d have been unable to appreciate much of the art, as the facility itself doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation. But the building has its own attraction, both with the modern entry plaza and in the museum itself, a former palace turned into a museum during the French Revolution.
• #73 New York Skyline — yep, got that. I can’t claim the other two NYC features, though: I’ve walked past the Metropolitan Museum of Art but haven’t gone in, and I haven’t made it to the Statue of Liberty.
• #89 Stonehenge I found more exciting as a story than as an actual visit. We get the legends and mysteries pounded into our heads for years, and that tends to develop expectations that just aren’t matched by the tourist trap this place has now become. Once you could wander among the stones; now there are ropes on the site’s perimeter, a gift shop at the entry/exit point, and a parking lot full of busses on the other side of the A303. Bill Bryson has written about the paradox of modern mass tourism, that it obliterates the true character of the places it infests; I can think of no better example of this than Stonehenge.
• On the other hand, #94 the British Museum really is all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve spent about two days total there so far; I could use another week or so and still not properly appreciate all its treasures.
• Finally, #100 the Eiffel Tower is worth your time as well. I seem to have more tolerance for mass tourism at a location built specifically for that purpose than at somewhere like Stonehenge — maybe that’s why one of my favorite stories from Europe ‘03 is standing on the first level of la Tour Eiffel at 11 AM Thursday morning, translating the sign on the door of the post office from French into English for a Japanese couple: “We’re sorry, we are closed due to a computer problem.”

So my final score is 5. What’s yours?

Not Dead

Despite the lack of recent posts, I’m not dead — just otherwise occupied. Events over the past 2-3 months have led me to take on another… ah… non-office time project, let’s just say. That has seemed a bit more urgent than blogging, and it isn’t close to done yet.

I will have Toronto trip notes soon, though, I promise (actually, they’re in another Safari tab right now, in an unfinished state). Meanwhile, some thoughts.

• Abu Ghraib — really don’t know what to think about this one, other than the easy superficial observation that it’s bad news. That said, is it being overblown by an opportunistic lefty press? Yep. (I was afraid the BBC World Service newscaster Friday night was going to break down into tears of joy as he read a report of Rumsfeld’s apology.) What can be done about that? Not bloody much. Was the release of this news timed for maximum political effect? Abso-friggin’-lutely! It torpedoed good economic news and quieted the latest Kerry-Vietnam uproar. Speaking of which…
• John Kerry and Vietnam — so now you have to have served in the active-duty military to be worthy of political office, eh? So much for the principle of civilian control of the military. For that matter, why don’t we just change the Constitution so only those who have served can vote? And I probably wouldn’t care that much about his post-Vietnam activities (accusing fellow troops of war crimes, negotiating on his own with the North Vietnamese in Paris, etc.) if he wasn’t making Vietnam his defining campaign issue.
• John Kerry 2005 — what’s he going to do if he does get elected and finds out that Vietnam was done thirty freakin’ years ago? (Other than fly over and kiss Jacques Chirac’s butt, that is.) It seems unbelievable, but when you compare his voting record and his campaign speeches, Waffles-boy appears to have fewer consistent guiding principles than our last Democratic president.
• The Virginia budget — I’m fine with it. Money has to come from somewhere, and if we were going to kill off the car tax once and for all, something had to give. The national left and the Virginia hard-right share a curious blind spot where the dot-com boom of 1998-2000 is concerned: both sides seem willing to accept it as a valid point of reference when it was really an economic “perfect storm” of sorts, in which technology and culture joined up to turn the economy sideways. The lefties blame President Bush for what was essentially a correction in the system following the wild run-up of the dot-com era. The VA hard-right isn’t much better, trying to stick to tax policies that were formulated based on the oversized tax receipts of that time. TANSTAAFL — I’d rather pay a higher sales tax (which I can control, either by buying online or just cutting back on the stupid stuff I purchase on occasion) than either (a) pay Henrico County every year for the right to own my car, or (b) watch my Virginia Tech degree lose value as our state higher-education system goes down the tubes from lack of funding. Can we dispense with the ideologically-based childish tantrums, please?

More soon — really. I mean it.