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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Toronto Goes Insane

I got on the TTC subway at Union Station after Jays-Red Sox and Leafs-Sens Game 7 ended nearly simultaneously, and the mass of Leafs fans that joined the baseball crowd were relatively calm and sane. Then I rode it up to Yonge and Wellesley and started walking back down Yonge, where I saw…

Mid-street partying…

And this guy…

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Blackout Quick Hitter

Most of you are probably aware that power went out over much of the Northeast U.S. and Southern Ontario Thursday afternoon into the evening.

CNN.com is getting hammered. I’m consulting the Washington Post and watching Fox News for updates.

If you’re curious about a specific location, though, I have a suggestion: try college and university sites. Most of them are hosted onsite at their school, and while many schools do have their own power plants, their connections out probably aren’t heavily redundant. Here are a few I’m using:

• Columbia University: NYC
• University of Toronto
• University at Buffalo (NY)
• University of Michigan: Ann Arbor (suburban Detroit)
• Cornell University: Ithaca, NY
• University at Albany (NY)
• Yale University (New Haven, CT)
• University of Dayton (OH)
• Case Western Reserve University: Cleveland, OH
• Mercyhurst College: Erie, PA
• University of Ottawa (Ontario, Canada)

Note that these sites will probably take a little while to get back online once local power is restored, because boxen will need to be restarted, requiring people to go back into the office, etc. But if they’re up, that’s a reasonably good indicator that the lights are back on locally.

Meanwhile, for historical perspective, check George Mason University’s Blackout Project, centered on the 1965 Great Northeast Blackout.

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Une réalisation bilingue

I had about six paragraphs written on the history of Quebec’s language problems, led off by a promise to keep it brief. (Pause for laughter.) I had gotten to about 1976. Then I came to a realization.

No one wants to read this crap.
Hey, quit cheering.

So I’ll stick to today’s situation, and provide a few links if the history interests you.

Quebec separatism is alive and well, but Montreal isn’t terribly sympathetic to it — Montreal may be the most uniformly bilingual city in North America. On the surface in Montreal, it appears that the local residents just don’t care what language they’re speaking. To the American visitor with aspirations to competency in another language (or two, or three), this seems like a great place to be.

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Holidays Here and There

As I mentioned in a couple of posts, I went to Montreal a couple weekends ago, just on a whim. Although I actually posted trip photos last weekend, I haven’t yet had the opportunity to highlight them here on the front page. So, I’ll take this American holiday weekend to make some observations on my Canadian adventure, and wrap up with a couple notes from my Virginia Fourth of July.

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