The Garden of the Blind

This week, I went to Canada's Capitol (the real one, not that silly city over by Quebec). It was my first time using my new passport, and it was the first time that one of my travel companions has left the US. The following are a few random highlights and observations from my trip.

Have you ever had fantasies about flight attendants? Well, I (sort of) came close to living that dream. I was the only person on my flight into Canada who was wearing shorts (it was in the mid-30's when we landed, so I didn't even need a jacket!), and so when my coworkers heard a flight attendants talking about the guy wearing shorts with the hot legs, they figure that it was about me. I didn't notice him paying any attention to me, so I'll never know for sure if I'm the one he was talking about. (This raises the larger question: why do gay men find me attractive? I'd expect them to be drawn to neat people with fashion sense...)

Speaking of which, Toronto has a lot of cars with rainbow bumper stickers. It's fabulous!

I saw three prominent landmarks on this trip that I had not seen before (at least not up close). I went to the very (very!) cold American side of Niagara Falls (did you know that you can get onto the observation deck for free in the winter, but that all of the gift shops are closed?), the base of the CN Tower (Toronto's Space Needle and until a few months ago, the world's tallest free-standing structure), and the start of Yonge Street (which has been considered at times to be the longest street in the world, and didn't have any markers that I could see).

It's pretty much always easier to return to your own country than it is to enter a foreign one. This is especially true when you are reentering a foreign country from your home country in a foreign car.

It's not necessary to wake up at 3:30 in order to catch a 7:55 flight. While the freeways are remarkably clear at 4:30, it probably wasn't that much worse at 5:30 (the line for Tim Horton's was really long though, which was made worse by the fact that my donut was all Boston and no Cream). The moral of the story is that you should check your flight times before going to be, and make sure that it's the actual flight times and not the mis-typed times on a homemade spreadsheet.

If anyone asks you what you think about the Canadian government's decision to allow seal hunting in Saskatchewan, you should not express indignation because 1) seal hunting is not inherently wrong or inhumane (this would be the hunting of adult seals for meat and furs as opposed to the clubbing of baby seals just for their coats, which is considered inhumane) and 2) Saskatchewan is a landlocked province that doesn't even have any prominent lakes.

My flight back into Salt Lake City had five uniformed pilots. The one in command of the plane was a woman, which was remarkable since women are highly underrepresented in that field.

The important thing is that I'm safely home and a good time was had by all. Take off, eh.