I was somewhat ambitious on the book front when we were in Canada, taking five with me, and then succumbing in the airport and buying another three that took my fancy.  That was never going to work, but in the event we played Canasta most evenings, so I got through only the new Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy book called ‘And another thing’ by Eoin Colfer, and the first half of ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell, that I’ve wanted to read for ages.

The Hitch-hikers book was always going to be interesting, since Eoin Colfer is carrying on Douglas Adams defining work with its unique style, and where the books were a development of what started as a radio play, and in many respects work better in that format.  And, for the most part he does that well, it was an enjoyable read that had an Adams feel, and didn’t feel like it let down the standard.  About the only point that started to niggle were what felt like a materially larger number of ‘guide asides’ – entertaining, but occasionally in such frequency that they distracted.  It was good to see him adding new features and angles to the Adams universe, as well as leveraging much that Adams created.  All in all, if you liked Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy then this is well worth a read, though it’s probably not in my top ten books this year.

The Alexandria Quartet, however, is already in my top three for the year, and I haven’t finished it yet.  It is actually four novels that deal with the same people from different angles – I am half way through the third (Mountolive) having read Justine and Balthazar.  This is definately not a light fluffy read that can be picked up and put down, since there is so much depth, and the description is so rich that it works your mind more than most books that romp through events.  The characters are developed better than any other book I can recall, with ones understanding building up in layers, often with the characters own understanding of themselves.  And, though Alexandria of the 1930’s is far far from my personal experience, I almost feel like was there personally.  It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading it, but I’m very glad I have.

Binary clocks are so last millennium.  You know the ones I mean – each of the normal decimal digits are represented in binary.  If you don’t know what I mean, I suggest you stop here and move along to something else .This is a bit of a bodge, since a real binary clock would use pure binary for each section … and you can get these as well :-

But, just too easy.  Everyone knows binary, it doesn’t really qualify as a properly geeky skill, or push any boundaries in number representation.  I was thinking about how one might use a numbering scheme where the base used increments each digit.  So, the first digit is binary, the second in base three, the third in base 4 and so on.  It might sound like a ludicrously hard thing to understand, but in working it out, it turns out it is quite possible easier than binary, since 2×3x4 just happens to equal 24, and adding another digit (in base 5) gets you to 120 which is handily exactly twice the number of minutes in an hour.  So, showing the hours down the left, and the three digits next, you get :-

This is pretty easy to use – the first digit shows which 6 hour block of the day you are in, the next which two hour block etc.  And, it has the beauty that the granularity gets finer as you head to the right.  In use, an idea would be to use different colours for each digit value – nothing for 0, red for 1, green for 2, etc.  Then you have three lights for hours and four for minutes (down to 30 second intervals).  And, I think it could truly be called cool in a world where the old geeky standard is mainstream.

I was planning an art-deco bookcase for the back room (see here), but reality has rather intruded.  We did a massive cleanse (for us at least), and threw out or gave away over 500.  But, when we did the maths that still left far more than would go into one walls-worth of bookcases, even if they went to the roof.  Building two was going to be wildly expensive and time consuming, so we decided to go back to a simple model, though still roof-high and with doors on to keep the dust out (photo below shows both bookcases side by side, though they are on opposite walls) :-

After quite a bit of research, the best option appeared to be the venerable Billy bookcase from Ikea – with vertical extensions it goes over 9 feet up.  But, the old design lives on – I plan to bring it out at some other time.

Brief post for Breff and JIm who I think are in Ireland.  Title says it all really, we’re home safely.  Loads of photos on Flickr in a set here.  Photos with Kat, Alan or Sara are flagged as family only – if you think this should be you then let me know and I’ll add you.

The time has come, as it does in all trips, to call time and head home.  And, whilst we’ve had a great time, with 2000 miles done in a 30 foot RV with very undamped suspension, we feel we’re done travelling for this trip.  Last time I posted was as we turned around at Thunder Bay; since then we’ve returned all the way back to Toronto, and on a little bit further to visit the Niagara Falls.

The trip back gave us more snow, with 3-4 inches at Nays (mid-way along the top of Lake Superior) – that allowed for a simply gorgeous walk down towards Nays Point, where we were the only people about – the only other tracks we saw in the snow were deer, moose, and other smaller animals.

We also decided that it was quite possibly the best snow we had ever experienced for making snowballs.  We then had a beautiful drive back down the East side of Lake Superior, marred only by being pulled in by the Canadian Police, who informed us that Sa and I had managed between us to get confused about who was paying for fuel, and had simply driven off.  I think it was fairly obvious that we weren’t trying to ‘gas and dash’ since we had pootled on, stopping to see the sites and have lunch – not really a ‘dash’ (not that you could in this bus – above 60 miles per hour feels pretty brave).  Very nicely, they took the relevant amount of cash and said they’d give it to a car returning past the fuel station and drop it off (photo after they left!)

There was hardly any traffic at all on the road – it would be typically several minutes between cars coming the other way, and we didn’t see anything on our side apart from when we got stopped for 20 minutes behind an overturned car.  When we set out, we had read that the north of Lake Superior was a gorgeous drive; having done it we’d vote the East better.

The day before yesterday, we set of from Sault Saint Marie for the about 240+ mile trip towards Britt, with a theory for going slightly further if time allowed.  We were making good time, so decided to go for it and head for a camp ground near where we got the RV, so making the trip to Niagara the next day shorter.  But, when we arrived there, despite  being said to be open, it was deserted, with an envelope containing a bar-code allowing you to get past the gate … and when inside we found burned-out electrics and no water, and a feeling that we were in some kind of horror film and would be picked off one by one through the night.  I know it sounds silly, but we all felt it independently, and whilst the gate was still open we decided to leave quickly before being trapped.  I won’t name the camp-ground since I’m sure it’s a lovely place normally, when there are people there, not just spooky looking corn dollies.  We decided that we’d head off for another camp-ground, by now feeling quite confident in our navigation.  Quite foolishly it would appear.  We couldn’t find the first two camp grounds, and ended up only 50 miles from Niagara, having done 490 miles in the day.  But, the night-time team navigation was quite entertaining.

Yesterday we spent the day at Niagara, and it really is pretty cool, even if there is a huge amount of tacky stuff around.  The Victoria Falls felt better, if anything just because it was less built-up, with elephants fording the river just upstream.  But, the amount of water at Niagara was huge, and it was fun to get down to right at the bottom of the falls in the spray.  Handy to have a waterproof camera for that!

(You can see the viewing platform position below)

It was also interesting to see the effort lavished on the power stations, with Ionic columns at the front of a huge building … seems that the Victorian fascination with large engineering was present in Canada as well (I suppose it was a British Colony/dependancy in 1905).

Now all that remains to do is return the RV, head for the airport and on to home.  A really enjoyable impromptu trip, though I think we are all looking forward to our own beds.

Edit : Linked in photos and fixed name of columns

It is fortunate that we had defined the purpose of this trip as the journey, and not the destination.  We got to the point we decided to turn around today, a waterfall called Kakabeka falls, about 20km West of Thunder Bay, and 850 miles from when we set off.  It’s fair to say that the gorge would indicate that when in flood it must be impressive … but at this time of the year the water flow is stunningly slow – it is interesting to see the geology though

We’ve had a small taste of the winter – a couple of days ago it rained all night, but seemed to stop in an hour or two before we got up – it turned out that it simply changed to snowing, and we got up to a fairly chilly morning (Sa was remembering that just about her only definition of what a good break would look like was ’somewhere hot’ and was trying to think how she had thought Canada qualifed).  We then drove through lovely vistas of snow covered trees for several hours.  Whilst it looked great, the downside of the sub-zero nights is that mains water feeds in the campsites are now turned off, so I had to fill the RV water tanks by hand this evening – a slightly longer process than it need have been since I had to do it from a tap in the main building, 4 litres at a time … and we, have a 120 litre tank that was only 1/3 full.  But, chatting to someone who lives here year-round she said that a mild winter is 3-4 feet of snow and a ‘normal’ winter is 6-8 feet.  So, the dusting that we had (an inch or two) doesn’t really count at all.

In closing for now, it’s worth mentioning the slightly surreal moment this morning, when we got up and walked to site office for breakfast.  There were a couple of hunters next who had a freshly shot moose hung up from a small digger, and were skinning it, not Kat’s top sight of the day!

Edit : Added photos now on fast internet!

A few random thoughts from the first couple of days :-

• CN Tower really is very very high.  We went right to the upper platform, 446m above sea level, and the tops of even high skyscrapers look a long way down
• The glass floor in the CN tower makes youthink twice.  It may be strong enough for a brace of hippos, or somesuch statistic, but your heart tells you that looking straight down a third of a kilometre with nothing but clear glass to hold your feet up isn’t something your brain has evolved to handle.  But, top marks to Alan and Sa, both of whom claim they hate heights, for lying on the floor looking downwards! (we have the photos to prove it)



• A Winnebago RV makes the average American car, with it’s dreadful handling, feel like a rally car.  And, it squeeks annoyingly when driven.  But, it’s remarkably civilised and spacious when stationary (especially with an electrically extending side wall)
• The curry powder you can get in the foodstore of a Canadian town of 1300 people is mis-sold as having anything at all to do with curry (we should have known that really)
• Canadians are to a fault lovely people – not just polite, but interested and helpful

We have a couple of weeks off now, with half-term for the kids and no exams coming up, a fair amount of holiday yet to take for me this year, and no annoying over-running work at home that prevents us getting away.  In customary (for us) fashion, we were still knocking all sorts of destinations and ideas about on Saturday, with an aim to sort out logistics by the end of the day and leave on Monday.  It may sound rather close to the wire, but it does allow some interesting options like checking the weather before you decide.  Ok, ok, thats a post-hoc rationalisation of the reality that we like going where the fancy takes us, and planning ahead makes it feel like it isn’t a holiday.  Even one and a half days ahead feels a little organised, but there are limits on how far you can push it!

The extent of our planning thus far is to fly to Toronto on Monday, pick up an RV on Tuesday morning, and head broadly across the top of Lake Superior, towards Thunder Bay and Winnipeg.  Winnipeg is 2222 km from Toronto which has a nice round feel to it, but we do need to get back again, so we might not go that far.  It was quite entertaining booking the RV, as the guy I was talking to when I said ‘20th October’ said ‘next year?’, and I said I really meant next Tuesday.  We did a slight compromise between something that was basically the size of a coach, and something that we might have half a chance of driving through towns – hence the 29 foot model below.

Right, all we have to do now is get up awfully early and head for Heathrow.

<Geek mode>

We have been looking for a small TV for the study – nothing flash, just a wee one that has a digital tuner.  As it happens the monitor that is linked to the computer in the study is rather old – a 1024×768 resolution Sony (it was good at the time!).  So, rather on impulse in CostCo we bought a combined monitor/Digital TV, for about £250.  It’s actually a full HD screen, so has a resolution of 1980×1080 – or roughly three time the old screen.    And, I have to say that it’s gorgeous.  It’s quite nice to look at even switched off – Samsung have got that cracked.  But, running at full res. on the PC it’s a revalation.  I’m, sure that half the reason that big apple screens look as good is because of simply a great high res screen.  Awesome.  And £250, whilst still a reasonable amount of cash, feels like a bargin.
</Geek mode>

I was part of a team exercise last week to see who could build the tallest tower out of straws to support an egg. The ‘winner’ was a pretty good structure. But, it wasn’t IMHO the real winner, despite what Ken might insist about our teams rampant cheating. The instructions never said that the egg had to be supported at the top of the tower. So, my team think they won really, since our tower touched the ceiling, even though the egg was only about 8 inches off the table (photo shows the proving run, using an apple).

Since when has the winner been the one that followed what the world perceived as the rules? Pah. Mind you there were some cool ideas that other teams came up with that we could use to make it taller next time. We never thought of using sellotape as a tension member in its own right!