Tag: Travel

Zooming with Cottage Neighbors

April 2, 2024

I push the join button on Zoom and face 18 somber people on the screen, members of our cottagers’ association. Nobody speaks. With a look of expectation on their faces, they appear serious. I ask: can you hear me? Some say yes. I grab my glass of wine while Kathy brings our dinner at 7 pm. We decided to eat our dinner during the Zoom call.

Looking at the Zoom participants, I ask who is from Ottawa. A woman says she is 100 km from Ottawa in Madoc. Then I recognize Kit joining us from Florida, Ry, who lives in New Hampshire, and a few from Toronto. The association’s President lives in Toronto and called the Zoom meeting to discuss issues concerning the group.

A revised constitution and the transfer of land used as pathways from the island’s original owners to our cottagers’ association are on the agenda. These topics leave me cold; I have never been interested in constitutions, and the land transfer has no impact on our enjoyment of the island. We already have legal access to walk on the pathways with all other cottagers, so who owns it is irrelevant.

I would have been more interested in the Zoom call if the agenda had proposed some new activities and developments for the upcoming summer. Bureaucratic matters, especially constitutions, leave me cold, but I looked forward to seeing some cottage neighbors.

After tent camping and trailering, we bought the cottage a few decades ago, envisioning a permanent summer venue we could visit every weekend. It never involved Robert’s Rules and land transfers. It was “getting away” from urbanization and work. It had to do with living on a lakefront with all the lake’s benefits, like swimming, canoeing, kayaking, sailboarding, and even walking on the pathways in the back.

But here we are, having dinner with a glass of wine when the President puts the revised constitution on the screen and explains proposed changes. What a bore, except for a few quirky items. He says we could have more than the current membership class, consisting of property owners on the island.

Less than half of the current cottage owners belong to the association, and the President suggests we could have the non-paying cottagers become another class of members. Huh? What does that mean? Why should you be a member if you do not pay the membership fee and cannot vote? Some people on the island may not even be aware of the association, but we make them members?

But wait. The President also suggests another member class: people who do not even live on the island. Who could these people be? Relatives, potential cottage property buyers? I think we do not need these artificial membership classes.

Another peculiar suggestion the President makes to include in the constitution is that only people with no history of bankruptcy can serve on the association’s executive. Someone asks how we can filter these individuals out of consideration. How can we ascertain that the individual volunteering to serve on the Executive Committee has no bankruptcy history?

Concerning the pathways, I ask: Why transfer the land to the association when we have the legal right to walk on them? What are the benefits? I do not get a response to my question or to the other question, whether owning the land would require liability insurance, which would cost dearly and increase the membership fee.  

However, there seems to be momentum to proceed with the land transfer, mainly from the executive members. There appears to be wind in their sails; I am unsure what drives their motivation. They promise to follow up on suggestions from the 19 members of the association logging in.

I leave the Zoom meeting with mixed feelings. When we bought a cottage on an island, we thought we had left bureaucracy behind in the city. But bureaucracy follows us today and is burgeoning, with big-city people coming to our island and developing big-city organizations with rules and regulations. I may have to reconsider joining the association for next year.

How I Accumulated a Lifetime of Pictures and What to do with Them

February 28, 2024

I am sitting in front of three boxes full of a lifetime collection of pictures, trying to figure out what to do with them. But wait! What about the albums on the shelves? There are twenty-four albums chock-full of photos. But there is more: I inherited my father’s twenty-five albums, including duplicates of the images I gave him. His albums also have pictures he brought out from Hungary, containing photographs of my mom when she was young when they married and then of his three boys and grandchildren growing up. Before I forget, there are also hundreds of slides. What should I do with thousands of photographs and slides of family, travel, and events?

I digitized slides and photos that I considered memorable. Those taken with a digital camera are on my computer, on Google Cloud, with duplicates on an external storage device. I even bought a “photostick” that sucked up all my pictures from the computer to have a portable copy, but it did not have enough storage space. And I produced picture books of our travels using Shutterfly software.

So, should I dump the three boxes? When I looked at some of the old pictures in the boxes, I found some that I could not place in my digital collection. We should go through the boxes to make sure we do not dump some memorable pictures!

Although I initially used film cameras with everybody else, I started shooting exponentially more pictures when digital cameras arrived, making it easy and fast to click, edit, and store images. I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus, at Carleton Place, a small town near Ottawa. I paid over C$1500! That camera sold for half this price a year later, but I wanted to buy a digicam for our trip to Asia in 2004.

The Canon G9 was my next digital camera; it looked like a small brick and fit into my hand with a comfortable hold but was a bit larger than fitting easily into a pocket. It was light enough to carry it in my hand or backpack.

Then I moved to what I considered a professional camera, buying a Sony SLT-A55V sold as a special deal one Xmas with many filters, lenses, and other photographic equipment. I thought it was a value deal for C$1000. I used that camera on many travel trips by adding another lens that photographers call the “traveling lens,” combining short and long-distance shooting without changing the lenses. This camera came with its bag, which I had to carry in addition to other suitcases on our travels.

The Sony camera was heavy when we hiked the Camino Santiago in Spain. I was also paranoid about being robbed carrying such fancy equipment (I also took the G9 in my backpack as a backup).

An Epson Multi-Media Storage Viewer added to the weight of the camera gear I carried on our travels. I was trigger-happy snapping pictures, and I thought I needed this device to download and edit the images I snapped daily.

But technology never stops, and I began using my cell phone camera, a Samsung Galaxy, for our trip to Pune, India, in 2018. Taking pictures with the cell phone was just too easy and comfortable. As a backup to my cellphone, I replaced the G9 with a Canon G7X Markll, a tiny “pocket” camera with excellent features. It took fantastic pictures and could wirelessly transmit photos to my cellphone. The cellphone and the pocket camera were light and easily concealed, significantly improving on previous travel with the Sony and the G9.

I remember arriving in Pune and discovering that my Galaxy did not work due to getting wet from my leaking water bottle. It was scary. But I read that if you put rice in a Ziplock bag with the camera, the rice will soak up the liquid. The camera worked after twelve hours.

On our trip to Pune, I took all my pictures with my cellphone, a multi-purpose device with many benefits. For example, when someone wanted to know how much a store item cost in Canadian dollars in Pune, I just looked up the exchange rate on the cellphone (I had internet access) and converted the local price into Canadian dollars in between taking pictures. In the Fall of 2023, I upgraded my cellphone to an iPhone 14, going to Corsica, France.

 This cellphone takes excellent pictures with three lenses, making me wonder whether I would use the Sony or the G9 again. Kathy tells me the Sony Digicam still takes better images than cell phones. That may be true. But how good should pictures be? The underlying question is why do we take photographs, and how often do we look at them? I take pictures to provide memories. But after showing them to interested family and a few friends, the images lose currency. They were uninterested when we visited with family and offered to show them some travel pictures from Africa using my projector and screen.

To me, there is historical and personal value in pictures. When I take a picture, I look for a person, a building, or a landscape, and that process sharpens my mind and renders the image memorable. Storing them for the long run has value primarily for me, the picture-taker, while its value diminishes exponentially for others, in my experience.

Thinking about keeping pictures reminded me of my father’s diplomas, which I have. When he passed away, I was the only one of three sons interested in retaining them and dubious if anyone would keep them after me. The same goes for the pictures I took.

Returning to what to do with all the pictures, the digital ones on Google are always available online without storage problems at home. The ones in the albums and boxes take up space and could be pruned and offered to our family, although I do not think they would be interested. They are snapping their own pictures. It is doubtful that we would take them should we downsize. Let me know if you have encountered the same issues and how you dealt with them.

Climate Change: From X-country Skiing to Urban Walking

February 15, 2024

We have always done x-country skiing in Ottawa for fun and exercise during the winter months. Snow could come as early as December but never later than by Xmas. We have always had up-to-date equipment, and nothing was better than being outdoors in the fresh air on a sunny day. Sometimes, it was cold, but layered clothing did the trick, and when it was frigid, we started skiing uphill to warm up.  

But there has been a massive change in the weather over the last few decades. When we moved to Ottawa in 1971, the temperature never reached zero Fahrenheit in January (in those days, we had the Fahrenheit scale). And we had ten feet of snow that month; I had to shovel snow off the roof to lighten the load. Not anymore!

It was so mild last year that the world’s longest skating rink, the three-mile-long Rideau Canal, did not open in 2023. It was open four days this year, in 2024. Balmy weather created risky skating conditions on the Canal, and the National Capital Commission, the agency maintaining the ice surface, deemed it unsafe for skating.

We had some snow in December, but there has been no precipitation for weeks. A few weeks ago, we started walking on snow-covered paths instead of snowshoeing, which has become difficult because of the lack of fresh snow. The snow on the pathways had become compressed by skiers and walkers. It melted during the days with above-freezing weather and then froze overnight. So, we walked with crampons on our boots to avoid sliding on the icy pathways. But walking on uneven, icy surfaces, even with crampons, is unpleasant. We needed a new plan to go outdoors for fun and exercise.

We discovered the city cleared the sidewalks of snow in urban areas. So, we picked a walk downtown, where we found cleared sidewalks. The plan was to walk for a while and then let serendipity take over by improvising the return route, aiming to visit a coffee shop.

We picked a location on Somerset Street West, parked the car at the Suya Palace African Grill, and walked west on Wellington Street, dodging people on the narrow sidewalk. Tinseltown Christmas Emporium was on our left. Further west, we passed the Ember Hair Retreat and the Crows Nest Barbershop. The Tooth and Nail Brewing Company was across the Les Moulins la Fayette coffee shop at Irving Avenue. On the other side of the street was an LCBO (liquor store) and the Ministry of Coffee (another coffee shop). Next to the Moulin la Fayette, we looked into the windows of the Tokyo Smoke shop (a cannabis store), all of these establishments within two blocks.

Walking and discovering the variety of stores was a refreshing change from walking in our neighborhood, where few people ever walk, and when they do, they walk on the streets because of the lack of sidewalks. Our progress was slow, with our attention focused on the various establishments.

We chose a street parallel to Somerset for our return. The changing character of the old residential area to modern architectural houses and small apartments was striking in design and colors. I took pictures of the evolving residential area. Some people walking by me with young children asked if I was a real estate agent looking for a house.

The area was changing with many renovations demonstrating the area’s attractiveness for living. Unfortunately, I thought the redevelopment would squeeze the small pop-and-mom stores out of existence.

The next day, we decided to pick a quieter area with fewer people on the streets for our walk. We chose to walk along Colonel By Drive, next to the Rideau Canal, which, without skaters, we thought, would be quiet. Instead, we met joggers and cyclists in balmy, above-freezing temperatures.

But Colonel By Drive was so noisy with heavy car traffic that we could not hear each other talking. Like the previous day, we chose a parallel street to return, Echo Drive, bordered by stately and some newly constructed homes. It was quiet with no car traffic, and we enjoyed this older but expensive area, looking at the architectural dwellings.

As we looked at the houses, some Jehovah’s Witnesses approached us, asking how we managed in this complex world. It did not appear they were successful in talking with homeowners on this street, so perhaps signing up people on the road for an interactive Bible course was a good substitute. Although they did not convince us that studying the Bible was our interest, we discussed aspects of our lives in an overcrowded world. After our walk, we ended up in a coffee shop, the Stella Luna Gelato Cafe.

Our Sunday walk took us from Ottawa South, going west on Colonel By Drive to the Bronson Bridge, where we crossed over to Queen Elizabeth Drive. We walked east along the Drive to Lansdowne and checked out the Ottawa Landsdowne Market, open only on Sundays. I have not been in this area for years and was stunned by the massive redevelopment around the stadium. The place reminded me of Granville Island in Vancouver, although on a much smaller scale.

A hundred vendors/farmers within one hundred miles of Ottawa come to this market. We stopped to talk with a vendor selling Kinoko mushrooms, which he grows in his garage, and bought some of these odd-looking “gourmet” mushrooms after he explained how he grows them. And, of course, we had to get some micro-greens from another vendor and buy organic, free-range eggs from a farmer who is a “leader in animal welfare.” Before we loaded up with additional purchases, we decided to walk back to the car, except for a stop at the Happy Goat Coffee shop on Bank Street.

We miss x-country skiing on fresh snow on a sunny day, but urban walking is more than a suitable substitute. It provides exercise outdoors, but more importantly, it is a way to learn about our city, its businesses, its people, and its developments that we do not see or hear about unless we walk around the city.

Exploring the Art and Wine at Chateau La Coste

November 1, 2023

A jazz trio played forties tunes on the deck of a vineyard, where we sat down after a tiring bicycle ride in the finger-lakes area of New York State. We relaxed by sampling the wine and listening to the music. It was a fall afternoon with the sun going down, illuminating the vinifera below us. Before leaving, we bought some wine for the night to enjoy at our hotel. These are the type of situations my lasting memories are made of.

The first such memory was when I finished university and helped my younger brother learn to drive when he turned sixteen. When he passed the driving test, I convinced him to drive with me from Vancouver to California. I explained to him that he’d do the driving for practice, and I’d do some wine-tasting on the way. He did not need much convincing. And it was a memorable trip.

More recent memories were at vineyards in North Carolina, where after a warm welcome, the hosts offered lunch in addition to the tasting session. What I liked about these visits were driving into an attractive estate with lush vinifera surrounding us, entering an ornate Italianate building or a large historic mansion where the winemaking took place, and partaking in a guided tour of winemaking before sitting down for the tasting session.

So, when we visited Provence in France a month ago and discovered that Chateau La Coste, a well-known vineyard was on our route, I jumped at the opportunity to visit it and bought entry tickets. Chateau La Coste is famous for art, architecture, and wine. The owner, Paddy McKillen, an Irishman, who bought the estate in 2001, commissioned artists to create artwork in the garden and hired world-famous architects to design the buildings (Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, and others). So my expectations were high only to be disappointed after the visit. Let me explain.

We approached the Chateau driving through fields of vinifera only to arrive at a large, open, unpaved parking lot, with recently planted trees. By talking to other tourists and asking questions, we found our way to the building where our tour started. Nobody welcomed us, nobody provided directions. It was not a promising beginning.

Our group of eleven people was taken on a guided tour of the wine-making plant. Well, production took place in a building that looked like half a barrel on its side, with interesting finishes, mostly aluminum, but nothing else (designed by Jean Nouvel). To me, it looked like any commercial building, like a Quonset hut, huge, but still only a simple shape, a half-barrel sitting on its side. Is this good architecture? The shape conjured up winemaking barrels, was that the idea?

We pondered the front of the building, listening to the guide, standing on a gravelly field, next to a massive excavation, which, I gathered, was going to be the location for a hotel. The surrounding for the hotel and the plant was not what I expected to be a campus-like atmosphere with attractive landscaping.

Once inside the half-barrel, though, the guide gave a detailed tour of the wine-making process and equipment. Surprising to me were the huge metal barrels holding the fermenting wine; I had seen wooden barrels in other vineyards previously (although, admittedly, the other vineyards were smaller than this one).

Wine tasting, the event we all looked forward to, was next and we entered a small nondescript building. We gathered around a U-shaped table, sitting on bar stools. At the open end of the U was the guide and at the bottom of the U were six bottles of the Chateaus brand.

Talking about the qualities of the first bottle, the guide poured a couple of ounces of wine into a wine glass placed in front of each of us. If you did not like it, you could pour it into a tumbler sitting next to the wine glass. The purpose of the tumbler became more obvious as we tasted the next few wines and became a bit tipsy. I began to pour half of my samples into the tumbler, I wanted to walk out at the end, although I did not drive, Kathy drove in Provence.

The two young Australian couples facing us across the U loved their wine and peppered the guide with questions. The three Israeli tourists next to us enjoyed their wine quietly. The two young women from New  York City talked to each other about the wines. Kathy and I practiced our wine-tasting skills by swirling the wine around the glass, smelling it, and observing the prominence of legs in the samples indicating alcoholic content.

During our discussion with the guide, we learned that Le Chateau produces excellent roses because of the soil in the area. And the wines are not scored for sweetness like we do in Canada. We also found out that of the million liters of wine produced annually, a third goes to North America, a third to Europe, and a third is sold domestically. The guide even mentioned some of the best years for each sample we tasted, should we decide to purchase some.

When we discovered, after sampling all six wines, that the fourth was the most expensive, many of us looked ruefully into the tumbler into which we poured some of it; we were all becoming a bit mellow after tasting four samples. But the sampling was a success indicated by how our conversation had become loud and animated, and as a result, in the end, we all tipped the guide. On the way out I bought a bottle of wine that we liked during the tasting, to enjoy at night at the hotel.

By now it was getting late in the afternoon, and we had to drive to Aix-en-Provence for our accommodation that night. We felt it prudent to eat before driving after consuming so much wine and tried one of the restaurants, set in a lovely garden. We were not disappointed with the quality of the food.

On leaving, we went by the gardens and noticed some of the artwork in the distance. When we tried to walk closer, a guard snapped at us and asked for our tickets. We did not know that we had to pay, we saw nothing indicating that on the way in and assumed that our wine-tasting ticket covered the whole vineyard. It was too late to go back to the entrance to buy tickets, so we left without seeing all the artwork. I understood it would take a few hours to see the artwork and the buildings designed by renowned architects, spread across the large estate. I was disappointed; we had seen parts of the vineyard, much of it under development but missed some of the finished areas with the work of famous artists and architects. Next time we come by, I’ll make sure we have sufficient time to fully explore Chateau La Coste.

Exploring Corsica’s Abandoned Homes and Ghost Towns

October 24, 2023

The Alfa Romeo climbed the winding road effortlessly. Kathy drove and I admired the landscape, occasionally grabbing the door handle when rounding a 180-degree turn with a drop into a valley on my side. But I kept my mouth shut. I spoke up only when Kathy stopped at a viewpoint, the front of the car facing a huge drop into a valley in front of us, pressing only the brake instead of putting the gearshift into park.

The GPS in the car showed the curves in the road ahead. Driving was slow because of the turns every few hundred feet, the narrowness of the road, and the traffic punctuated by numerous cyclists going almost at our speed. Turnouts helped us to stop and let faster drivers go by us. Overall, the drivers showed restraint; we could not go faster than fifty kilometers per hour.

We rented the Alfa at Figari Airport and drove to Porto Vecchio to shop for supplies to last us four days in the mountains where our daughter and son-in-law rented a house. The mountains began just when we left Porto Vecchio. Although we drove only just over sixty kilometers, it took us two hours to reach our destination. The scenery along the trip got my iPhone camera busy; the jagged mountains were stunning, reminding me of the Rockies. We drove through small towns like Levie, Zonza, and Quenza to reach Sorbonella, a town of 68 people, where our house was; the speed limit through the towns was thirty kilometers.

It surprised me to see all the boarded-up houses in the towns; shutters covered windows and doors. Where were the inhabitants? People sitting in street cafes were tourists, many had bikes leaning against their chairs. I decided to walk around Quenza the next day to check out the boarded-up houses. And what I saw confirmed what I had seen, most of the homes, even along the main street were tightly shut; the gardens were unkempt, and gates shut tight with a chain and lock on them. So, what gives?

I searched the internet and found one answer: there were 613 houses in Quenza (population of 235), of which 110 were occupied; 494 were secondary units (this is the expression used by the local statistical agency) and 9 vacant units, in 2007 (I discovered the French government keeps detailed statistics). The secondary units were mostly owned by native Corsicans who left for career or other reasons and kept their family home, according to some people I talked with in Quenza.

The next day we drove to Aulene (population 179), where we found houses boarded up similar to those in Quenza. According to French statistics, there were 421 houses in 2007, of which 81 were occupied; 333 were secondary units, and 7 were vacant. After a short walk around town, we settled into a small café for the traditional café allonge, next to tourists.

Holiday homes owned by people living in France and foreigners represent forty percent of all real estate in Corsica, according to local authorities. And, according to INSEE, the French statistics collection agency, there were 7000 holiday homes in Corsica in 1968, ratcheting up to over 71,000 holiday homes in 2007. Looking at holiday homes for sales ads in Corsica indicated that the desirable units are along the ocean, where, I assume, the foreigners bought. In the mountains, where we were, I assume that most of the boarded-up homes were owned by Corsicans.

The Mediterranean climate has attracted people to buy real estate in Corsica thereby elevating real estate prices. That made purchasing property by local people difficult. In response, the local government brought in legislation in 2014 to require five years of residency in Corsica for outside purchasers except for native Corsicans living abroad.

Talking with some French people from outside Corsica, we understood that the French people are not welcome to buy Corsican real estate, except when they are tourists and spend money locally. Corsicans are proud people and consider themselves different from the French people; their feelings towards the French have been demonstrated by setting fire to French-owned holiday homes. But the island remains a popular destination for vacationers.

Seasonal homes are shut down most of the time and there was an overabundance of them in the small towns driving through the mountains. With their shutters, they gave me a feeling of abandoned places, like ghost towns (similar to abandoned mining towns in British Columbia, Canada). It was a bit eery. Not only were there the shuttered homes but also the abandoned gardens and very few people on the streets except for cycling tourists. But we enjoyed the serenity of the quiet streets, punctuated by the occasional cafe along the sidewalk. The one grocery store in Quenza, one room, shut down between the hours of 12:30 to 4 p.m. There was no other commercial establishment here, we had to look up where the nearest gas station was seven kilometers away.