As so many of our years have, we started 2014 with a New Year’s celebration at our friends Marc and Kris’s place — known as The Farm — near Buckhorn just north of Peterborough, where we scraped the pond clear and did some skating and also went for some snowshoe hikes through the woods on the property. After that we met up with Becky’s brother Dave in Port Hope for a hockey tournament, where his team was playing Zoe’s team — it was a lot of fun, except for the fact that Zoe’s team got completely annihilated 🙂 Becky and I also took some time off for a little relaxation at the Scandinave spa in Collingwood, near Blue Mountain, which offers massages and has a sauna and steam room and a half a dozen or so pools of varying temperatures. It was fantastic.
We also visited Ottawa for our annual Winterlude trip, where we pretend to skate on the canal in order to justify the eating of several pounds of poutine and beaver tails and maybe some maple taffy, which they make by pouring the syrup into cold snow and then wrapping it around a stick. I made a quick trip to Boston for a conference, where I paid a ceremonial visit to Boston Common and of course to Hahvahd yahd. It’s not quite the same, but I had a great time at a conference at the University of Toronto as well, which has some cool old buildings too. And soon it was time for our annual trip away from the snow to Florida, where we visited Becky’s mom and her new husband at their place in Port St. Lucie on the Atlantic ocean side of Florida.
We made the obligatory trip to our favourite beach, the white beach at Siesta Key and watched some sunsets from the south jetty in Venice, and took the kids to Busch Gardens to see the alligators and ride some coasters and eat too much junk food. We also went to Pop’s Sunset Grill down by the intercoastal waterway near Nokomis, where you can eat at a fire table. And of course we had Zoe’s birthday, as we usually do when we’re in Florida, and went bowling. After we got back, I went to New York for a conference that we put on at Pier 50 (which I found out is where the Titanic was supposed to dock if it had finished its voyage). I visited some of my favourite places, including Central Park and the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park and the New York Public Library near Bryant Park, where I like to work in the periodicals room.
Not long after that, it was time for Becky and I to head to Perugia in Italy for the Journalism Festival there, which we went to last year as well. We stayed in our favourite room with a tiny little private balcony, at a tiny little French-inspired hotel in Rome on the third floor of a building not far from the train station, with one of those tiny little wrought-iron elevators that you can barely fit two people and luggage into. We made sure to visit the Trevi fountain so we could throw a coin in (which supposedly guarantees that you will be back) and had a great dinner at a tiny little place right near the fountain called Il Piccolo Bucco (which means hole in the wall). We did a self-guided audio tour of the Palatine hill and the Colosseum and then we did an audio tour of the Vatican and saw the Sistine Chapel (where you’re not supposed to take photos). It was spectacular.
Then we caught a train up to Perugia, which is a couple of hours north of Rome. First stop was the journalism school — which is quite unlike the one I went to, in part because it looks like an Italian villa, complete with its own lemon grove. Italian journalists have to get accreditation (a license, in other words) from a journalism school in order to get a job. Then it was off to the Brufani Palace hotel in the old city, where we checked into our suite, overlooking an old monastery. We ate dinner in one of our favourite spots in old Perugia, a tiny little restaurant tucked into a kind of cave. It is quite amazing, with some beautiful views from the old rampart walls. And of course there is plenty of gelato and espresso to be had.
We had some time so we took the train a couple of hours to Florence (or Fireze as the Italians call it) and wandered around — and had some more gelato and espresso, naturally. And we climbed the hundreds of old stone steps up to the top of the bell tower of the Basilica, known as the Duomo and walked across the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge. And on the way back I learned something about Italians: a conductor came up to us on the way back and seemed very upset — he talked sternly in Italian, and when I said we were Canadian he asked me to read the back of the ticket, which said the tickets needed to be validated or punched on the day of travel (which I guess we had missed when we bought them from a machine).
I mentioned that we came down in the morning without validating and the other conductor didn’t say anything when he checked our tickets, and this guy asked “When did you come?” So I said 10:30 and he looked at his schedule and then said: “Well, that man is from Tuscany, and he does not do his job well!” And then he went out of the carriage and I could see him on the phone yelling at someone. So for this guy, the key point about the other conductor was that he was Tuscan, and the mean conductor (I assume) was Umbrian. What I discovered is that many older Italians only think of themselves as Italian when they are somewhere else — inside Italy they often tend to think of themselves as Calabrian or Genovese or Ligurian or wherever their family is from.
After Italy I headed off to New Orleans for a work get-together, where the team and I went to as many famous places as we could in the short time we had — including the Cafe Du Monde, where we had their famous beignets, and a lot of bars obviously (which weren’t that appealing to me since I don’t drink). Of course we had to go to one that served absinthe the old-fashioned way, where you pour it over a sugar cube, and we heard all about how it caused people to hallucinate etc. (it was banned in the US for a long time). We stayed at a lovely old hotel and had a great time. One thing I didn’t love was going for a run in the morning before they had finished hosing down Bourbon Street — it was a sewer of every kind of human effluent and the smell was so strong I almost threw up, but instead I turned left and headed towards the river.
May 24th we went to the cottage as usual, and I had a swim, which I do most years to prove how tough I am 🙂 And Caitlin and I both had a nice nap for some reason that escapes me now. And we did another somewhat smaller Mesh conference, where I got to meet some fascinating people as usual — including a guy who calls himself a cyborg. He was born with achromatopsia, which means he is totally colour-blind — just black and white and shades of grey. So he built a headset that he calls an antenna, which is connected to a chip in the back of his head, and the tiny camera on the antenna turns colours into musical tones. He said rather than try to recreate colour, he thought it was much more fun to turn one sense into another, like an artificial version of synesthesia.
I took a trip down to San Francisco to see the new headquarters of Gigaom, which had moved from its old home on 4th Street south of Mission to a bigger building kitty-corner to that on Howard, with a much bigger open area for hanging out, with a kitchen and cereal bar, etc. I stayed at a great old hotel near Union Square called the Beacon Grand, which had a rooftop bar called the Skylight Lounge, which was apparently a pretty big deal back in the day. And of course I got to run along the Embarcadero, which goes past the ferry terminal (with my favourite Blue Bottle coffee) and towards the Bay Bridge, past the stumps of the old wharf pilings and the massive bow-and-arrow sculpture.
At the cottage for the summer, there was much kayaking of course, and sunsets, and our friend Rob Hyndman, one of the Mesh founders, even dropped by on his motorcycle on his way down to PEI. There was lots of napping on the beach in the sun, and we made a trip over to Go Home to spend some time with our friends Marc and Kris and Barb and Lori, where we had our usual French toast on the dock breakfast and did one of our canoe-kayak trips to an upper lake connected to Go Home. There was quite a large waterfall there from an even higher lake, and Barb and I took the kayaks into the outflow and she managed to stay upright and I did not. I was fine, but I lost one of my favourite baseball hats that said “Pater Familias” on it, which Becky and the kids got me because I like to repeat that line from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou (“I’m the goddamn pater familias!)
We also rented a little cottage near Bala in Muskoka, which Becky’s mom helped pay for because she wanted to help the whole Stone family get together now that they don’t have a cottage there any more. It was a cute old place with a great big dock (including a floating portion) and a boathouse that had two bedrooms, and I got to do some kayaking around the lake and underneath the old railway trestle bridge. Meaghan and Zoe and I visited the falls in Bala, and saw the old church where Becky and I got married many moons ago. Back at Golden Lake, while cleaning out the upper part of a closet in the big cabin (where I disturbed what looked like several generations of mouse) I found my dad’s old flight helmet from when he used to fly CF-104s and Sabres and other fighter jets.
Caitlin and Wade moved into a cute little apartment upstairs in an old building in Hamilton, not far from the hospital where Wade works as a nurse in the emergency department. And we all got to make fun of poor Wade after he smashed his (large) head into one of the shutters on the cabin and knocked the whole shutter off. So we got him a toy hard hat 🙂 At the annual summer Farm weekend, I did the popular “ice bucket challenge” where you take a video clip of someone pouring ice-cold water over your head, as a fundraiser for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease. What does an ice bucket have to do with ALS? I don’t know. But I did it anyway. And back at the cottage there was more kayaking and sunsets and I got to do one of my favourite things which is to play guitar on the porch with my nephew Scott.
Back at home in Scarborough I did some kayaking up and down the Rouge River near our house, which feeds into Lake Ontario about a block away from our place. There’s a great bird sanctuary and marsh at the bottom, which I found out later was the site of a crazy person’s dream to create the Venice of the North (he came up with the name Rouge Hill). He dug all these channels to try and duplicate the canals of Venice, and even started selling building lots on the shores of the river, but then came the Great Depression and a hurricane and then World War II and it never happened. I paddled right by the ruins of an old bar/restaurant that used to stand on the banks of the river back in the 1930s. The walls of the ravine are so high that sometimes it’s hard to believe that it’s in the middle of the city.
In the fall, I made a trip down to New York to visit the Gigaom team there, and stayed at a great Airbnb apartment on the lower East side, in a great old brownstone building with a cast-iron fire escape, which I sat out on and watched the world go by. I got to walk and run along the High Line, which is an incredible park that New York City created out of an old elevated railway line. I got to visit the legendary Katz’s Deli on the lower East side and have one of their amazing smoked meat sandwiches, which was so big I saved half of it for lunch later. I also visited the office of Vice magazine in Williamsburg, one of the biggest new media outfits (which started as a music magazine in Montreal).
Back home, I went down to Harbourfront where a friend lives and rented a kayak from a place right on the lake there, and we paddled across the harbour with a big group of kayakers to the Toronto Islands. We paddled out the Eastern Gap near the island airport and down to Ontario Place, where we followed the channel in and around the dome, We pulled up the kayaks on the beach of one of the main islands and had a bite to eat at the little cafe there, and then we went back out and up the Leslie Street Spit as far as we could, and watched all the sailboats go by, since it was one of the warmest days of the fall. As we paddled back from the islands later, it was pretty amazing to turn around and look back at the sun setting on the buildings near the CN Tower.
For Halloween, Zoe was the Winter Soldier from The Avengers, and Caitlin was one of the Power Rangers along with some of the nurses at her work at McMaster Hospital. Becky and I got to make a quick trip to New York in the fall, where we had some great pizza and wandered around Zucotti Park and saw the big Christmas tree and skating rink at Rockefeller Center (although we didn’t skate) and walked down 5th Avenue to see the Christmas window displays at Macy’s. And we got to attend a special cooking class near Bryant Park where we made our own pasta the old-fashioned way and then ate the pasta! We also wandered around Grand Central Terminal, and experienced the famous whispering corners underneath where if you stand in one corner and whisper, the curved ceiling allows someone across the hall to hear you clear as a bell.
We checked out the skating rink at Bryant Park, which I think is better than the one at Rockefeller Center, and we got to connect with an old friend from my Globe days, Steve Northfield, who is living in New York working at Human Rights Watch and took us to a great old club in the East Village called The Jazz Standard (I told someone who is from New York that I was going to a club in the East Village and he got incensed. “There’s only one Village — Greenwich Village!” he yelled. “They just invented the East Village!” Okay pal, whatever you say. Back home in Toronto it was time to head down to the great Christmas market at the Distillery District, where we got hot chocolate and got a photo in front of the giant Christmas tree they have down there.
And that was it for us in 2014. Hope you and yours had a great year!