The year started with beaver tails and maple taffy and general merriment at Winterlude in Ottawa, and then we headed off to resort in the Dominican, on the south side of the Samana peninsula, across from Punta Cana. There were tiki umbrellas and breakfast by the beach, which most of the time we had all to ourselves. Some days we even got some chairs on the beach, although most days they were “reserved” by people who got up at 7 am and put their towels on them with clips, which you definitely were not supposed to do but everybody did :-(. The resort had some great pools. and some leaning palm trees and some great specialty restaurants (which cost extra of course). And we did a fun horse ride on a trail through the forest to a waterfall.
We also went on a whale-watching tour, and while we only saw flashes of whales we got to sit up on top just a few of us, which was nice because people were apparently being violently ill down below 🙂 And we did a zip line through the jungle, which Becky did with her usual panache. We also took a bus tour out to a beach with some tree forts that you could rent apparently. No sooner were we back in Toronto but it was time to head off to Perugia in Italy for the journalism festival that we’ve been going to for a couple of years now. Never get tired of the view from the Brufani Palace hotel in the old city, and the amazing venues for the conference, some of which are buildings that date back to the 11th century (the Sala dei Priori was built before Gutenberg invented the printing press). We also joined a few friends on a cab ride to Assisi, where we toured the basilica again and hiked the amazingly tilted hills of that old town.
After Perugia, we set off for Sorrento, which is on the coast south of Naples. When we asked our Italian friends about the best way to get there — trains serve the rest of Italy very well, but not the southern parts — they suggested we take a ferry from Naples. I said I checked the website and they didn’t seem to be running yet, but then an Italian friend checked and said we could just go to the pier and get a ticket. So we took the high-speed train to Naples and then down to the pier and got a ticket for the ferry. It was a beautiful day, and as we were coming into Sorrento, I could see the beautiful old grand hotels standing right on the cliffside next to the harbour — a hundred-foot drop or so. And as I looked at them, I noticed that one of them was our hotel!
When I booked the hotel online, I saw photos of the rooms and so on, but it wasn’t clear that it was right on the cliff by the sea — I thought it was just a nice downtown hotel. To make things even better, when we checked in and got to our room, it was a corner suite with a balcony on two sides, which I also didn’t know when I booked it! Usually you look at things online and they look way better than they are, but this was the oppposite. Our balcony looked out over the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, and it was big enough to hold about fifty people. It was spectacular. And the wisteria was blooming, so the pergola over the patio right at the edge of the cliff was covered in these amazing blooms. It was the perfect place to watch a sunset — although it was too early in the year to take the private elevator down to the beach restaurant, unfortunately.
We took the handy Circumvesuviana railway to Pompeii one day and toured around the ruins, including the famous whorehouse where there were paintings of the different things you could expect in each room, and in the street there were bas relief penises that pointed the way to the whorehouse (didn’t take a picture of one unfortunately). Since we were there already, we also toured Herculaneum, the lesser-known cousin of Pompeii, which instead of being covered with ash was covered by lava, which preserved some of the wood by effectively carbonizing it. The nice part about going late in the day (and early in the season) was that we had the place to ourselves — there was a tour guide for just us and another couple. Quite amazing.
We also did a boat tour over to Capri, where we saw the various grottos and passed under the famous Faraglioni rocks. And we were lucky enough to be able to enter the Blue Grotto, which can be closed if there are too many waves — the cave itself is huge, but the opening to get in is only about four feet high, so I had to lie down in the bottom of the boat and have Becky and some other person lie down on top of me so we could get in through the opening. But it was definitely worth it. Then we took the funicula up from the harbour to the town above, then a bus up to Anacapri, which is at the very top — where you can take an old ski-lift up to the peak and its amazing views. Then we hiked down on an old trail past a house that belonged to the Scottish writer Compton Mackenzie and a monastery hidden in the trees, Back at the beach I asked for espresso and gelato but wasn’t specific enough so we got these, which cost about $45.
Then it was back on the ferry to Naples and the high-speed train to Rome, where we stayed in (of course) our favourite little French-inspired hotel. We saw the newly-cleaned Trevi fountain, which somehow doesn’t look the same, and we ate at an amazing high-end restaurant in the Monti neighbourhood of Rome that my friend Eric Reguly (who is half Italian) got us into, called L’Asino D’oro (the Golden Ass). Back in Toronto, I taught a part-time course at the University of Toronto for grad students who wanted to learn about social media, which was fun. And the girls took Becky to see the Kinky Boots musical. Then it was time for Zoe’s graduation prom, where she looked marvelous — although the doing of the hair apparently got a little stressful at times 🙂
On a business trip through Toronto, I rented another kayak down at Harbourfront and paddled over to the islands and back, which was awesome. And then I headed off to New York to visit the office of Fortune magazine, which I joined after Gigaom shut down last year. I got to eat at the legendary Odeon restaurant in Tribeca — a real celebrity haunt back in the day — and had my usual burger and fries at the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. After I got back, we made the snap decision to buy a cute little used Mini Cooper, which is ridiculously fun to drive, especially on the curvy backroads heading up to the cottage. Soon it was time to open things up at Golden Lake to open up my summer office there.
We had lots of kayak sunsets and coffee cruises with my mother, we did a trip to Go Home and some canoeing there as usual and French toast on the dock. We rented the cottage on Manchee Point in Muskoka again, and did beer-can chicken and took a group photo. Becky and I had our anniversary dinner at the wonderful Blackbird Cafe in Burnstown near the cottage and there was guitar time with my nephew Curtis. We also took Zoe off to Kingston for her first year at university! We also did our usual backwoods camping trip with Marc and Kris, where we launched into Anstruther Lake and then portaged into Rathbun, and then into Anstruther creek and then finally into Copper.
I did a little trip to Denver at the last minute for a journalism conference, where I saw the famous blue bear, and then Becky and I headed off for a whirlwind trip to Paris for a conference. We checked into our hotel near the Arc de Triomphe and even though we had only had about two hours sleep we decided to push through and try to convert over to local time, so we climbed the Arc and got a great view of the city, along with what’s called the “etoile,” the circle with six entrances of multi-lane traffic with no lights 🙂 It is said that if you can navigate entering and exiting the etoile then you automatically get your Parisian driver’s license. We then walked down the Champs Elyssee towards the Louvre, bought and ate a couple of crepes from a truck and then fell sound asleep in the chairs surrounding one of the ponds at the end of the Tuleries gardens.
From there it was on to the Louvre, and then we walked across the Seine and down towards the Eiffel tower, where on a whim I looked up the restaurant on the third floor of the tower and found there was a reservation free the next night, so I booked it. That night we walked along the Seine where there were seemingly never-ending parties going on, and stopped and had a drink on one of the many party boats that spend almost all of their time tied up by the banks. The next day we took a tour along the Seine on one of the Bateaux Mouche boats and saw all of downtown Paris including Notre Dame cathedral, which was fascinating. While I was at the conference, Becky went to the Louvre and saw as many of the antiquities there as she could in the limited time available.
We ate in a great little restaurant/bar down by the Seine where the owner loved practicing his English so much he read us the entire menu and described every item in detail. Then we did the same for a British man and his son who came in later 🙂 When we left a tip (which most people don’t do in Europe) they rang a giant bell at the bar and made us have a drink of Calvados. Speaking of food, the restaurant across the street from our hotel, the Venetian Star, had the most amazing croque monsieur and croque madam sandwiches (basically a ham-and-cheese sandwich fried in egg batter — the madam has a fried egg on top).
The next day we took the subway to Le Marais, a very funky neighbourhood that used to be the Jewish ghetto and then after that the gay ghetto. We toured some amazing shops and bars and the historic covered malls of the area, and then we made our way to Notre Dame, but the wait was hours long, so we went to a nearby cathedral called Saint Chapelle, which had the most incredible stained-glass windows, which had been painstakingly restored over a period of several years. That night we had dinner inside the Eiffel Tower, which was fantastic (and the tower itself is much bigger than I thought it was), and then we took the elevator up to the observation deck, which had a spectacular view out over Paris, which is well-named The City of Light. And then we did another Bateaux Mouche tour, this time to see the city at night, which was amazing.
Back at the lake, Wade and my nephew Scott and his friend reshingled the back cabin, which was sorely in need of it, and all it cost us was a few cases of beer 🙂 Pretty soon it was time for Thanksgiving and closing up the cottage, and the last kayak ride of the year. Went to Massey Hall and saw a fantastic charity concert for refugees that featured Ron Sexsmith, Steve Earle, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris, The Milk Carton Kids and Daniel Lanois. It’s incredible how good Robert Plant’s voice still sounds even though he is in his 70s. We made a visit to The Farm to see some fall colours and found some giant puffball mushrooms, and then it was time for Zoe’s graduation from high school — our last child is out of high school! That makes us really old I guess.
We made a Christmas trip to New York with our friends Marc and Kris to see some of the lights and dropped in to Eataly in the financial district and had some fantastic Lavazza espresso and gelato, saw Alexander Hamilton’s grave. I took some shots of New York’s amazing old police station, had lunch with Gawker Media founder Nick Denton — who talked about his plans to move on after the company went bankrupt due to a multi-million-dollar lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hogan. We saw the Oculus built on the site of the old World Trade Center, saw some of the awesome Christmas window displays and over-the-top decorations on Fifth Avenue — including a moving one with a soundtrack — and the Rockefeller tree and the giant ornaments and the Christmas market at Grand Central Terminal and toured the public library near Bryant Park, including my favourite work spot, the periodicals room. The upper reading room is a close second, with its beautifully painted ceiling mural of clouds.
And that’s about it for our 2016 — hope you and yours had a great one! See you next year.