Fresh From Kingston

Chilling out on the bed in your hotel room watching television, while wearing your own pajamas, is sometimes the best part of a vacation.
— Laura Marano

Isn’t it amazing how much stuff we get done the day before vacation?
— Zig Ziglar

I need a six month vacation, twice a year.
— Unknown

Fall means Writersfest, so Thursday morning I loaded the car with my pre-packed suitcase and writing bag, and drove to Kingston where I stayed for the next four days and three nights. Traffic wasn’t bad, and I actually made it in time for my first workshop – first time that’s happened.

The last workshop on Thursday was canceled, so I decided to indulge in a little shopping. I splurged on a moonstone pendant for myself, something I’ve always wanted. It was a little pricy, but not as pricy as the birthday present I got for the daughter. I picked up a belated birthday present for the son-in-law too, and a couple of small things for Christmas.

After dinner I was organizing my things and realized I’d forgotten my diabetic medication. A quick call to the hubby confirmed that my divided pill box was sitting on the kitchen counter. So we figured the quickest, and easiest way to fix this was to meet at the MacDonalds in the Belleville Walmart – the halfway point between Cobourg and Kingston.

By this time it was dark out, and I don’t see well in the dark. Add to that the number of one-way streets, and streets without signage in Kingston, and I ended up hopelessly lost. I did make it back to the highway eventually, but I was 45 minutes late getting to Belleville. But I met my husband, who not only gave me my drugs, but to make me feel better included the new Lynsay Sands book I’d received in the mail that day.

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night – I think my mind was just too wound up. There was this unit in one corner of the room that was really noisy, and I ended up unplugging it.

And of course I had to have the balcony door open, so there were new sounds to get used to – cars, the water lapping on the shore (that sounded like plastic bags being crumpled), and a noise like an X-wing fighter from Star Wars that was produced by cars going over this green thing:

Here’s a view of the sunrise from my balcony, or at least as much of it as I could see:

And Friday night was a full moon. This picture was taken from the waterfront beside the hotel:

And this is what happens when you accidentally take a picture while moving:

I attended some very interesting workshops, which I’ll be talking about on my writing blog. One thing I will say about the Holiday Inn, they treated us well. This was waiting for us at every workshop, along with coffee, tea, and water. It made it hard to be a diabetic.

Other than shopping (which I did WAY too much of), I didn’t do much site-seeing. The workshops took up most of my days, and Thursday evening I was driving to Belleville, Friday evening I was pretty tired, and Saturday night I was getting my stuff ready to go home the next day.

I enjoyed my time away, and even re-connected with a couple of people I’d met at previous Writersfests.

I can’t wait until the next one!

Medius Monday

medius ~ the middle finger

I don’t know why I always think that I have more time to do things than I actually do, but it’s a sad fact of my life and I’m just going to have to learn to deal with it. Either that or budget my time better. ;-)

Among other things I didn’t get done last week, I didn’t get my blog page done that was going to be dedicated to my trip to New Brunswick. But as I scrolled through the pictures on my phone I realized that it probably wasn’t worth the effort. While my pictures were okay, they’re not exactly cutting edge. So I downloaded just a few of them to give you the highlights of my trip.

Here’s my first view of New Brunswick, as taken from the plane window as we began our descent into Moncton:

My sister met me at the Moncton airport, which was very small compared to Pearson in Toronto. We had lunch at Tim Horton’s, made a quick trip to Costco, and then met the daughter at the Saint John airport. I wish I’d taken pictures of the two airports because if Moncton was small, then Saint John was tiny. The daughter’s plane was pretty tiny too, like Air Canada’s version of a circus clown car – all these people kept coming out of it and you wondered where they all sat.

The next day my sister took us to the Irvine Nature Park on the Bay of Funday (okay, pretty much everything in New Brunswick is on the Bay of Funday). First we have the beach we followed along the shoreline where we found many interesting rocks:

That green hump of land in the distance is where we started out. And here’s a picture of my sister and I that the daughter took for me:

This is a rare phenomena folks, as neither of us particularly care to have our pictures taken, although I think she cares less for it than me. ;-) After traipsing up and down the beach collecting rocks we went to the top of that green part in the distance, had a picnic lunch, and then hiked along one of the nature trails through the woods up there. It was a LOT of fun!

The next day we did a bunch of touristy stuff. We went to the Reversing Rapids (that I did not get a good picture of) where I bought a stupidly expensive mug in their gift shop, then walked up and down the hills of Saint John, ending up at the Market Square where the Saint John Library was, and the museum. My sister ran into a friend at the museum who got us free passes, which was really cool.

Even cooler was discovering a painting of a ship that had been donated by my Aunt Kay.

The ship’s name was The Vocalist, built in 1856 by John Fisher, who commissioned the painting. Unfortunately it floundered in 1861. After the museum we stopped for lunch in an Irish pub (that’s the daughter and her lunch):

We went to a different indoor market (there seemed to be a lot of them in Saint John), and walked through a couple of the parks in the middle of the city, one of which contained an old cemetery:

It was another fun filled day, despite the fact it was really, really windy and a little on the cool side. Unfortunately, we had to leave the next day, but on our way to the Moncton airport we stopped long enough to watch the tidal bore:

You might need to click on the picture to make it bigger, but that wave you see is the tide coming in, up the river. It was kind of fascinating to watch the water rising, not quite to the top of the banks but then we didn’t have time to stay for the whole thing.

As most vacations tend to be, it was way too short. I’d go again in a heartbeat, but not without a proper camera.

And a sweater. ;-)