Birthday Retrospective 41

Today is my 41st birthday, and I've been thinking about the last couple of years and how much has happened in my life. A year ago, I was in Québec (the city in the province), and a year before that I was in Waterloo, Ontario. Today, I am in Armidale, NSW, Australia. It's been quite a couple of years!

Being a post-doc is weird; this is something I say fairly often, probably a couple of times per week. I have been a PDF (post-doctoral fellow*) for about four years, and in that time I have done what seems like a pretty broad range of things at work. Besides the frequent moves - this is my fourth post-doc position, and more on that in a moment - I have taken turns working at particular skills that are typically important skills for university professors - and that is my career goal.

* Technically, I am a Fellow now, but my previous positions since my PhD have been "post-doctoral researcher"; the main difference is funding, in that a Fellow is supported by an award or funding from outside of the lab group or PI (primary investigator; a professor). Here at the University of New England, I have a contract and independent funding and my job title is officially a Post-Doctoral Fellow.

My first PDF, at the University of Waterloo, lasted about 2.5 years. In the final half year or so I started seriously looking for my next position, and I was contemplating relaxing my standards for advertised jobs I would apply for from strictly tenure-track to include interesting PDFs. The main busy period for such applications is the fall in Canada, but before I really got into a serious search - with a hard deadline for my position at U Waterloo of October 31, 2017 - I was offered a PDF with a professor I had met several times and already had the beginnings of a working relationship with. My U Waterloo PI was Dr. Maria Strack, and Dr. Line Rochefort at Université Laval had been one of Maria's PhD supervisors, about a decade earlier and they continue to work together. 

I moved to Québec at the end of September 2017, and in the personal chaos I lost track of world events; my first day of work at Laval was the day after Catalan held a referendum to separate from Spain - an event closely watched by many in Québec. My contract at Laval was short-term because Line was at the end of her main Discovery grant and had not yet secured funding for the next five-year period. She was applying for two other major grants in addition to renewing her Discovery, and needed a person to divert attention from her so she could focus on grant-writing ahead of deadlines in October and November. My job was largely to work with Line's students and others as the English-speaker: I was the only native Anglophone in a lab dominated by Québecois but with plenty of other nationalities and languages as well. I learned that I quite enjoy helping ESL scientists with the intricacies of technical writing in English.

The grants Line was applying for included funding for a PDF, and the unwritten agreement was that should any or all of the grants be successful, that position would be mine if I wanted it. The dates we would learn about the success or lack thereof of these grants were in late March, and my 7-month contract at Laval was set to end at the end of April. In late January, as I was struggling to make plans beyond that end-April horizon, other professors I had worked with forwarded a job ad to me, at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. 

Dr. Nathan Basiliko paid for me to visit Laurentian in late February - about a week after I first spoke with him and other professors at Laurentian - for a large meeting to bring together nearly everybody involved in a large collaborative grant they had been awarded. That was an interesting meeting, and at the end of the two days I agreed to move to Sudbury to work with Nathan. A big part of my decision was the 2-year contract on offer, as well as the opportunity to expand my expertise into different areas of Restoration Ecology.

Sudbury is a fantastic place, and I thoroughly enjoyed living and working there. After only a few months in Sudbury, I was made aware of an opportunity in Australia, to work with people I'd met when I visited Charlie in December, 2017. Dr. Romina Rader and Dr. Susan Wilson were willing to Nominate me for a UNE PDF, with the first application deadline in early July. There's a long story there, but the upshot is we were successful at the first stage, and I was invited to complete a full application with a 5-page proposal to replace the 1-page version in the first application, due in early September. We were successful again at this second stage, and a Skype interview was scheduled for mid-October; I was told I could expect to hear the decision in about a week.

Around 10 days after the interview, I was informed that UNE was offering me the position. This converted November and December into frantic preparations to move around the world. Charlie had joined me in Sudbury and we had to coordinate this massive undertaking while both of us continued to work - me at Laurentian, trying to wrap up what I could before leaving, and her with the lab work and data analysis stemming from her "summer" job in Sudbury. 

Somehow, we accomplished everything, and moved out of our Sudbury home and drove to Calgary just before Christmas, 2018. That is another story of its own. We were granted our Australian visas and booked our flights somewhere between Winnipeg and Regina, and flew without further drama on January 8th, and over the International Date Line on January 9th, consigning that day to the Time Vortex and landing on the 10th.

Australia has been excellent and wonderful so far, and promises to continue to be so. I baked myself a Birthday Cake today and both Charlie and I have been relaxing and taking it pretty easy all day. On Charlie's suggestion, my Sunday Drives - restarted after a long hiatus in Ontario and Alberta - have become "Sunderday" Drives, a term coined by a good friend of Charlie's in Sudbury. The Sunday Drives were never tightly linked to any particular day of the week, but the move to Saturdays (three such drives have been completed so far) flips the feelings of the two weekend days. Previously, Saturdays often became unpleasant errands-and-chores days, with long hours spent shopping for non-exciting, necessary things and little time to maintain our home with such tasks as laundry or general tidying-up. Now, Saturday mornings are given to shopping for furniture and other necessary things (shops, especially thrift stores, are open limited hours on Saturdays, often closing shortly after noon, and are largely closed entirely on Sundays), with our departure for more fun driving and sight-seeing happening after lunch. This makes Sunday a wide-open day where we can each decide to accomplish as much or as little as we like. Today, for example, I hung an Art on the wall, and baked the afore-mentioned cake. I'll make supper and maybe wash some dishes, otherwise the day is filled with far less useful tasks.

I've been trying to get into a habit of photo-editing, with some success, so here is a recent photo.

The End of (My) Summer

Tomorrow I will pick up my rental trailer, fill it (and my truck) with my abundant possessions, and drive East. This marks the final stage of my move to Ontario - started at the end of March, and I've been between homes (or simply homeless) since then. I measure this by the time elapsed since I last paid rent - unless I find an apartment for half-way through October, I will have avoided paying rent for 7 months by the time this move is complete.

A quick bit of googling (google-mapping?) leads to an estimate of 31 hours total driving time from Regina to Kitchener/Waterloo, taking either of two entirely-Canadian routes that diverge near Nipigon, Ontario. Highway 17 follows the north shore of Lake Superior and around Georgian Bay, while Highway 11 takes an inland route further north. I took 17 the last time I went that way - back in late March. This time I plan to take 11 because there are fewer elevation changes along the inland route. There are a few roads that connect 11 and 17 in their western parts, which will allow me to revisit this decision if, for example, weather conditions at Longlac are very poor. 

I received an email from U-Haul today informing me my reserved trailer would be guaranteed available at noon tomorrow, which is later than I'd like to pick it up; hopefully they'll let me have it tomorrow morning. Then I need to pack it and get moving. Kenora, Ontario is approximately 8 hours away, and I am fine with arriving at a hotel in that small city at some late hour. I am also fine with a lesser drive tomorrow, so I might end up merely somewhere east of Winnipeg, or even in that city. 

My planned stops - and plans are slippery fish that change and change again - are Kenora, Longlac, and North Bay. That places me within about 5 hours of K/W on Friday. I get a free month of storage with U-Haul, that I have already arranged for a drive-up locker at one of their facilities in Kitchener. Rather than struggle to move my possessions, that I have been apart from all summer anyway, into my friends' basement (up the stairs, through the doors, down the stairs) I can just dump the contents of the trailer and most of what's in the truck into this storage locker and then leave the empty trailer. 

If I don't make this schedule I will be disappointed because there are people in Ontario waiting to see me, and a birthday party and other festivities to attend this upcoming weekend, but it won't be the end of the world. Assuming no serious problems on the road, and I fully plan to take it easy and slow, I think I am in danger of losing at most a day, and if things go very well I could conceivably arrive in southern Ontario late on Thursday. Rather than put in a punishing 12-hour day followed by at least an hour to unload, I'm OK with paying for a hotel room in Barrie or wherever if I'm in very good shape as I pass North Bay.

I don't have a picture to go with this post, so here's a shot of the delicious saskatoon-berry pie and coffee I had at Ness Creek back in July.

The Longest Field Season I've Ever Heard Of

The title of this post is not strictly true, but I am at the end - or, perhaps merely near the end - of an extremely long field season. Yesterday two days ago I finished the last round of gas-flux measurements that I expect to do as part of this summer of field work; the fact that these measurements were made less than 50 hours after the official end of (astronomical) summer is no more important to the definition of "summer fieldwork" than the first measurements made in May.

As usual, I have been basically terrible at keeping this place up to date and generally maintaining contact with people. Here's a short description of my activities since March of this year.

End-March, 2015: I drove from Saskatoon, SK, to Kitchener, ON, to start my new job as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo, working with Dr. Maria Strack in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management. At the time, I did not know if I would be spending my entire summer outside of Ontario, or would be visiting field sites for days or weeks at a time but basing myself in Kitchener/Waterloo. 

April 1: In what has so far not turned out to be an April-Fool's prank, I started as a post-doc at U Waterloo. Among the first decisions to be made, among such tasks as acquiring keys and locating work spaces, was that I was to spend 4 months in Alberta. As such, there was no need for me to find my own apartment and I could save thousands of dollars in rent money.

May 6: I flew to Edmonton, AB, and then was delivered to the house in the tiny town of Seba Beach, AB. 

May 7: We - I'll describe my coworkers in a moment - got started on the project. Briefly, Dr. Strack has an ongoing series of experiments looking at the process of cutover peatland restoration. After draining, clearing, and harvesting a peatland (either a bog or a fen, depending on local hydrology), restoration of the peatland involves returning the ecosystem to something resembling the natural site that was there before. This is very complex, but one approach is to examine ecological function, such as the net movement of carbon into or out of the ecosystem. Immediately after harvest, an exposed field of decomposed peat is a strong exporter of carbon, in the form of both CO2 and CH4 as the microbes in the peat digest the organic matter. As plants re-establish themselves on the field, their photosynthesis and changes in water movement patterns eventually leads to a situation in which the field as a whole is a net sink for carbon, with growth and accumulation outweighing respiration and near-surface populations of methanotrophic bacteria consuming all or nearly all of the CH4 still produced in deeper layers.

Coworkers: At the beginning of the summer, I was working with Ali, recently graduated with a B.A. in Geography at U Waterloo; Stephanie, working a co-op term with us after her second year of her Geography B.A.; and Cristina, AKA Dr. Cristina Lazcano, post-doc / adjunct prof. in the Geography department at the University of Calgary. Stephanie went to Manitoba in late June to replace a worker who quit. In late July we (Ali, Cristina, and me) were joined at Seba Beach by Sabrina, who started her M.Sc. with Dr. Strack in September. We had a few other visitors, but most such visitors were at Seba Beach for their own projects, which may overlap with what we were doing but they were not there to help us directly.

June 1: Convocation at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK. Because I knew well in advance I needed to get myself from Seba Beach to Saskatoon at the end of May I decided to gamble on vehicle ownership. At some point in April, while I was in K/W, I came up with what I thought of as my "Summer Truck" idea, and that it would be mildly crazy and a gamble. It was, but in a very good way - I like to think I won that gamble. My truck, now named Tarrandus*, has been fantastically useful.

* My truck is a 1997 Ford Ranger XLT. The name Tarrandus comes from the scientific name for caribou / reindeer, Rangifer tarrandus.


Tarrandus, seen here parked in front of a shop near Charlie's and my former apartment in Saskatoon. I intend to paint the white canopy in black-and-white dazzle camoflage, and I thought this shop's zebra stripes served as a first look.

June 4-6: Canoe trip with Charlie. Charlie and I have established our own tradition of canoe trips on prairie rivers on (or near) the May Long Weekend. This year, because of my work schedule and the date of convocation, we decided to have this trip a few weeks after May-Long, in early June. We completed the trip we had started two years previously, travelling down the Qu'Appelle River from our rescue-pickup location to Buffalo Pound Lake.


Our tent, shortly after a "gully washer" - a small, intense storm typical of summer rainstorms on the prairies - had blasted down the valley and repainted the sky.

June 28-July 2: ICoN4 Meeting, Edmonton, AB. Four years ago I attended the second International Conference on Nitrification (and related processes) in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The third meeting was in Japan and I was not able to attend, but the fourth was in Edmonton and when that decision was made I was in Saskatoon and knew I'd probably be able to attend. Seba Beach is only about 80 km from the University of Alberta where the conference was held.


This photo of the pre-conference workshop attendees was "favourited" and re-tweeted when I uploaded it to Twitter, mainly by other attendees or their academic collaborators.

July: I travelled to Saskatoon three times in July, to spend time with Charlie and to pack up our apartment there and move some items to Regina. Charlie moved to Regina for August 1, but my stuff as well as her items we could move to Regina before August were placed in a friend's garage in Regina. My stuff is still there, Charlie has moved into a fine apartment.

Also in July, plans formed for me to spend some time in September at various field sites in Western Canada. My coworkers, including other members of Dr. Strack's lab working in other places across Canada, finished their field seasons in late August, variously returning to their homes around August 21 to August 25. I had no fixed dates to be in Ontario to restrict me, so when opportunities for early-autumn fieldwork were raised I quickly agreed.

August 10(ish): The Vegetation Survey at the Seba Beach sites started to take over my life. Early plans were to complete the Veg Survey in the last full week of work, approximately August 24-28, under the assumption this would constitute only four or five days of work. In reality, the Veg Survey grew into a monster that completely consumed all other tasks over three full weeks. We placed around 600 quadrats on a grid of transects covering about ½ of the total area of the Restored Site and all of the (much smaller) Unrestored Site. Then there were accessory tasks, like biomass collection and some side-projects involving the spread of Birch trees into the Unrestored Site.


I took this photo during a short break from laying transects, while I was near the western edge of the Restored Site. If pink or orange flagging tape is visible in this photo, those are quadrat positions on the transects.

August 15: I was invited to a wedding in Nisku, AB, just south of Edmonton. Charlie’s friend Moose was attending a cousin’s wedding, and needed a neutral party along to help avoid or diffuse any family-history based awkwardness. I love weddings – any excuse to party, and a wedding is a damn good excuse and opportunity for that – and August 15/16 was pretty much my last free weekend of the summer so of course I went. I stayed at Airways Country Inn – Nisku is adjacent to Edmonton International Airport – which is a hotel catering mainly to truck drivers, and attached to Peelerz, a strip club. I did not go in to Peelerz, but I did enjoy my complimentary beverage (Gin & Tonic, for me) at Drillers, the lounge / restaurant at the hotel. My gift to the couple was a tea set from the knick-knacks shop across the street from the house in Seba Beach. Tea sets, it turns out, are kind of a specialty of that shop.


My gift to the couple with the unpronounceable names. Think stereotypical German meeting stereotypical Ukrainian, then throw in a hopelessly monolingual Anglo like me.

August 21: Charlie arrived – in Red Deer, I drove down there to pick her up after a day in the field - to spend a lovely weekend with me at Seba Beach, then she was a tremendous help with the final parts of the Veg Survey and some of those side-projects that we’d put aside during the main Veg Survey work.

August 28: Very early in the morning, Charlie and I dropped off the other three people (Ali, Sabrina, and Scott, sent to us from McGill to help. So I was wrong about none of the visitors helping us, above) at Edmonton International Airport, and then spent the rest of the day and most of the weekend relaxing at Seba Beach. It really is a very nice place to spend time, at least while the weather is good in the summer.

August 30: Charlie took Tarrandus to Saskatoon to help her complete her move to Regina, and I drove to Fort McMurray with Kim, M.Sc. student in Maria’s lab. Kim had spent most of the summer in Ft. Mac, and there was an opportunity for her to collect some early-autumn data from her sites there; I went along because I like those opportunities. Also for various fieldwork general-safe-practice reasons and because it’s good for me to show my face at Suncor in Ft. Mac for reasons to do with where my post-doc funding comes from.

August 31-September 6: Kim and I braved the terrible, terrible September weather of Fort McMurray and got the work done. Once again, UPS was involved and managed to be utterly awful in every way – that’s a rant for another day, but the short version is: DO NOT USE UPS. Despite these difficulties we had a pretty good work week and I’m happy with the data and samples we pulled out of the various wetlands there.


This is a view of "Saline Fen", one of Kim's study sites. Photos from the main study site on Suncor's mine have to be approved by Suncor before I can show them to anyone else.

September 7-10: Another opportunity for early-autumn fieldwork; Cristina and I collected a final round of gas-flux data at Seba Beach, then packed up the equipment and supplies, cleaned the house, and drove to Calgary on September 11.

September 12-13: Weekend in Calgary. I spent some time with my friend Rick who I hadn’t seen in several years; good times were had in a dim basement with bad movies and violent video games, just like old times. A++ would click frantically under fluorescent lights again.

September 14: I took a Greyhound bus for the first time in my life, from Calgary to Regina. This represented a bottleneck in my movements, because baggage restrictions on an inter-city bus are similar to those on an airplane. My usual habit of just tossing everything into the back of the car or truck was not useful here. The trip itself was pretty uneventful, and simultaneously less boring and less exotic than perhaps I had been expecting.


This pigeon had found a perch among abundant anti-pigeon devices, and seemed entirely unconcerned by my presence as I waited for the bus to return to the Husky station. The passengers had been deposited at this Husky station for 30 minutes, not enough time for me to enjoy a meal at the restaurant, and I didn't want to spend my time with the other passengers in any case, most of whom were smoking outside of the convenience store.

September 15: After only a few hours with Charlie I drove from Regina to Brandon, MB, to stay with Dr. Pete Whittington of the Geography Department at Brandon University. He is involved in peatland restoration projects in Manitoba (as well as other places) in cooperation with Dr. Strack and Dr. Line Rochefort of Université Laval. Dr. Whittington loaned me his drone after a bit of practice flying; a drone is a fun toy and I want one. I’m not sure what I might *do* with one outside of work, but they still seem like tremendous fun.


I took this photo in Manitoba while I was assisting another researcher at a site. I deliberately treated it like I would a bird, just to practice my birding technique.

September 16: I left Dr. Whittington’s house early in the morning, and had breakfast at the Husky House restaurant beside Highway 1. That would be entirely unremarkable except for two things: there was a clearly mentally-ill older man at a table who spent the entire time I was there talking to the various voices in his head, and the food was not the best I’ve had. I generally like Husky House restaurants for breakfast, I can get a “traditional” breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns and unlimited coffee for a reasonable price (that would make an American, accustomed to IHOP and Waffle House, weep for the prices Canadians pay for such fare). It was still pretty good, just not as good I usually expect.

My plan had been to pick up Ali at Winnipeg International Airport around 11:00, but heavy traffic on the 401 meant she missed her flight from Pearson (Toronto). She made it to the check-in counter before the plane actually took off, but not through security and to the gate in time to board. Air Canada allows passengers in such a situation to take the next available flight for no additional charge, so I received a text from Ali just after breakfast describing this situation and giving me 3.5 more hours to do whatever I wanted. So I visited Spruce Woods Provincial Park, between Brandon and Winnipeg.


Spruce Woods is an excellent provincial park. I went to the sand dunes there, and took this photo from the top of the hill just north of the dunes where an observation platform has been built that allows some tremendous views. Marshs Lake (no apostrophe, and this is not the usual plural of "marsh") has a walking trail around it and if I'd had more time I certainly would have explored it.

I have spent the time since September 16 at the Moongate Bed & Breakfast, about halfway between the two tiny towns of Elma and Whitemouth in eastern Manitoba; we are not far from Whiteshell Provincial Park. This B&B is quite pleasant, with a full kitchen that makes our lives much easier (and cheaper) than relying on a hotel / restaurant combination. If you follow the link, you might see that Moongate advertises itself as a retreat from the pressures of the modern world, including such nuisances as cellphone reception and the internet. This digital isolation (they use the term “digital detox”) is a bit of an obstacle to some of our work here, and I am posting this from the boardroom at Sun Gro’s Elma plant.*

* That was my plan. I wrote most of this yesterday, and I had intended to return to Elma Plant in the late afternoon but was distracted by the availability of good beer at the local "country" store. I am posting this from the house patio at Moongate, where the owner's wi-fi leaks out.

Ali returned home on the 22^nd, and I finished the last few tasks of projects I am directly involved in here yesterday (23^rd) morning; now I am a field assistant for Marie-Claire. Marie-Claire is a kind of researcher / lab manager / general task-manager and student-wrangler working for Dr. Rochefort at Laval, and is here in Manitoba to supervise some new restoration efforts at Sun Gro’s operations. We have been spending a fair bit of time out at the field to be restored, discussing plans with a highly capable and very easy-to-work-with heavy equipment operator named Bruce. He can draw straight lines across the landscape with his dozer in a way that makes me and my wobbly transects look like a drunken moose leaking bright pink flagging tape.

I will be here until Marie-Claire’s work is complete, which mostly means until she is satisfied that Bruce is doing exactly what she wants him to do as he fills ditches, damns drains (i.e. big ditches), and constructs “bunds” out of raw peat. I had thought this might be early next week, but it is now looking like we will depart next Thursday or Friday, or about one week from today.

If I do leave eastern Manitoba on Friday, then my field season will have been 149 days long, or nearly three times my longest stay in the Arctic, the 53 nights I spent in a tent at Alexandra Fjord in 2009. Of course, in the High Arctic by mid-September there is not-melting-this-year snow on the ground and air temperatures are averaging zero or lower, while here in south-eastern Manitoba we still have many of the signals of summer, including the blackflies and mosquitoes that bit me earlier this afternoon (yesterday afternoon, see above asterix), and some signals of autumn, such as the hyper-aggressive wasps that did not appreciate my appreciation of their volleyball-sized nest in a short tree. The swelling in my hand has almost completely faded (it's gone completely now, though a faint itchy feeling remains).


The nest, with angry wasps patrolling the exterior.


A close-up look at the entrance and entrance guards. This is a heavily cropped version of a photo taken with my 105mm telephoto macro lens; I did not get close to the nest a second time!

Post-Doc: University of Waterloo

I have a new job: a post-doctoral position at the University of Waterloo, in Kitchener/Waterloo (K/W), Ontario. My first day on the job will be April Fool's day, so I will be departing Saskatoon on the morning of March 28. This will give me four full days to cover the approximately 3000 km to K/W, and as long as I don't slide off the road (again) I should be able to make that distance easily.


The last time I drove through northern Ontario in late winter / early spring, I had some traction difficulties.

I will be working in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, with Dr. Maria Strack. Her work has included considerable research into the greenhouse gas exchanges of wetlands, particularly peatlands that have been harvested and restored. Most wetlands are nitrogen-limited; the abundant plants and other organisms living there have adapted to scarce nitrogen supplies and as a result most wetlands are not thought of as strong sources of N₂O. N₂O is a powerful greenhouse gas, and while wetlands are strong sinks for CO₂ (because of vigorous photosynthesis) and sources of CH₄ (because of anaerobic, organic-matter-rich conditions below the surface), their contributions to N₂O emissions are not well known. My job will be to try to fill that knowledge gap by examining N-cycle processes such as nitrification and denitrification - both of which are potential sources of N₂O - in some Canadian peatlands.

I plan to move to K/W with as little in the way of possessions as I can. If I take no furniture (the desk I am currently writing this on can be dissassembled, and I might bring it) I have no need to rent a truck, thus saving potentially $1000 or more - when I moved from Guelph (effectively next door to K/W) the rented truck cost several hundred dollars and burned several hundred dollars more in gasoline. My car - formerly my parents' Chrysler 300M - isn't the most fuel-efficient vehicle in the world, but it gets much better mileage than a truck. Once I arrive, I'll need to find a place to live (friends in Kitchener have graciously offered to let me stay in a spare bedroom while I conduct this search) and presumably then buy some furniture. My bed, the single largest item I own that isn't self-propelled, is a little more than six years old. It's in fine shape, but when I bought it (when I first moved to Saskatoon) the salesmen informed me it "should last" about 10 years. Nothing else big enough to need a truck to move it is worth anywhere near that much money, so I should be able to buy new and new-to-me furniture in K/W for less than the cost of moving the items currently in Saskatoon.

The Chrysler 300M, named "Nikki", beside Buffalo Pound lake in southern Saskatchewan.

Charlie will be keeping the apartment in Saskatoon, so it makes sense to leave furniture here for her, anyway. We plan to live together again, after she completes a M.Sc. here* and we have a chance to look for new and exciting opportunities again.
My contract is for one year, with the possibility of extension for another two years; current (rough) plans are for a project that will last two years total. So, in early 2017, Charlie will be looking for a PhD position and I'll be applying for faculty positions - at least, such is the plan today.

* In Canadian university biology departments, M.Sc. degrees are expected to take about two years; mine took about three-and-a-half but I'm abnormally slow when it comes to higher education, apparently.

I'm looking forward to the new job, I'm happy to be moving on from the lab and work I've been doing here in Saskatoon, but I am sad to go, too, and I will miss living in the Paris of the Prairies. It will be strange to be back in southern Ontario, and so close to Guelph, but I have friends and family in the area and I fully expect to enjoy my time there.

Driving to Montreal

Tomorrow, at a time of day I normally try to pretend does not exist, I will leave my home in Saskatoon and begin my drive to Montreal. I plan to take three days to drive the approximately 3200 km, which may be a bit ambitious so I've given myself almost a full buffer day. I'm going to be at the icebreaker opening reception at 7:00pm on Friday in Montreal at the APECS pre-conference workshop; if I drive as long tomorrow and Wednesday as I hope to, I'll arrive in Montreal in the late afternoon or early evening of Thursday. If I get more tired than I expect or experience other delays, I can spend Thursday night somewhere a few hundred kilometres west of Montreal and have a leisurely drive into the city mid-day on Friday. I'll be staying with a friend of a friend on Rue St. Denis, which I have been told is exactly the part of town I should most want to be in to experience Montreal at its best.

But first, a series of long drives.

Day 1: Saskatoon to Kenora, ON. 1047 km according to Google. If things go extra-well, I might push it the extra 140 km to Dryden, where the Husky station is a truck stop with restaurant. I love Husky restaurants, especially for breakfast.

Day 2: Kenora, ON to Cochrane, ON, via Highway 11, 1200 km. I'm trying to stay north as much as possible, I have no reason to dive south towards Toronto and southern Ontario. Again, if things go very well, I'll try to push it to Kirkland Lake. Obviously this is more feasible if Day 1 makes it to Dryden.

Day 3: Cochrane, ON to Montreal, QC, via Quebec 117, 868 km. The shortest day of the three, because I want to arrive in Montreal at some polite time to meet the person I will be staying with. I'll be tired, but if I drove 1000 km on the third day I'd show up completely exhausted from the road, and make a poor first impression. Hence my desire to push longer on Day 1 and Day 2.

The whole trip eastwards, covering something close to 1/2 the width of the North American continent.

Going home will be a different route, I'm planning a Sunday Drive out of Montreal (there are ferries across the St. Laurence! One is about 80km downstream from Montreal!) and a weekend at the family cottage between Ottawa and Kingston in eastern Ontario. I'll be in less of a hurry going home, and I'd like to explore the south shore of Lake Superior by driving along the upper Michigan peninsula.

Sports Car Olymics 2011

The weekend of Canadian Thanksgiving, October 8 and 9 (the 10th was the holiday Monday) I drove my new-to-me BMW to Regina to participate in the 2011 Sports Car Olympics, hosted by the Queen City Motorsports Association (QCMA). I was a member of the QCMA for most of last year (2010), but I only took part in one-third of last year's SCO; this year I decided to do it all.

There were three events. First, on Saturday morning was the rallycross. The term has different meanings depending on where you are in the world; in Canada it means an autocross event on a soft surface of either dirt or gravel (rarely grass, which gets chewed up into dirt pretty quickly). Autocross events are timed runs through a course, usually laid out with bright orange traffic cones, one car at a time, with a handicap system to allow less-powerful (i.e. less expensive) cars to compete fairly with powerful sportscars.

Here's a shot taken by one of the organizers, Rob Howell, of me splashing through the wet part at the far corner. Hurray!


I took some pictures at each event, this is one of Elvis putting his new-to-him Saab 900 Turbo through its paces.

The second event was the Time-Speed-Distance (TSD) rally. TSD rallies are long-ish timed events held on public roads; the point isn't to go as fast as possible (that would be illegal in any case), rather it's a form of precision driving, in which navigation plays as much a role as driver skill during tricky cornering, and penalty points are gained by being too early through a checkpoint as much as too late. I greatly enjoyed last year's TSD, in which I navigated for a man who helped organize this year's events, rather than participate. I navigated for Elvis, in the Saab shown above, partly because I know Elvis is an excellent driver and partly because I didn't want to take my bimmer into that kind of driving environment before I've had a chance to re-tune my reflexes from front-wheel-drive to rear-wheel-drive (and approximately double the horsepower of my previous car).


Elvis' mighty 1989 Saab 900 Turbo, purchased only days before for $1000 - a hell of a deal, in my opinion, considering the total lack of rust anywhere on it. We had some troubles with it, mainly in the form of a malfunctioning cooling system, but it served us well. Plus, it just looks cool. Those rally lights were just something Elvis had kicking around in his garage, and didn't actually provide any useful additional light at night, though they were wired up fine.


In addition to a Swedish car, Elvis had inadvertently acquired a crystal ball, which I found under my seat during the rally.


Rally directions here cover up some of the crud on the windscreen, as we drive slowly along a path through a field.

The third and final event was an autocross, held at the 3 Flags Cart track near Lumsden, about 20 km north of Regina. QCMA often holds autocross events here, which is rather different from the parking lot we use in the Saskatoon Sports Car Club (SSCC); the cart track surface is less rough than a typical parking lot, and the track constrains the possible route choices severely compared to a big empty square.


A Porsche Boxter on the opening slalom at 3 Flags.

I drove down Friday night, for registration and because the rallycross started at 8:00am on Saturday. Thanksgiving weekend is a busy weekend for hotels, but I was able to book the last available room at the Sunrise Motel. I'd give it about 1.5 stars, which was perfectly adequate for my purposes.



I only booked one room at the Sunrise because I decided to gamble on somebody in Regina offering me a couch or spare bedroom. Such did not materialize, so I ended up spending more money at the Super 8 motel Saturday night. It was a lovely suite, the last anything at the hotel, though I confess I didn't use most of the facilities at all. Oh well, some gambles don't pay off.

Somehow, I'm not sure exactly how, yet, I won third place overall. I know I did poorly at the rallycross, probably not last but certainly not near the top, and I'm almost certain I came last in the autocross on Sunday. Elvis and I came in second place in the TSD rally, behind the first place winners by a slim margin. But, however it happened, I'm very pleased with my TSD Silver Medal and the additional free T-shirt I got for coming in third overall.




I would like to take this opportunity to point out that this very powerful Subaru rally car, driven by an experienced and skilled driver, was soundly defeated by Elvis and myself in a 22-year-old, $1000 Saab with "one-wheel-drive".

1996 BMW 328is

Today I bought a car. A 1996 BMW 328is, in dark purple (it's kind of an unusual colour), and with 250 000km. The previous owner is a professor at the University of Regina, and he told me he bought it from a Dean, who got it from his daughter. There are reciepts and expired vehicle registration documents going back to 2000, which includes the original invoice from Three Point Motors used vehicles department; I don't have any information on the original purchase, except the license-plate surrounds which state "Victoria BMW". As a strange coincidence, Pixie the Prelude, my previous car, has a Three Point Motors sticker on the trunk; both of my Saskatchewan cars were apparently sold at that dealership (they're mostly a Mercedes dealer these days, it seems) at some point.

I had been half-heartedly looking for a new-to-me car ever since I decided the rust issues on Pixie meant she wouldn't last another winter. Hondas from the 1980s don't have good defences against rampant metal oxidation, and once the rust got into the rear panels above the rear wheels it progressed rapidly. I was awarded a scholarship (that I'm still not 100% certain I'm allowed to talk about - it's from NSERC and they asked I not broadcast my award until after they've announced it through their news section) that started in May, so my budget increased from "it runs" to "hey there are some options at this price point!"; I upgraded my search to "whole-heartedly" a couple of weeks ago as the weather started to change. An older Bimmer really isn't THAT expensive, though maybe I should wait on such pronouncements until after my first significant maintenance. On that topic, the previous owner described some rather major recent work done on the car, including a new clutch - so at least I'm not likely to find myself stranded with a blown clutch on some half-abandoned gravel road, as happened shortly after I bought Pixie nearly two years ago.

This car does not yet have a name; I'm of the opinion names for cars emerge after some time has passed, and I await the appearance of the name.

As for Pixie, I have made arrangements for her to be an organ donor for a ministock racecar, a very similar 1988 Prelude that turns left, abundantly, at high speed. This is, I think, a better end for my faithful Pixie than to rot in a junkyard.

Enough text, have some pictures.

Sunday Drive 64: Afsluitdijk and IJsselmeer

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Before I travelled to the Netherlands, I talked to several people (in real life and on-line) about renting a car in the country and driving around. While everybody acknowledged the excellent train system and bicycling possibilities, I was also told that as long as I stay out of Amsterdam, driving in the Netherlands is a fine way to get around and really explore some places not easily reachable by other means (plus, I'm lazy and out of shape so long bicycle rides were a bit less appealing).

There were two examples of Big Engineering I wanted to see: the Afsluitdijk, which divided the former Zuiderzee into (part of) the Waddenzee and IJsselmeer, and the Delta Works, a series of dams, dijks, canals, and other structures that protect the province of Zeeland and important places further inland such as Rotterdam from flooding during large storms in the North Sea. In Dutch, -zee usually seems to indicate seawater (i.e., salty) and -meer a lake (i.e. freshwater). The IJsselmeer is a huge, shallow lake and since its creation nearly 80 years ago has had some areas walled off and pumped dry to create new land. Zeeland is a large and relatively sparsely populated province that would be almost unhabitable were it not for the protections built after a devastating flood in 1953.

I went with Andy to Schiphol airpot early Saturday morning - it's easier to check out of a hostel and ride the trams and trains with another person, even if both of you are carrying luggage. Andy headed for the departure lounges, but I turned left and entered the rental-car zone. Six car-rental companies operate counters at Schiphol, and because the Hertz desk had a small queue (and because their website had strongly implied much higher prices for walk-ins compared to on-line reservations, which I didn't want to do through the wi-fi at the hostel) I went to Europcar. I expect all of the companies had very similar prices and cars and at this point I'm not interested in being proven wrong - besides, no price quoted on a website ever carries over to real life in my experience. There's always *something*...

Anyways, arranging the rental was pretty straightforward. They gave me a choice of three cars in the second-smallest size class (smaller cars are much less comfortable, and cost trivially less to rent); I went with an Opel Corsa because we don't have Opel in North America. Of course, Opel is just a brand within General Motors, but there are different cars from even the large multinationals in Europe compared to North America (though the differences are less than I expected). As I expected from a rental, an Opel Corsa is more "driving appliance" than "proper car". It was boring, but massively reliable and thoroughly practical. They offered me a satellite-navigation system to rent for something like 12 Euros / day, but I'd brought along my Garmin GPS unit (named Serena) and downloaded their map of Europe before my trip. As an aside, despite the high cost of that map (about $100 through Garmin's website), it was very worth it. Not just for my driving around, but also getting lost in Amsterdam and other cities while walking.

It took me a little while to figure out the car, mainly the goofy windscreen-wiper controls and the very grabby clutch, but I was underway on Dutch motorways pretty quickly. Needing breakfast, I fumbled with Serena after I got off the motorway and found a small shopping plaza, I think in the town of Zwanenburg. At 9:00am, shops were just starting to open, and I helped a young man practice his English when I bought some ham-and-cheese pastries to enjoy just before the rain resumed. The pastries were very tasty, and the local crows watched me eat but politely waited until I was done before swooping in for the crumbs.

Once I got the car figured out and Serena fastened to the inside of the windshield, I poked around a bit and discovered I was pretty close to Zuid-Kennemerland National Park. The name "Parnassia", which is one of the park entrances, just sounded enchanting so I told Serena that's where I wanted to go, and I was off.


Getting out of Zwanenburg involved a short drive along the Zwanenburgdijk. Narrow roads like this one, with zero shoulder and frequent traffic-calming devices, are abundant in the Netherlands.


Once past the traffic and roundabouts of suburban Haarlem, I quickly reached the edge of the Park.

Zuid-Kennemerland National Park is built around the near-shore dune system, the ecology of grazing animals (semi-wild horses and cattle) on the scrubland vegetation in the dunes, and the broad beach at the North Sea. Parnassia is a small facility consisting of a restaurant with patio and a modest sandy walk down to the beach, with close access to trails leading through the dunes. The weather at the time of my visit was exactly what I was expecting when I saw on the map that I was close to the North Sea: rain, wind, grey. Perfect.










The structures on the horizon in the middle of this picture are on the breakwater protecting the entrance to the Noordzeecanal.


This is a very tight crop of a picture I took looking straight out to sea from Parnassia. The offshore windmill farm I saw from the airplane is just visible here, along with what I think is a tender ship.


The gulls (Lesser Black-Backed Gulls, Larus fuscus, I think) seem to like weather like this even more than I do.





After my wanderings near Parnassia, I tried to pay for parking at the automatic booth. It did not accept coins, nor any card I happen to possess. In my fumbling to get the machine to return my ticket so I could pay at the exit gate, I accidentally called the attendant. He was able to sort me out, and take my coins when I got to the exit.

My goal was neither bracing North Sea weather nor tasty pastries, so I set Serena towards the town closest to the Afsluitdijk on the south side, Den Oever, and returned to the Dutch motorways. Normally on my Sunday Drives I just leave my GPS on wanderings mode, showing the map and my position & velocity but not giving directions to anywhere in particular. In the Netherlands, I mostly chose destinations and had Serena give me directions, which was very useful both for getting to interesting places like National Parks, and for freeing me from navigation decisions when passing through small towns with many bicycles, traffic lights, and pedestrians to watch out for.

I got off of the motorway as I approached the dijk (the A7 runs right over the Afsluitdijk) and found a quiet side road near the dijk that protects Den Oever and the adjacent village of Ooserland from storm surges coming through the Waddenzee.


The N242 is a smaller road than the A7; I think the N-series are comparable to most 2-digit highways in Canada, while the A series are freeways; I refer to the A roads as motorways following the British convention for talking about big highways without stoplights (apparently I am alone in this habit).


I think this illustrates the difference: this is the A7, which is divided highway with a central grassy median.



My car for a few days: an Opel Corsa, in dull-as-dishwater dark silver. Still, it handled reasonably well, was comfortable, and never failed me.


Looking west along the shore of the Waddenzee


Playing with depth of field.

After my little diversion at the Waddenzee, it was time for the main event: the Afsluidijk. Really, it's not too visually interesting, as it's a straight dijk that runs for 32 kilometres and is as close to perfectly level as any human-made structure. Fortunately, there's a monument and some other facilities near the middle.


A view of the Afsluitdijk and statue of Cornelis Lely, the primary architect of the dijk.


The freshwater-side of the Afsluitdijk, showing the top layer of stones applied to the dijk as it was constructed. Every one of those stones was fitted by hand, though they were transported to the site by machinery.


Looking northeast from the overpass. It really is a rather boring bit of scenery, but its history makes up for it (in my opinion).

After going full-tourist on the Afsluitdijk, I continued across. I wanted to get off the A7 as quickly as possible, but I made a few wrong turns and missed exits before I could make my way back to the shore of the IJsselmeer.


A farm in Friesland. Lots of Dutch farms look like this, from what I saw. The Netherlands has some of the world's most efficient and productive agriculture, according to some sources.


Wandering around, generally heading towards the water, I eventually found myself on the road that runs along the base of the dijk that separates Friesland from the IJsselmeer. Unlike most of the other dijks I drove along in the Netherlands, I could not find any place open to the public to climb over and see the water.


Many of the churches I saw were not located within a town or village, and instead were surrounded by agricultural lands.

Having satisfied myself with the Friesland shoreline area, I perused my maps and set my GPS for Weerribben-Wieden National Park. This took me out of Friesland and into the province of Overijssel, but for atmosphere's sake I played with the car's radio until I found a station that might be broadcasting in Frisian. This is the local language, which is supposedly quite distinct from Dutch; I have a tin ear or something because I couldn't really tell the difference.


The Dutch are masters of bridge-building; every possible design appears in some form, somewhere in the country. I quite like this wooden structure, one of a pair, that crosses the A7 near Sneek.


I accessed the park at its north end, through the town of Ossenzijl. Dutch roads always seem to provide just enough time to adjust and mentally switch modes from motorway driving (pay attention to the cars, drive faster than 100km/h) to town-and-country driving (pay attention to the bikes and pedestrians, keep it under 50).

I'll talk more about the park in a future post about the wonderful national parks of the Netherlands that I visited. I only spent about 20 or 30 minutes at Weerribben-Wieden, mostly because I wanted to press on with my big drive - it's a beautiful area, and I'd be happy to spend several days there.

Looking at my maps and my GPS, I decided I had spent too much time on really big roads that don't show much of the country, and I discovered a nearby road that runs along the top, rather than on one side, of a dijk with the badass name of "Hammerdijk". Of course I had to drive it. It turns out this road/dijk is approximately the border between the provinces of Overijssel and Flevoland.


Driving along the top of the Hammerdijk.


Another presumably-high-efficiency Dutch farm, just over the border in Flevoland.


I don't know what was going on here with this little stone hut and the freakin' cannon on the dijk, I suppose I should have stopped. Farmers displaying their stuff prominently near roads seems to be fairly universal though, so perhaps instead of a plow or an old combine, this farmer has a Napoleonic (?) bit of fortifications. The signpost indicates two roads that meet on the Hammerdijk, Kerkbuurt and Blokzijlerdijk. The name of the road on the top of the dijk apparently changes along its length, perhaps the beligerence indicated by the cannon had something to do with this?


As I think I mentioned previously, many roads are narrow enough that even small cars must move into the bicycle lane when encountering oncoming traffic. Here on top of the presumably-centuries-old Hammerdijk, such narrowness at least makes sense.

Having satisfied myself with some dijk-driving, I set course for Almere. The province of Flevoland, which contains Almere, is largely composed of large polders constructed after the IJsselmeer was created. My Lonely Planet guide describes the province as:

"Flevoland, the Netherlands' 12th and youngest province, is a masterpiece of Dutch hydroengineering. In the early 1920s an ambitious scheme went ahead to reclaim more than 1400 sq km of land - an idea mooted as far back as the 17th century. The completion of the Afsluitdijk...paved the way for the creation of Flevoland."

Then the book goes on to describe Flevoland's cities as "grindingly dull places, laid out in unrelieved grid patterns." and doesn't mention Almere, a city of nearly 200 000 people, at all.


The shore of the IJsselmeer is lined in several places with large arrays of windmills.

I arrived in Almere, travelling mostly on high-speed, bordered motorways (borders of trees block out much of the road noise from surrounding areas, but conceal those areas from view from the motorway), at around dinnertime. Many businesses in the Netherlands close earlier than I'm used to, such that approximately nothing was open by the time I found a parking meter in downtown Almere. Some sort of festival or event was just packing up in one of the main squares, and the local McDonald's was full of children. Even here, so far from the usual tourist areas, the employees understood my English (smiling and waiting for the machine to show me numbers makes things easier).

I ate at McDonald's, rather than looking for something more "authentically Dutch", in reaction to my Lonely Planet guide. If I'm going to be in a cultural wasteland, I might as well dive fully into this dull grey nothingness. Having said that, I have no problem with McDonald's or their food; you get what you expect, at least. Plus, I was at the edge of a large mall in a concrete jungle built from recently-drained seabed within the past few decades. Throw some grime on everything and add a few flying cars and it would be a great stand-in for Blade Runner.

My Lonely Planet guide was more-or-less correct about most things, even if it sometimes takes a condescending tone, so I relied on it again and chose a bed-and-breakfast in Amersfoort as my first choice for the evening. I didn't want to drive in any big cities (parking is death), but I put together a vague plan in my head to try for Amersfoort first, then look for a motel or something in Utrecht if accomodations were very busy.

Serena was able to locate not only the B&B in its four-centuries-old building, but also the best way to enter the old town center of Amersfoort. The B&B itself was not very well marked, not with big signs or other clear indications that I was naively expecting for a place that charges money to sleep there. I found a big black door that seemed unlikely to be for a simple residence, and I knocked. I was let in, and at the desk made the happy discovery that they were far from full even on this lovely weekend, and their prices were quite reasonable - about 70 Euros for my own room with a shared bathroom (shared with nobody else - they were much less than 1/2 full) and a place to park my car down the street.

Having woken up very early after a noisy night of limited sleep, I was more tired than I expected when I got myself settled into my room, and I crashed on the very comfortable bed at some embarassingly early hour. The evening light was lovely, but I couldn't pull myself together enough to explore the town. Instead I resolved to spend as much time the next day here before moving on with my explorations.