Guild Trip - Part 2: People Doing Things™

You can skip this post if you're not part of the guild, as it will only contain photos of people you don't know doing things that you don't care about.

Rampduck, Leoroxx  and Rundvelt enjoying a few quiet beers and a bit of religious or political debate on the verandah.  (I don't actually know what they were talking about at this exact time, but I am fairly confident in my assertion, based on the discussions I heard throughout the week.)  That bottle of Jack Daniels on the table didn't last long, either.

The frenetic pace of life on the ranch was too much for poor young Leo.  How he slept through the noisy board game rules arguments is beyond me.  In his defense, I think most of the attendees spent at least part of each day sleeping, before drinking and playing Rock Band late into the evening.

Some guildies decided to take advantage of some of the beautiful weather to play a spot of croquet.  From memory, I heard that the game was still going on 4 hours later - Wii Croquet really doesn't prepare you for the real thing guys!

Dom shows off perfect croquet form.  You can tell that he's serious, because he even put his beer down.

Shtanky and Kaihlann throw some horseshoes.  Reigning Canadian Champion Stephen (who won the only game he has ever played on beginner's luck 2 months ago) chose to remain undefeated by hiding whenever horseshoes was mentioned.  Still undefeated!

Rampduck's expression suggests that he was trying to do some work before Rundvelt and Stuie arrived to debate auction house strategies.  Good work guys - bringing work on a guild vacation is a no-no.

The top level of the gym was mostly empty except for a giant projector screen, which we promptly turned into a huge concert hall for the purposes of playing copious amounts of Rock Band.  The setup allowed for 2 vocalists (lead and backup), two guitars (lead and bass) and a drummer.  With over 700 songs to choose from, we seriously rocked out.

Pasiphae wowed us all with her Queen, AC/DC and Black Sabbath vocal talents.  Also, she sounds exactly like GLaDOS.

Khazak takes on the drums - not pictured, the giant jar (as in, pasta sauce-style jar) of alcohol that he walked around with the entire time.  I still don't know why a cup wasn't sufficient.

Moozipan (the owner of the Rock Band ensemble) shows off his impressive vocal talents.  A-Ha's Take On Me seemed to be the crowd favourite, although no one quite knows how he hit those high notes.

The setup, from the performers' viewpoint.  The railing was in a rather inconvenient place for the drummer, but otherwise it was the most awesome Rock Band setup imaginable.

Peeps hanging around in the kitchen waiting for breakfast.  I am not sure what is up with Emoras in this photo - perhaps a few too many drinks the night before.

Prior to this was Part 1, which covered the venue and surrounds, and over the next few days I'll put up Part 3 and Part 4, which cover Stephen and my sidetrips in the local area.  

Guild Trip - Part 1: The Venue

Since moving to Canada, we've joined a new guild (group of people) in World of Warcraft, many of whom are based in Toronto.  This has been brilliant and we have met lots of awesome friends this way.  This guild has an awesome organisational team, who found and rented an entire ranch in southern Indiana for 19 guild members from all over the USA and Canada to hang out in for a week.

The Toronto crowd included 6 cars, so we headed down in a big convoy for the 13 hour drive.

We knew we were in America, pretty quickly.

4 of the cars in front of us.  The bikes on the roof saved us all at multiple points when we got lost and couldn't see the others - 6 car convoys are pretty tough to maintain.  In true Canadian style, our guildmates drove bare metres apart, and very rarely less than 15kph over the speed limit - Canadian driving is slightly terrifying to me :)  Apparently there isn't a whole lot of speed enforcement - despite driving the whole way well above the speed limit, no one was fined or ticketed and the police we saw didn't even look interested in the people driving much faster than we were.

Nervous meetings - the Toronto-based people all knew each other, but some of the other guildies from the USA hadn't met others before in person (although we've spoken to them and done things together in-game for months).  Amusingly, people are much the same online as offline, and it didn't take long to adjust to the voices coming from that person rather than their avatar representation.

Cars parked outside the ranch.  The ranch was huge, and could have easily slept many more than the 19 people we had.  It had the main building with communal areas, an industrial kitchen, a gym, and some sleeping space, plus another two smaller buildings with additional sleeping space.  We stayed in the smallest building, which was a couple of minutes walk away from the bigger buildings - this came in very handy being as we are old and boring (despite being a similar age to most other guildies) and like to sleep for 10 hours a night.

The other sleeping building, colloquially the couples' building.  I heard rumors that the wooden construction was designed in such a way as to make the entire house creak and groan loudly any time anyone moved - not quite the romantic retreat after all :P

Part of the communal space - couches for reading or chatting, tables for gaming, and a giant bar.  The couches are also facing a big tv, which saw some Gamecube use.  

 Being a group of nerds, there was a lot of board gaming happening - the pool table was quickly converted into an epic board game table, and many debates over the rules were heard day and night.  Sadly for me, I only got to play ONE game of Ticket to Ride.  Woe.

The ranch also contained vineyards, 9 holes of golf, fields of soy beans, and supposedly some elk, although we didn't see (or taste) those.  The weather was fairly nice - 30-32 degrees most days and probably around 60% humidity.  Apparently it was a bit too warm for our Canadian friends, because most people spent most of their time in the air conditioned main building (which was so cold that I had to wear a jumper).

Being a ranch, there was plenty of kitschy decor around.

To be continued in Part 2 (imaginatively labelled "People Doing Things"), and Part 3 and Part 4 which cover Stephen and my sidetrips in the local area.

A Weekend in Algonquin

While Stephen's family was visiting, we went with them to Algonquin to visit some friends of theirs at their cottage.  These friends had a fantastic array of toys - quad bikes, jetskis, paddleboats, kayaks... all sorts of things.  Jax's boarding kennel was full for the long weekend, so he came with us, and he had a fantastic time.  He was off-leash nearly the whole time, and stayed really close to us, which was good to see.

After Jax's first canoeing expedition a month ago, he seems to have decided that boats are awesome, because this trip, he was jumping in boats all over the place without being asked.

In a canoe with Stephen's Dad...

He doesn't seem too worried about potentially falling into the water, which is surprising considering how much he hates swimming.

In the canoe with us....

On a paddleboat with us.  Any boat you got on, he tried to join you - even the jetski.  He actually went for a jetski ride with Stephen.

It's hard work being a dog.  Apparently the water was coming in and wetting his paws, so he decided that this chair was a better plan to hang out.

 Stephen and Jax enjoyed the opportunity to run around off-leash.

Well.... Stephen did, anyway.

We took the quad bikes (which they call "ATVs") and went to pick some wild raspberries for lunch.  Unfortunately, the whole of Algonquin is home to billions of insects - flies, mosquitoes, deer flies, horse flies... and they all bite.  We ended up with a huge trail of them biting us while we were driving the bikes, which wasn't that fun - neither was the next day when we woke up covered in itchy insect bites.  Ouch.

I thought that driving faster might stop the insects from following us - we went back at what I thought was around 35kph... Stephen (who was riding pillion) told me when we got back that it was actually 35mph, so 55kph.  Apparently that was a bit fast for him.  I had fun anyway ;)

It was a really fun weekend, and we were sad to head back to the big city.

Catching up

I've been a bit lax lately with posting - we've been doing plenty of things, but I usually only take 1 or 2 photos which never seems like enough for a blog post.  So here's a bit about what we've been up to.

Summer is well and truly here - it's been hot and humid and muggy and generally pretty uncomfortable.  I can't wait for autumn - apparently that's the best time of year.  Summer, however, is fun for a few reasons:

Here's us playing Ticket to Ride in the Toronto Islands with our friend Garry.  Jax was chilling out under the table enjoying the sun.  (I won, by the way.)

We need to make sure Jax doesn't get sunburned...

 Summer is also baseball season, so we've headed out twice now to watch the local Toronto Blue Jays.  Baseball is actually a lot of fun to watch - there are a lot of crowd pleasing activities including scantily-clad women dancing and throwing Jays t-shirts into the crowd, plus the 7th inning rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" which is played every match.  It's pretty fun.

Our friend Adeline came from New York for the weekend, so I am going to shamelessly utilise her hot dog photo being as it's much better than mine :)  At the baseball, you get the biggest hot dogs evar.

A carving on a tree in High Park.  (Also Adeline's photo - it never turns out right on my phone camera!)

Stephen's Dad and his partner Anne visited from Australia, on their way to a 3 month drive around eastern Canada and the US.  They bought a car - more of a minivan really, so that they can sleep in the back of it.  Amazingly, Canadian insurance companies are absolute jerks - they ignore the 12 years of driving experience that we have in Australia, and will only accept us as having been licensed since we traded in our Aussie licenses for Canadian ones - so because they think we've only been driving for 7 months and have never held insurance, insuring one car costs $5,000 a year.  Ouch.  

New cuisines!

One really cool part of living in Toronto is discovering new foods that we didn't really get in Australia.  Here are some of our new faves:

Ethiopian food is kind of strange - it looks like various colors of mush, and comes with a cold flatbread called "injera", which has a spongy texture.  You eat it by tearing pieces off the bread, and using it to pick up the mush.  It takes a bit of getting used to but it's pretty tasty - although I am generally wishing that I had some crackers and a fork after about 5 minutes.

Roti is a West Indies food, which I've learned since I arrived here covers Jamaica and some other places nearby.  It is like a wrap, with things inside - chicken or chickpeas or goat, with potatoes in a curry sauce.  This is probably my favourite new food here - and makes up for the lack of decent Thai food.












Poutine!  We had some visitors recently who didn't seem really keen on the idea of poutine - this is totally unacceptable!  It is mandatory from now on that all visitors to our house try poutine (the national food of Canada).  :)

Canada Day Cottaging Part 2

With all of those lakes sitting around, we figured that we should make some use of the available nautical equipment, so we borrowed a canoe and went for a paddle on the lake.  Jax hates the water, but he got into the canoe with a bit of coaxing, and he seemed to be ok after a bit.  

Captain Jax, king of the lake!

We tried to get Jax to swim, but he wasn't really having much fun.  He would sooner be in the boat than the lake, methinks.  The lakes were actually pretty good for swimming - clear and cool but not too cold.

Canoeing is hard work.

We took a drive up to Algonquin Provincial Park, which is a protected park full of moose, beavers, and other native animals.  Amusingly, the side of the highway is full of dead porcupines - not quite kangaroos, but close enough.  We looked for moose which were supposed to be hanging out by the side of the road, but we didn't see any.

The park was beautiful - everything was so green, it was hard to imagine that it was all covered in snow 5 months ago.   Dogs are allowed in provincial parks too, so it was nice for Jax to have a good walk somewhere new.  He was rather interested in the beaver-eaten tree stumps, but we didn't see any beavers.  Apparently in summer they eat water-lilies, so they stay in their ponds - they only need to leave the safety of the pond in autumn (braving the prowling wolves).

This is a beaver lodge - these were dotted around little flat lakes everywhere throughout the park.  The beavers have created all of the lakes with their damming activities, creating the ecosystem where all sorts of creatures (like moose) can live.

Here's a beaver dam - it's hard to see, but they've dammed the entire river on the right, causing the lake on the right.  The water on the left is a trickle, so the plants have grown over it.

The whole park was bright green - in fact everywhere we drove was picturesque green trees and blue lakes.  You can even see a beaver lodge in the lake here.

All in all it was a fantastic first Canada Day for us, and for Jax too.  Hopefully we can get out into the lake country again sometime and find those elusive moose!

Canada Day Cottaging Part 1

Happy Canada Day everyone!  (Yes, that's a Tim Hortons Canada Day donut.)

For our first Canada Day, we decided to do as the locals do, so we rented a cottage for the weekend about 2.5 hours north and drove up into lake country.

Before I moved to Canada, I knew they had big lakes, but what I didn't get is that there are a lot of small lakes too, and I mean a lot.

Every one of those is a lake suitable for swimming, canoeing, maybe fishing.  So the enterprising Canadians build cottages around the lakes, and retreat to them over summer.

A lot of them look like this:

They have their own dock, and sometimes a tiny piece of sand, and usually an outdoor entertaining space of some type with some outdoor chairs and whatnot, and a BBQ.  The green covered area you see there is a mosquito-netted hut, because the entire area is home to the biggest and most bloodthirsty population of mosquitoes I have ever encountered.

So here was our Canada Day - having BBQs on the world's tiniest BBQ, and chilling out.  Here's Stephen and Jax cooking the BBQ.  It's about 8pm in this photo - we get a lot of daylight at the moment.

Steaks, potatoes and sausages!  They don't really seem to have the same type of sausages here as in Australia (or if they do, we can't find them) - they're all crazy smoked sausages instead.  Not so tasty.  BBQ baked potatoes are nice though.

Jax was getting into the Canada Day spirit :)