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Things to do in Canada in the summer.
The American Crystallographic Association have their annual conference in Toronto 25-30 July; Worldcon is 6-10 August; flights are cheaper at weekends, Canada is a nice country and my boss is generous with holiday allowance, so I'll be flying to Toronto on 24 July and flying back from Montreal on 15 August.
Which gives me most of two weeks at liberty in Canada. Inspired by Stan Rogers, I was planning after Worldcon to get on a train and head to Halifax, rent a bicycle and spend a few days cycling along bits of the Nova Scotian coast before heading back to Montreal airport; is this sensible, or are the small roads of Nova Scotia built (like the small roads of eastern coastal Norfolk) carefully out of sight of anything scenic, and used only by bears and badly-driven eighty-ton coal trucks ?
I assume I can amuse myself happily for a week in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and intermediate parts, travelling on trains and sleeping in youth hostels; what should I be sure not to miss in that region? I had a short but intense trip to Toronto a few years back which took in Niagara Falls, Casa Loma and such parts of the Royal Ontario Museum as weren't being rebuilt; I've spent some time in Montreal but only in the deep mid-winter.
Also, are there likely to be useful things I can do if I turn up at the Worldcon venue a day or so early?
Which gives me most of two weeks at liberty in Canada. Inspired by Stan Rogers, I was planning after Worldcon to get on a train and head to Halifax, rent a bicycle and spend a few days cycling along bits of the Nova Scotian coast before heading back to Montreal airport; is this sensible, or are the small roads of Nova Scotia built (like the small roads of eastern coastal Norfolk) carefully out of sight of anything scenic, and used only by bears and badly-driven eighty-ton coal trucks ?
I assume I can amuse myself happily for a week in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and intermediate parts, travelling on trains and sleeping in youth hostels; what should I be sure not to miss in that region? I had a short but intense trip to Toronto a few years back which took in Niagara Falls, Casa Loma and such parts of the Royal Ontario Museum as weren't being rebuilt; I've spent some time in Montreal but only in the deep mid-winter.
Also, are there likely to be useful things I can do if I turn up at the Worldcon venue a day or so early?
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(I must confess that Montreal is the far more fun of the two cities, though. Wistful sigh.)
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I think there are bound to be useful con-prep things to do here if you're here a day or two early.
Between here and TO there's Kingston, which is a very nice little town with many War of 1812 relics and a nice lake.
I haven't been to Halifax and don't know anything about bikes. You can get to Halidax on trains from here. If you need to stay here random days between trains that's fine. We now have guest rooms, though around worldcon I can't promise that you'd get one to yourself.
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The trains to Halifax look as if they pass through many miles of the kind of bleak you don't get in Europe, which might be fun, but they do seem to take twenty-one hours to go eight hundred miles, and I don't know if twenty-one hours of bleak is still fun, particularly since I get two and a half days in Halifax out of forty-two hours on the train. So maybe Halifax is not for me. I was thinking of heading to the Francophone north at Lac Saint-Jean, but there are only three trains a week at inconvenient times. I suppose Montreal is probably a fine place to relax calmly for several days, but that's starting to be a long time to be under your feet; perhaps Ottawa.