Favourite 2014 travel photos. Boston, MA. July 2014.
Nashville craft beer
Every North American city I’ve been to over the past few years has a vibrant and growing craft beer scene. As part my pre-trip planning, I look for a craft beer bar or two and create a list of beers I hope to try when visiting a city. For this recent trip to Nashville, a small craft beer bar in the Gulch neighbourhood, Hops + Crafts, came very highly recommended.
Early afternoon on my last day in the city, after filling up on a wonderful pulled pork sandwich from the Peg Leg Porker just around the corner, I arrived at Hops + Crafts just as it was opening. Not sure if it’s a good or bad sign when you’re the first person in the bar for the day. But when you catch a look at a set of taps like this, any guilt is gone. After all, this was a small sliver of vacation time for me…
Southern eating, Nashville style
With limited time to explore Nashville on my recent trip there, I had to cut a few corners. One place I wouldn’t cut on was experiencing my share of southern food staples. I had no shortage of recommendations for great places to eat and foods to try, and I managed to squeeze a lot into my abbreviated time in the city.
On my first afternoon in Nashville, after visiting the Country Music Hall of Fame and taking in some live music downtown going on as part of the Country Music Association Festival, I worked up an appetite for some barbeque and dropped into Jack’s BBQ right on Broadway. It took me about twenty minutes in line to get to the counter, as this is a popular place:
A morning tour of Saint John
Saint John is a city I get to visit a couple of times a year for work. But each trip is usually a very quick one, leaving very little time to explore the city. That being said, it’s a city I’ve spent a bit of time in over the years. Saint John is my dad’s birthplace, and when I was a kid, a family road trip up there wasn’t an unfamiliar occurrence.
On a work-related trip to Saint John back in May, I found myself with a quiet Saturday morning to do a bit of exploring. From my downtown (or is it uptown?… let’s just say it was in the centre of the city) hotel, I walked toward the waterfront and encountered this fellow. It’s a sculpture donated by Moosehead Breweries, Canada’s oldest and largest independent brewer. Better to meet a guy like this here than on a New Brunswick road in your car:
Favourite 2014 travel photos. Chicago, IL. April 2014.
Under the Bean
A morning of sharks, eels and blue lobsters
My Dad was pretty stoked to visit the new aquarium on our visit to Toronto. I’ve never been much of an aquarium guy. Honestly, when I walk around one, I’m pretty much thinking, “I wonder how that fish would taste?” Maybe I shouldn’t visit these places around lunch. But I digress… The Toronto Aquarium was a pretty cool attraction and captured my interest enough that it made me pretty excited to visit the New England Aquarium on my recent visit to Boston.
The main feature at the Toronto Aquarium is their shark tank. But they first tease you with a whole host of interesting sea life. One of my favourites was the steely eyed wolf eel:
Jays games with Dad
I’m having a pretty good year of seeing baseball so far – a couple of early season games in Chicago, a recent game in Boston, and back in May, my Dad and I took in three Blue Jays games in Toronto. This is the second time over the past few years that we’ve moved into my sister’s downtown apartment while she was away, stocked up the fridge with a few days supply of Steam Whistle, and then spent most of our time down at the place formerly known as SkyDome.
For the first of the three games, the Phillies were in town to start a short two game series. Dad and I were camped out way up in the 500 level with vertigo-inducing seats:
Arthur, Ottawa and (finally) Boston
Our recent trip to Boston, planned as a second honeymoon, almost didn’t happen. The days leading up to our departure had both of us watching the track of Hurricane Arthur. Our timing was impeccable – a hurricane headed for Halifax…. in July. I wrote about rolling with the inevitable punches traveling will throw at you from my recent experiences in Nashville. This trip to Boston was about to throw a haymaker.
It became pretty obvious that Arthur was setting its sights on a direct hit to Nova Scotia the Saturday morning we were scheduled to fly to Boston. Hope was gone for it tracking out to sea and once Air Canada granted fee-free changes, we took a calculated risk to move up our flight to the Friday afternoon before. The trouble with a hurricane hitting Halifax is that it will tend to hit Boston the day before it reaches us. I wasn’t convinced that we’d get out to Boston, but was hopeful if we started our journey early, we’d have more options out and around the storm. Sitting at the gate awaiting the flight to Boston, the sound of the passenger manifest being printed off about 40 minutes before the flight raised my spirits.
Then it happened. I glanced up to catch the dreaded word on the screen. CANCELED.
The Amazing Race challenge was on. We hurried into line at the gate, got on our cells and managed to get re-booked out to Ottawa around the storm with a flight on to Boston the next morning. We were very lucky. People just behind us in the line and a bit later on their phones weren’t able to get re-booked until two days later. When we got to the front of the line to get our new boarding passes we got our first pleasant surprise: Air Canada would be putting us up in Ottawa on their dime. Sweet! We made our way over to the domestic terminal gates and realized our seats weren’t together to Ottawa. I inquired if there was a way we could be seated together. Pleasant surprise number two: exit row seats to Ottawa and Boston! With a couple of hours until our flight, I was ready for the time-honoured tradition of killing time with an airport bar beer:
Clearing my head beside Lake Michigan
The last word on my recent trip to Chicago goes to a quiet Saturday morning I spent walking along Lake Michigan. Sometimes on solo trips, I find a need to just stop running from place to place or event to event and “just be” for a bit. In a big city like Chicago, this can be a bit of a challenge with all of its sights. On my last full day there, I took the subway a couple of stops north of my hotel and then walked east toward Lake Michigan. It had been a long day previous – a lot of exploring public art, an afternoon at the Art Institute, a White Sox game, then some time in a blues club. Early morning coffee in hand, I was in need of some quiet time to clear my head, much like the early morning clouds clearing off over the water:
Escape to the islands
When my Dad and I were in Toronto back in early May, we weren’t treated to great weather for the few days there. It was unseasonably cold and windy, so we were lucky the Jays games we went to were played under the dome. We did get one relatively nice afternoon to make a trip neither of us had before. A quick walk from my sister’s condo (our home away from home for this trip) is the ferry over to the Toronto Islands. Shortly after departing downtown, this is the view back toward the city… pretty nice!
Bluenose Traveler 