Bradford

As is usual, I spent most of my time in Canada staying with my sister and her family in Bradford.
Let me preface this by saying right away that I am not a particular fan of the town.  I don’t want to knock it too much though, since Shona has lived there for a while, the kids seem to like it and I guess it has something to offer.  It is just not my cup of tea and never really managed to capture my enthusiasm.  On this trip, I found myself with some free time, usually in the evenings when I took the chance to walk the streets of Bradford and give it a chance to make me love it.
Here is the town hall, the centre of all things Bradford.


One of the things that I dislike about the town that remains unchanged is the way it is developed.  The houses all have a sameness about them…I often refer to them as “Lego neighborhoods” since they look so cookie cutter to me.  The way communities develop in small town Canada is this:
1) Aging farmer sells a huge plot of land to a developer
2) developer builds a few hundred houses that look identical, or perhaps vary with 3-4 models
in Germany however, small towns tend to develop very differently.  The aging farmer divides up his land into as many plots as he can, then sells them off one by one to potential homeowners.  The homeowner then engages a contractor to build the house however they want on the plot.  Personally I like this method better since it leads to a much more diverse looking collection of houses.  That being said, there is a definite sameness to German architecture that dominates housing right now.  The blocky white house with red tile roof.  I guess it’s a matter of personal taste.
Anyway, here is a typical Bradford street. (or is it stepford, how can you be sure…)

Once you get out of the residential part, you are treated to the main street of Bradford.  A fabulous collection of new and old.  Which is to say, fast food restaurants that are in new buildings or fast food restaurants that are in renovated old buildings.  These are spaced out with strip malls and huge package stores of course.  I am again being unfairly critical I'm sure, but since I am writing this, I get to use my blog as a platform however I choose.   I choose to dislike downtown Bradford.
Bradford has ~25,000 residents, yet has the following fast food outlets on a single street. 
2x McDonalds
Burger king
Pizza Pizza
Subway
Kentucky Fried Chicken
3x Tim Hortons
Harveys
Swiss Chalet
Mr Submarine
Popeye’s Chicken
Wendy’s
Pizza Nova
Pizzaville
Gino’s Pizza
Lamar’s Pizza
Little Ceasar’s Pizza
I am sure I missed some and I did not count non-fast food restaurants…  I think Bradford must have one of the highest restaurant per resident ratios on earth.    The people here must also eat at home as well, in addition to the 20 fast food and at least 15 more normal restaurants, there are 3+ giant grocery stores.  So what is there to do in Bradford, answer#1 would have to be eat.

One restaurant worth noting is this one.  Jamaican patties are one of the greatest foods anywhere:

Check out the lovely Bradford Food mart, located next to the always needed small town exotic birds store.  Apparently the people of Bradford also enjoy a parrot or two in their lives.


While out for a walk, I also saw this sweet ride.  Check out the El Camino.  this one is more polyfilla than car at this point, but I am sure with a coat of paint, this could be brought back to its former glory.  I think they should consider a giant mural of a wolf howling on the moon on the hood.  Somehow it would seem like the right thing to do.
 

Something else I liked is that there are wild rabbits just roaming around the town.  Maybe this is because West Gwillimbury is the carrot growing capitol of North America.  On a walk one evening I saw these two rabbits enjoying a visit to someone’s yard.  I thought at first they may be pets, but no, they are just neighborhood rabbits.

One really great thing that is new to Bradford is the recently completed recreation centre.  For a town the size of Bradford, this thing is amazing.  Two ice rinks with 900/500 seat capacity, swimming pool, water slide, indoor running track, multiple basketball courts.  the place is really great.  I guess with that many fast food places, the town felt compelled to give the residents a place to work it off.


OK, a longer post than I anticipated making today.  This ends my in depth look at the glory of Bradford, Ontario.  I hope I showed all of its greatness.

Canada Trip

I just recently enjoyed a nice, long overdue trip to Canada.  I had not been over since Jan 2009 or so and I was ready to enjoy all that the great white north had to offer.  A nice topic to begin this revitalization of my blogging effort is to share the trip experience. 

As usual, my trip began by making my way to Stuttgart airport.  Claudia and the kids had already left for their own little adventure, so it was the glorious bahn that took me there.  In  all truth, I don’t mind riding on the train at all.  German trains are clean, on time and get you where you need to go with the efficiency that one would expect.  From my house, I have to walk about 10 min to the local station, then take three different trains to the airport.  All in all it takes a little over an hour if your connections are well timed. Everything was smooth and good and I found myself in the departure area of Flughafen Stuttgart.

No matter how often I go there, I still enjoy the architecture of the airport.  The roof supports made to look like trees is just something that never gets old.

As I mentioned, it has been quite a few years since I was on a plane, and I noticed that the check in process is quite different now.  I flew with KLM (on an Air France flight) and at the check in area, it is all self service now.  I had to take this image from the Air France website since I forgot to take a picture when I was there;

They have successfully further removed the human element from air travel .  I just had to approach the machine, press a few buttons and let the machine scan my passport and it would poop out my boarding pass.  Then I took my bag up to the remaining human employee and dropped off my suitcase.

So having arrived at the airport a couple hours before my flight, as my many many emails advised, I killed off the next hours reading until boarding time.  I got on the plane without issue and was off on the first leg of my trip, Stuttgart-Paris. 

 

I changed planes at Paris CDG airport.  The last time I was there I thought it was grey, grubby and under a lot of construction.   I have to say, the construction was worth it.  I thought the terminal was pretty nice looking and I did not mind wandering around while I waited for the connection.  Like most things in the western world, the entire place is permeated with stores and various other stalls trying to sell you things while you wait.  I would not be surprised if all airlines had side deals with airports ensuring a minimum time for flight connections to ensure every traveller had enough exposure to fabulous retail offers.  I did manage to resist temptation though, all I purchased was a delicious Orangina.

The flight was long but smooth and uneventful.  Surprisingly, the food was really excellent.  I have since described it to people as being food that I would not send back if it showed up in a restaurant, which is about the highest praise an airline should ever expect for their meal service in economy. 

I brought along my own inflight entertainment, I had the entire series two of the fantastic BBC One show Sherlock.  I was a big fan of the first series and I had been saving the second one for the trip.  If you think watching 270 minutes of Sherlock in a row may be too much, you would be wrong.  I am already looking forward to a third series.  Without any spoilers, there is of course a twist at the end of the final episode that I think most people have not yet figured out (me included.)  The creators of the show have said that the show contains a clue to the answer that everyone seems to have missed.  I think I’m a pretty clever guy and I’ve gone back to look for this clue and found nothing.  I hope the explanation is satisfying.

Anyway, after all that travel, Shona picked my up at the airport and we drove up the road to glorious Bradford, where I would spend the next couple of weeks.

The next (many) posts are not going to follow any narrative of chronology, I am just planning to post things that I feel like as time and motivation allow.  I am sure there will be some interesting stuff for the lover of southern Ontario though.

Cheers.

Birthday Boy Henrik

Today is a big day for Henrik, he is two years old!

In celebration of this glorious occasion, I have pulled out some of my favorite pictures of Henrik from the past 12 months.  

Henrik is a tremendous joy in our lives and the two years with him have been filled with fun and laughs (mostly)

As you can clearly see from the below montage, he is a guy who always has a smile on his face.  It is a smile that I think it pretty infectious and it is pretty hard not to feel better and happier just by being around such a happy little dude.  Any of the photos below can be clicked on and enlarged to enjoy the birthday boy in all his glory!

I shall return...

OK, so I have been asked by enough people now about when I will return to writing my blog.  I am going to start up again in the next days, I have just been updating my "blogging environment" which is so say reinstalling all the applications I have used to create this masterpiece of mediocraty.

In case you are curious... what kept me off blogging for the past (many) months?

Aside from laziness on my part, the main thing keeping me from the blog was photo management.  I was trying to find a way to get my photos under control.   Picasa has been my traditional go-to program, but as the volume of photos grew and my HD filled up, I became less satisfied with it.  I wanted to move all my photos to a network drive.  In the version of Picasa I had last summer, there did not seem to be a way to do this.

I gave Adobe Photoshop Elements a try, which had a couple of features I really liked
1) chance to have all photos on a network location
2) chance to make "stacks" of similar photos to save space.

Elements had a free 30 day trial so I gave it a go.  It was ok, but I became discouraged quickly based on two things.  First, the initial time needed to organize my quite huge photo collection was daunting and second, the program performance was slow.  The second one was the killer for me, a slow running program will kill my enthusiasm pretty fast.  I hate to wait and Picasa had made me very accustomed to a fast response time.

So, my compromise is to have muliple photo repositories... on my main system, I keep all my photos on the network drive, then on the laptop I blog from, a copy of the last 12 months photos.  That keeps the program running fast and my photo storage needs to a reasonable level.

Honestly that was about my biggest limiter and when I write it out here, it makes me think I was just being lazy. 

So, I am not sure how well I keep at the blog this time, but I will do what I can to have some posts go up relatively regularly.

-F