August 7, 2012
All my weekends are long weekends at the moment, but my husband, with a full-time job, was really looking forward to his chance to get away from Toronto. We just got back from an extremely relaxed three days at Kingston, a charming little college town about three hours away from Toronto (well, three hours away when you go there anyway - on your way back, you get stuck in traffic and it's more like four and a half).
My husband decided to put me in charge of the itinerary - always a mistake if you want to just relax, because I am, of course, research expert extraordinaire. I got particularly carried away with the ghost stories I came across, the most grisly of which involved the town's building a park about a foot above a mass public graveyard, because they realized, after digging up 10,000 bodies that they didn't have the resources to transport the bodies to another burial site (they'd apparently expected only a tenth of those bodies). My overactive imagination and I had great fun with that one.
In the manner of Goldilocks, our first day at Kingston was too sunny, the second too rainy, and the third just perfect. But no matter what the weather was like, we went out undaunted, and got a feel of the place's history and patriotism by wandering everywhere on foot, and reading every plaque we could find.
Being near water puts me in a great mood in general, and the Wolfe Islander III, a Government run free cruise to Wolfe Island, the largest of the 1000 Islands, was an especial highlight. The ship splashed water at us from every direction, it was fantastic! The island itself seemed like an idyllic place - we nearly ended up buying a house there, but I talked him out of it when I realized there were only three restaurants on the island (though they did serve really good food).
Fort Henry was another highlight of our trip - we've been reading/watching a lot about US politics from the time of WWII, and this was another piece to put the period in context. We also saw a particularly impressive display outlining the evolution of guns over the ages, which made my day.
Best of all, I think the weekend gave us a chance to catch up on our reading (we took our books to the pubs and unabashedly read through the music playing!) and exchange long conversations about life. I definitely feel re-energized for the week ahead.
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