Day 23
A Drive in the English Speaking Countryside
The last full day of our vacation. By now, I was spending easily as much time worrying about the disasters and drudgery that awaited me back home, as I spent actually enjoying myself. Since detailing my worries about my real life aren't what this is all about, I'll edit all that stuff out. The result of this editing is that I really don't have much to say about the day.
Well, there was that Deighton novel that I'd already half finished by the time the day started. And, the day started very late indeed. Made us very popular with the housekeeping staff, who'd somehow come up with the strange idea that they'd be able to do our room sometime before dinner.
I sat around in the room reading, at least until I finished the book. We went down to the dining room for lunch. Actually, to get there, we had to walk past a half a dozen other private dining rooms (or "function rooms"), and on the way, I could see lots of people carrying plates with halves of lobsters on them. This seemed to me to be an awfully wonderful way of running a buffet, and a good excuse for me to try it.
It was pretty good as buffets go. I don't know if it was really worth the price to me, except that I did high-grade all those bits of lobsters and even found a few extra claws that weren't attached to anything.
The Canadian lobster fisherman have been up in arms lately that US regulation doesn't allow the sale of "shorts" (teeny-tiny lobsters), which the Canadians claim is a violation of the new free trade agreement. Well, I know where all those shorts they aren't selling here have gone. It's sort of criminal (in my opinion) to sell the veal equivalent of lobster, and darned frustrating to get so little meat out of each one, but if you load up your plate with a bunch of them like I did, there's some pretty decent pickin's to be had.
After lunch, we still felt morally obliged to do something vacationy, so we piled into the car and drove north to the southern Ontario boondocks, just so we could turn around and drive back. It was warm enough to make good use of that car's air conditioner that we weren't paying $5 extra per day for, too. This may not mean anything to you, but I was still sore about that.
We got back to the hotel just in time for housekeeping to start on our room, so we went downstairs and bought a chunk of smoked salmon to take back home with us. Robert ran up the street and got us a fifth of Coke. Yeah, we were going to be living like royalty. We both got back to the room just about the time they were done making it up, so we immediately set about tearing the bed apart and getting all the towels dirty as soon as they left.
I laid down to watch some TV, and ended up falling asleep a lot. Robert was awake, at least on the hour, because I noticed that the channel was getting changed to track some of the programs I'd most like to sleep through at all the appropriate intervals.
I also noticed, later when I woke up for real, that just about every commercial on Canadian TV is for beer. Now, I know you're saying to yourself that beer commercials also saturate the US airwaves, and that I must just be exaggerating again but honest: With the exception of the occasional "Chev" dealer commercial (they've got cars up there that look a lot like Chevys, but are called "Chevs" -- such a strange and different world), all the commercials are for beer. Still more evidence that the MacKenzie brothers weren't so far off the mark with their routine.
All that napping kept me up all night, and aside from all the awakes I had saved up, I also had a lot of worrying to do about how horrible the next day, the trip back home, and all the days to follow would be. That left me sitting up in bed all night, watching the latest Meech Lake news on the TV (they came up with a last minute agreement that received unanimous approval, then promptly fell apart while we were on the plane the next day), and some really boring shows about Canadian literature. I don't think that the literature itself was boring, but the show sure was.
I also read another Deighton book, but you probably already guessed that.
So much for the vacation, eh?
On to the End of the Line
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