August 1 - 27, 2014

"Haven't you gone yet?" a good friend teased us the other day. "How can we miss you if you won't go away?!"

Well, yes, since vacating our house on August 1, we've spent the first weeks of our sabbatical year off orbiting within 2 hours of Ottawa. So far we've made it:

• as far East as Montreal, where Trish and I pretended we were Plateau hipsters for a few days while the kids went to sleepover camp;
• as far West as the Barron River Canyon in Algonquin Park for a short canoe trip; and
• a bit further North visiting friends' cottages up in the Gatineau Hills. 

While hovering close to home has sometimes made this feel like a long goodbye, it has been a great chance to recover from the big push to move out of the house, and to reconnect with a few more friends...

We also taking some time to get use to being happily homeless, and to pare our travel gear back to "all that we can't leave behind".  We have really appreciated the hospitality of friends who have put us up (and/or put up with us), and we are getting excited about heading off for Turkey in mid-September. 

Having reached escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the nation's capital, we are now on the VIA train en route to Toronto, from where we'll next visit some of our family in Southern Ontario. See you soon!