People in transition are all around. Back to School Sale signs have started to pop up in store windows. The cold wind of seasonal change is about to begin blowing an ominous breeze of scheduled existence and early sunsets. And I’m sure the odd leaf will soon fall to the ground, brining the end of summer with it. People will leave, people will return, and I will remain with my bad haircut. The perpetual Sunday that is August is here, and still I feel as though my summer hasn’t really started. Odd.

At any rate, the end has begun and Andrew’s apartment over on Windermere is now empty of us. Last week we packed up all of his earthly possessions and somehow managed to fit most of them into the little blue car. With our seats pushed up as forward as they could go, we set out on a very long and very cramped journey to Barry’s Bay. After 20 minutes of unloading what took as nearly 12 hours to pack, we dropped in at the Trout Lake cottage to see my family and some summer friends of yore. After a couple beers, a couple burgers, and a game of ‘Last Man Standing’ on the raft with the Nagy kids, we returned to the cottage on Lake Wadsworth, and swiftly set out on an Eastern Ontario adventure to Tyler’s cottage down on Big Rideau Lake.

A small congregation of Andrew’s housemates from Queen’s came together at Tyler’s island abode. Beer, boats, and belly-aches were made our pleasures at the gracious hands of our hosts. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a finer cottage. Love and comfort oozed from every wonderfully uneven floorboard… even in the outhouse. You could just feel the years of childhood joy that several generations of Tyler’s family have experienced there. After a kayaking excursion, a barefoot trail hike, some sailing, and a whole lotta risk, we had to leave the lovely oasis and head home like the rest of the long-weekend adventurers. A car full of Queen’s alumni traversed the 401, when we realized that during the 4 years each of us had going back and forth in between Kingston and Toronto, none of us had ever stopped in at the Big Apple. As we saw that red orb grow in front of us on the horizon we figured ‘why not?’ We stopped, we ate pie, and we climbed the steps inside the Big Apple that let us look out upon the bad traffic we would soon face. It was all actually incredibly anticlimactic. In the end, we made it back to Toronto with overly full stomachs.

In Toronto I remain, with a new bad haircut and trying to lose the 6 pounds I gained over the long weekend. Humbug. Now Andrew and I are trying to find ways to escape the city again… which is made more difficult with work pending and schedules undefined. Feels like Fall already.