west uptowner

Just got back from two weeks in Newfoundland and Labrador... I'm not so much exhausted as kind of blank. It wasn't as spiritually overwhelming as I was hoping -- what place ever is -- but I think the speed of our tour kept me too busy to really take in these places. Well, despite that I did a lot of walking around and took in quite a bit of Labrador and the Rock on the way.

Tours are inevitably unbalanced gifts: you get to travel to amazing places you'd never bring yourself to, yet you rarely get much time to really see them. Your focus must be primarily on the job that brought you there, and that means everything extra-curricular must begin and end in under six or eight hours.

That said, if you push it a little, those hours can count for a lot.

What really touched me when I was there is how thin the soil is, how harsh the climate, and yet how vibrant the people are who live there. It's amazing that they all have the guts and will to make these isolated places so warm.

# posted by trev @ 3:42 p.m.