Monday 31 August 2015

Ontario trip

I'm just back from a trip to Ontario and upstate New York.  It was 7 places in 8 days, so more driving than drawing, but I did manage a picture in all but one day.  The first was on the flight there.  Over Minnesota, the pilot came on the intercom saying "There's a big line of thunderstorms, but we see a bit of a gap, so we're going for it."  Fun flying at 35,000 feet with clouds surging above you on both sides, and even more fun drawing them as we bumped and rattled our way through.

The next day we went to our family cottage in Southampton, an old fishing town on Lake Huron.  The town docks were built when the water levels were a lot higher, so the tied-up fishing boats now look like a bit like submarines, with their hulls below the dock.

A storm rolled in the next day, a proper Three-Day Blow, with squalls, big winds and big waves.  The clouds arrived and the rain just started as I finished the increasingly-frenzied half-hour sketch.
I lost a drawing day to the exhaustion of driving back into Toronto's impossible traffic, but then went on to Kingston, where my sister has a little cabin on a lovely piece of lakeside land.
Then we continued around Lake Ontario to Ithaca in upstate New York, home of Cornell and birthplace of my partner.  We stayed at an elegant bed-and-breakfast in a Victorian era mansion (with, spectacularly, a desert buffet in the evening).

From there, on to a wedding in St. Catharines Ontario, with a quick visit to Niagara Falls.  I only had a few minutes, so I drew the falls themselves, but the crowds and a century's worth of tourist attractions would also have been great subjects.
And finally, the old standby, an airport view, this time through the plane window as we awaited diagnosis of a mysterious fluid leaking from the wing.






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