I just got back today from the annual Civic Holiday Algonquin camping trip that I go on with friends and family (see here, here and here for descriptions of previous trips).

I'm not doing a full blog this year like I have in the past and I didn't really take any pictures. The trip was much the same as in previous years with a group of 20 people made up of the usual suspects. It was an excellent time as always, but I just wasn't up to taking photos. I'm having a lot of trouble getting back into photography (disregarding my big trip to Australia/NZ).

Some of the highlights from this trip included celebrating Judy's 50th birthday with cake and champagne and also golfing with a club, tee and golf ball all carved from wood by Anthony (the ball was particularly spectacular). The other interesting thing this time was that the park was under a complete fire ban as it's had almost no rain this year. In fact, we almost had to cancel the trip because the east end of the park was closed due to forest fires up until a week ago. With no campfire we had to alter the menu a bit so that we could cook everything on the Coleman stoves. It wasn't a problem though and we made up for the lack of a campfire by sitting on the beach a lot.

I definitely want to go camping more than once a year. In particular I'm looking at doing a long canoe trip in the Northwest Territories with Matt in summer 2013, possibly with Canoe Arctic. I've seen so little of my home country and it's time to start remedying that!

I don't have a lot to say about this one. For anyone who is not familiar with Neal Stephenson, he seems to write books exactly for me. Super geeky and often epic in length. Cryptonomicon included a Perl script and the Baroque Cycle numbered about 3000 pages. I've read all his novels. One of the main plot devices in Reamde is a fictional MMORPG called T'Rain. The book was awesome and I loved it but it certainly wouldn't appeal to everyone.