Back to the swallows. An estimated 500 pictures yielded some actually nice ones.
©Giliell, all rights reserved.
Click for full size
The Daily Bird #782
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Back to the swallows. An estimated 500 pictures yielded some actually nice ones.
©Giliell, all rights reserved.
Click for full size
We had an uneventful and generally boring drive yesterday which is just the way we like it. This part of the trip is just about putting kilometers behind us and that we did…about 650 km so far. We’ll spend today in Pointe Claire (we’re all exhausted) then tomorrow we’ll get back in the car and head east again for the next leg of our journey which should take us as far as Rimouski, Quebec. We’ll spend the night there in a motel and the following day we’ll drive the last leg of the trip all the way to Perce. Thankfully, the scenery improves once we get past Quebec City and the last part of the trip is so pretty that you can almost forget that your ass is asleep and your legs are numb.
St. Lawrence River, ©voyager, all rights reserved
Pointe Claire Yacht Club, ©voyager, all rights reserved
My pics aren’t the greatest either. The big lense needs a lot of light, so I had to use long shutter times and as silly as it sounds, the moon is a moving object. Anything above 1 second and it starts to blur and I had to do 8. It was also so dark that I had a hard time finding it through the searcher at all and the focus was guesswork.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Moon and Mars
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Probably the best one
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
One of the many tourist attractions and one the kids insist on visiting every time is the Aquarium. It has a lot of thematic basins, but of course the main attraction is big shark tank with the glass tunnel. Seriously, how anybody can think of sharks as monsters after seeing them will be eternally lost on me.
Pictures are a bit on the poor side, because the light is always low and a good camera needs good light.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Collared Doves were another species that inhabits the camp site and that will come and pick breadcrumbs from basically under your feet.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Highway 401, looking east from Woodstock, ©voyager, all rights reserved
Jack’s Walk is on the road today. We’ll be traveling down Canada’s busiest (and most boring) highway the 401 all the way to its eastern end in Montreal. It’s about an 8 hour drive for us once we add in about 4 or 5 stops for Jack (and us) to get out and stretch. We’ll be staying in a place called Pointe Claire, which is on the west end of the island of Montreal, where Mr. voyager’s mom lives. We’ll stay a few days to visit with family and friends and then we’ll hit the road again, this time along with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law, for a much longer drive (about 1000 km) all the way to the Gaspe Peninsula.
This is an annual trek for us. In a little village at the very tip of the Gaspe Peninsula is a place called Perce where my husband’s mother has a second home. It’s a very special place. It lies nestled at the base of the Chic Choc mountains in a small valley on the edge of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It’s full of colour and charm and I can’t wait to show it to you. It’s a well-known vacation spot because of the Perce Rock which lies just off it’s coast. It’s a stunner! It also has the world’s largest colony of gannets on Bonaventure Island which is also just off the coast.
But I’m skipping ahead. The next week or so is all about getting there. Jack’s Walk will still be here daily, but the timing will probably be wonkier than usual. My mother-in-law doesn’t have internet (she’s 92, although you’d never know it!) so I’ll be posting from the Tim Hortons down the road. Same thing once we get to Perce…no internet for the first few days, but one or two of the local motels has accessible wi-fi so we’ll get here somehow.
See you soon from la belle province, Quebec.
The last of the streets photos. as I already mentioned, the city is between sea and mountains and has grown in the only possible direction, which is uphill, resulting in some streets that would make San Francisco envious. There are even some where there are escalators to get pedestrians up.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
The yellow mark on the lamp post is the sign in solidarity with the political prisoners after the failed referendum last year.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
We’ve been neglecting the Daily Bird, which is a thing that cannot be.
So here’s a gorgeous Sardinian Warbler for you.
The funny thing about shooting with the 600mm lense is that I sometimes don’t even know what I’m shooting and only find out at home when I look at the pics on the computer screen.
Sardinian Warbler
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Early harvest, ©voyager, all rights reserved
According to the weatherman we can expect to have rain off and on all week so the farmers are out making hay while the sun still shines.
Tree Tuesday gets around and this week we’re in Finland on Uunisaari Island in Helsinki with a grouping of birch trees sent to us by Ice Swimmer. Birches are a favourite of mine and Ice Swimmer’s photograph shows them off perfectly with that beautiful white bark standing out in the sun and their small, delicate leaves silhouetted against the blue sky. Gorgeous.
Thanks Ice Swimmer.
Birches in Uunisaari, ©Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved
While there are few green areas in the centre, there are wonderful planted balconies and lovely squares. One thing is that apart from the pretty fountains there are water fountains everywhere that keep the population on two legs as well as four legs hydrated.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Another pigeon bath
©Giliell, all rights reserved
As you may remember, our lovely bunny Pünktchen died some weeks ago, and of course, the first thing my dad did when he returned from their holiday was to take the little one to the breeder to get a new one. The guy breeds bunnies for shows, so those who don’t fit his breeding needs are sold as pets, which shows again that those things are stupid as the new bunny is the cutest.
So here’s the first pics of the new family member. Let’s start with Molli, being very hot and not suspecting that life would change again.
Effin’ heat wave when you’re wearing a fur coat.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
And here he is, Fleckchen.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Isn’t he pretty?
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Translating his name got me thinking again. Now, first of all, in German we make things small by adding -chen, which doesn’t always work in English. While you get a baby and a kitty, you don’t have a “cary”, meaning a little toy car. Now, the former bunny was “Pünktchen”. A “Punkt” can be a dot, but also a spot, which would be the more usual term for describing an animal’s coat. A “Fleck” is something like a larger dot. It can be a spill on your clothing, but also the colouring of an animal, so now I have two rabbits named for their coat and they could both be translated as the same word in English. So I went with “Patches” because his coat looks more like a patchwork blanket.
Molli and Fleckchen
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Here you can see the first contact between the two, with Fleckchen being in his temporary enclosure, from which he escaped the next day. Thankfully he#s still too young for making baby rabbits.
Taking flight, ©voyager, all rights reserved
It’s been a crazy, busy day around here and Jack didn’t get out until much later than usual so to make up for it I took him to the lake. I figure you guys have seen lots of wet dog photos lately so instead of another one here’s a nice bit of fluff.