Tomorrow I will board a plane at the Sudbury airport and, connecting through Toronto, depart for Fredericton, New Brunswick. I am excited about this for at least a two reasons. First, this coming week is the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) annual Congress. The week-long meeting will bring students, post-docs, and career researchers from across the country to share in the latest ideas, discoveries, and physics mysteries.
Second, I have only ever visited (in this order) British Columbia, Quebec, and now Ontario. I want to visit all of the provinces of Canada. Spanning a vast piece of the North American continent, with populations typically concentrated closer to the Canada-US border, this will be a challenge. While there may be 50 states back in the US, generally each is much smaller than the provinces of Canada. A several hour drive in the US can be sufficient to allow the visit, in just one day, to many states. A day’s drive in Canada may only bring you to the next provincial boundary.
I have never been to New Brunswick, or any of the “maritime” provinces. As a New Englander by birth, coastal ocean life is in my veins (something to do with the salt concentration of the body and the seas … I dunno, sounds like hokum). I am excited to be back closer to the Atlantic. This will also be my first time in the Atlantic timezone. I have only ever flown over it before.
I have also missed work travel. As much as I adore living where my experiments are located (for the first time since 2009), I do enjoy the odd trip to go to a physics event.
Life these days is a contrast in travel styles. Family travel is best achieved from Sudbury by a portfolio of driving and air travel. For example, it’s easiest to get to my family home in Connecticut by flying to Toronto, then Boston, and driving 2 hours to home. However, going to see family in Wisconsin is really best achieved, with perhaps the exception of Milwaukee, by driving. For example, it’s a 9.5 hour drive to the Oshkosh area and a 10.5 hour drive to Jodi’s family home. It’s about 11+ hours driving to Milwaukee – about the same as driving to my own family home in Connecticut.
What about flying to Wisconsin? There are no direct flights, so it’s a 1 hour plane flight to Toronto, with at least a 1 hour layover before flying to Chicago (which is about 3-4 more hours), then another layover before flying to Milwaukee (the closest airport to Wisconsin family). That totals to something like 8-10 hours with minimum-length layovers. From Milwaukee, it’s a 90 minute drive to Oshkosk and a 5.5 hour drive to the family home. Generally, for Wisconsin family, driving is better for the sanity.
For physics, however, flying is pretty much a requirement. Toronto is just 4 hours’ driving away, Kingston (home to Queen’s University) is about 6.5 hours away, and Ottawa (home to Carleton University) about 5 hours away. Other than that, it’s faster to fly by a lot (even flying to Toronto, if everything is on-schedule, is better than driving in terms of time). If I want to do something for physics in Canada or elsewhere, flying is top of the menu.
I’ve been trying to re-cultivate a love for airports. I’m very much in favour of the Toronto City Airport. Toronto Pearson Airport is fine. I’ll be at the Montreal Airport for the first time in about one month, so I will see what that is like. Fredericton is a smaller city, so I imagine it will be something like the Sudbury airport, which I like very much (I am big fan of small, easy-to-navigate airports). My recent experience at LAX confirmed a long-standing set of reports from others about how bad is that particular airport, but other than that I generally don’t hate many airports.
It is beautiful here in Sudbury this weekend. The skies are clear, the temperature is lovely, and the smoke from recent wildfires is playing only the smallest role in air quality right now. I am excited to see what a maritime province is like, though I do love my home here in Sudbury.
