Oh Canada!

I had to travel to Canada for work this past week. A few of my co-workers and I were kicking off a green building project in Toronto + we were attending a large green building conference in the same city (along with about 60 other people from my newly acquired / merged company). It was really pretty crazy as the new company - SCIenergy - was having events a couple of the evenings + there was event that the conference had one evening - a series o speakers followed by a concert in the Air Canada hockey arena. Between the events, the conference, juggling the site visits and kick-off meetings....all told - for 6 days of travel, we had about 4 hours of "free time" so we made the most of it~

There is a system of underground tunnels that connect buildings in Toronto because of the extreme weather in the winter. There is also a network of above-ground enclosed walkways and glass structures between buildings. We stumbled across a structure designed by my favorite architect: Santiago Calatrava. He specializes in bridges, public infrastructure projects, and buildings that have some sort of kinetic (movable) feature to them. He is a very talented architect / engineer. His structures comprise of sinuous lines and are all very elegant. It was refreshing to walk through this project of his! This one in particular connected a couple of more modern buildings as well as one historic building. The differences between the historic and the crisp, clean white metal and glass structure is really quite nice~

Afterwards, we rented bicycles from a bike-share program that has 1000 bikes "locked up" at 80 different stations throughout Toronto. You pay at a kiosk & it unlocks the bike. You ride around however long you want then you return at any of the stations. It made our sight-seeing go much quicker and more fun than hopping on a cable car or open-air bus to get around.

In downtown, there is a mix of modern buildings and preservation of historic structures. The variety makes sight-seeing interesting. We went to an area to the east of the downtown business district was very hip: the Distillery District. This area was comprised of brick warehouse structures that have been converted into a village of trendy restaurants, shops, and galleries. The streets are blocked off from automobiles, they are lined with cobblestones, and public sculpture is scattered throughout -- making it ideal for public gathering and socializing. We spent the majority of our time there rather than the touristy area around the CN tower (which has an observation deck near the top of a spire) in which to see the city from above. That's the first image shown on this blog post - for it's iconic of Toronto.

Toronto is an interesting city -- clean, good infrastructure, diverse & international population, and seems progressive in a number of ways. I liked it as a city. I wish that there was more down-time on the trip in which to have explored more. But it was also great coming home!

This was the first work trip I have taken in close to half a year. I used to take a lot of short 1 - 2 - 3 day trips to places within a drive of Atlanta for my previous job. At this new job (5+ months), the travels are going to be much less frequent but they will all be far away. This is definitely a better arrangement for our little family unit~

When arriving home on Saturday night, Mercer was actually excited to see me. In the past, it doesn't seem that he would care so much - but as he's getting older - he recognizes our absence when we're gone -- even a short absence such as Todd going into work early -- Mercer will inquire about where he is.

There is an entire blog worth of things to write about that Mercer is saying and doing now. That will come shortly. 'Til then, here's some pictures of Mercer at one of our favorite places to hike: Sope Creek and the paper mill ruins that straddle both sides. We took this hike and had a little picnic on the rocks the day before I had to go out of town for the week. It was a beautiful day and it was also the first time that Mercer did this mile +/- hike down to the water all by himself (we helped him navigate over the rocks in the creek - of course). Todd ended up carrying Mercer for only a couple of minutes as we were walking back to the car -- but this is a vast improvement over previous hikes.

Oh, there's nothing "baby" about Mercer anymore! I've had a bit of a hard time this season while changing out summer clothes for bigger fall/winter clothes. Each season is tough, but this season, we put away everything that also deals with potty-training, diapers, etc. It is a great milestone, but also makes us realize that he's not even a toddler anymore. He's a little boy now (or in his firey words - I'm a "big" boy).