I had lunch out with family the weekend before last, and we had a brilliant time, nine of us altogether, sharing good food, a few nice glasses of this, that and the other, and a lot of chat. And I mentioned I’d been in Toronto. Why were you there? Erm, I was a member of the Mars Society, and the annual conference was in Toronto … its a campaign group for human spaceflight to Mars, made for people like me, and people like Bob Zubrin, the founder of the Society. His book, the one I have, is on Amazon; my link button isn’t working, but its called The Case for Mars.
Well, anyway, I hunted out some photos, and it turns out that 1999-2000 was a year with quite a lot of space-related activity for me. For a start, there was going down to Cornwall to see the eclipse. I stayed at Penzance Youth Hostel, which was great, and walked up to Madron, a little village just above Penzance. The weather, as anyone who was in southwest England at the time will remember, was terrible that day. I have no photos of anything remotely eclipse connected, except for the vicar of Madron Church and his caretaker: they were absolute stars, and opened up their church with coffee and biscuits to these soaked wannabe starfarers who’d suddenly landed on their doorstep.
Then I went to Geneva for a week, and took the chance to go to CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. They were still looking for the god particle at that stage … and I finally had a really good understanding of how radioactive half life relates to the weird particles they search for. That was fun. They have a kind of museum of the stuff from the 1950s parked in the grounds, just outside the cafe, thats fun too: 
And then there was the funny little trip I did to Leicester University, to the Challenger Centre there: it was a worldwide initiative headlined by some of the parents of those astronauts who died in the Challenger disaster – a group of us from the Mars Society went up there to do a role-playing exercise of a shuttle mission. Erm, it wasn’t taken too seriously, but I loved it:
And then there was Toronto! Omigod, Toronto! Its gorgeous. Still, the great thing was we all got to be with other enthusiasts – it was a little embarrassing at the final dinner, when everyone who wasn’t American or Canadian was asked to stand up, and be applauded … but it was a good laugh. And I got Bob Zubrin, the founder, to come over at the end of the last day, to have his pic taken with us: 
I did lots of other things on that trip too, of course: I went boating on Lake Erie and saw my first traffic queue of speedboats; I went to two theatre festivals in Ontario, the Shakespeare and the Shaw; I took the train from Niagara to Chicago and went with all the foreigners who were escorted at gunpoint off the train (well, not really, but it sounds dramatic, and we did have to get off) to pay the entry fee; I went to Chicago and saw one of the most famous houses built by Frank Lloyd Wright; and I went to another convention in Chicago, met a favourite author Larry Niven, and fell temporarily in love with a lawyer from Pennsylvania, I think, who had the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. Mmmm.
But while I was still in Canada, up in their Great Lakes district, I found another form of bilingualism that Canadians don’t talk much about: not just French-Canadian, but Inuit-Canadian. How about this for a shop-sign:
I just love that script, I really do.
Life is really very good. I’d be interested in other people’s peak experiences like this, the more, the merrier. Enjoy your day.
Tags: CERN, Inuit, Leicester Challenger Centre, Mars, Penzance eclipse, space, Space Research Centre, Toronto