Serena Ryder stood me up!

Mike and I went to London Ontario this month to see what it might be like to live there. Mike will probably be doing his master's and Ph.D out there, so we might be there for about 4 years.

We had a great time. It's a really pretty city. Of course being from Alberta I'm amazed by anywhere that has old brick houses with ivy on them. It's been stinking hot in Calgary for weeks, and it was so nice to get out of our 28 degree townhouse to an air-conditioned hotel room. The hotel was pretty sweet. Our room was built like a 1 bedroom apartment with a kitchen and living area, and separate bedroom.

It was still hot out there, but it was usually cloudy which helped us feel a bit more comfortable when we were walking around outside. It was just fun to walk up and down the streets and look at all the old houses.
It was my birthday on the 19th and we had a great dinner together at a wonderful restaurant. On the 20th we went down to Detroit for the Serena Ryder concert that I had been looking forward to for weeks. We managed to get to downtown Detroit without meeting any violent criminals, but we were a bit early so we had to sit in the car looking rather suspicious for about an hour.

I was hugely disappointed when I found out that Serena Ryder had dropped off that leg of the tour a few weeks prior. You'd think that Ticketmaster would have some way of knowing and contacting people who bought tickets. However, since her album hasn't been released in the US yet, I was one of only 3 people there who had a clue who she was.

Fortunately Xavier Rudd was amazing, and managed to bring me out of my funk with his crazy one-man-band and diggeridoo skills.

We were also cheered up by the fact that the concert was over soon enough for us to hit a Cracker Barrel restaurant on the way back up to Canada.

On our last day we checked out of the hotel in the morning, but our plane didn't leave until after eight pm, so we had a lot of time to kill. There is a really nice park in the middle of London called Victoria Park. They were having a free music festival in the park called the Home County Music Festival.

Since we had spent the night before at the concert in Detroit, we didn't listen that closely to the music. However we had a perfect day lying in the grass, eating fair food, and watching squirrels bury food in the lawn.
I had a great bit of summer in London. Although I would be happy to have fall start tomorrow and put and end to this annoying heat wave.