One great way to get to know a new place is through running. For the last two months I’ve been exploring my neighbourhood since we moved to Kitchener-Waterloo. Some runs have been less fruitful than others. There was the disastrous morning I discovered that the route I had plotted to take me home from a trail head led me through a busy industrial park with no sidewalks.
Most runs have been less stressful and have allowed me to reacquaint myself with a part of Canada that is so different from the prairie that has been my home for the last three years.
Here was the view a few days ago, on a fairly hot and humid morning along the Grand River. Views like this make the occasional steep hill along the trail worthwhile.
Here’s a selfie taken after that run, in which the only military thing about me is the T shirt. The long hippy hair and goatee are decidedly non-regulation, but since the closest Regular Army unit is two hours away and my place of duty is at a civilian university, it can stay for now. Sadly, I have just made an appointment for 1 October to get a new military identity card, so I will have to address this deplorable grooming standard soon. But not too soon.
My God – what a vision – is this a lousy beatnik I see before me?
Beatnik? Hipster, dude, hipster.
You shall have to come visit the officers' mess of the RHFC in Cambridge.