The trails are stuttery because the clouds rolled in, off and on. But I’m quite enamoured with the colours that I ended up with.  (And here I contemplated doing it up in black and white, to avoid the orange glow of the streetlights.)

Video:

So my friend Kevin called me up last night, just before supper time.  “Are you gonna be at  home for the next ten minutes?”  he says.  “I have a tasting we need to do.”

I said, “I have to take my wife to a dinner party, but I’ll call you later.”

“Okay,” he says.  “I’m on my way home now.  Bring the 1919 when you come.”

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About 7:30 I got over to his house.  In a grocery bag I had my camera and my bottle of Angostura 1919, a delightfully smooth amber rum that, sadly, can no longer be purchased in my neck of the woods.  (Apparently the Canadian distributor went belly-up shortly after Kevin bought me my bottle of 1919, and so I’ve been rather parsimonious in my rum drinking.)

Kevin had gone to the liquor store with the intent of picking up some boxes, nothing more.  But he’d happened upon a bottle of El Dorado rum, and he’d remembered his uncle, telling him that there existed a rum that was at least the equal of Angostura 1919, and it was El Dorado.  Kevin’s uncle swore by the 40-year-old El Dorado; what Kevin had discovered in the liquor mart was a rack of bottles of 12-year-old instead.

We set them on the counter and, nerd that I am, I snapped the photo above while Kevin was adding ice to tumblers.

Verdict:

The El Dorado is a bit darker, with a bit more molasses flavour to it. I found it sweeter than 1919, but that’s fine by me; I’ll drink green ginger wine, which my wife finds offensively sweet, so sweet isn’t going to put me off.

Both rums seemed to me equally smooth; I distinctly remember telling Kevin, when he first introduced me to 1919, that it was dangerously smooth, that I couldn’t tell there was even alcohol in my drink.  The El Dorado has that same silkiness; it goes down almost too nicely.

In short:  Mmmm.

We seem to have discovered a rum to rival 1919, and it’s one that we can actually buy.

We said “Sure!”

Gimli beach, seen from the breakwater

It’s a pretty laid-back festival, as such things go.  Gimli is a small beach town about an hour north of Winnipeg, with a good-sized harbour on Lake Winnipeg (which is often referred to as an inland ocean).  We got to town about 10:30 in the morning, wandered around the harbour and beach area for a bit, found a festival programme, and sort of planned out our day.  We had lunch at the Europa Diner, which serves huge portions of delicious food — we ended up taking home a box of fries and a box of salad that we just couldn’t finish — then wandered over to the main stage at the park, where a concert was slated to start at 1:30.

The concert proved to be sets by some local talent.  I got to hear a six-year-old boy playing piano; he started out at the mike, saying that he was going to play “Strangers in the Night” (“I wrote it myself”) and then had to be reminded, via a stage whisper from the concert MC, to actually go and play the tune.  He was a pretty decent pianist for a six-year-old. (I’m 38 and I can’t play worth beans.)

I had taken a separate route to the concert from Mom and my wife. (I’d wanted to check out the Fris Nok game, which turned out to be groups of three or four throwing Frisbees at beer bottles set on poles stuck in the ground — not quite what I’d thought it might be.)  So just as the six-year-old was finishing up his set, they wandered up.  They’d been in a little bazaar-style area, checking out the wares.  When the next performer took the stage, I wandered over to check it out.  There were English-Icelandic dictionaries for sale, and all manner of jewelry, including lots with Mjolnir.  I found one pendant with Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s ravens, engraved on it, but while I am quite taken with the ravens, I’m not the type to wear such things.

When I left the bazaar, the ladies were about ready to move on.  There was a Norse combat demonstration coming up, and I really wanted to see it, so we headed back towards the harbour.  On the way we stopped in at the Reykjavik Bakery, and bought some vinerterte and a loaf each of Viking bread.  Mmmm.

The combat demo was really quite intriguing. It started off with a brief look at a small group of villagers, left behind while the able-bodied men went a-viking. (The narrator alleged that the word “viking” isn’t a noun but a verb; to go viking apparently means to travel in search of plunder or trade. I’d heard that before, but according to my favourite online etymology source, that may or may not be true.)  The women, the children, and the greybeards were left behind, and perforce needed to develop and maintain skills with weapons, both to hunt for sustenance and to fend off attackers, since not all Viking types got along with each other.

So the demo opened with a group of women, children, and old men practicing their archery, firing (blunted) arrows at a shield propped on a stick.  Then a raiding party approached, and the villagers drew together, ready to defend themselves, to the death if need be.

Then another raiding party approached. The two parties squared off, traded jeers, and rattled spears on shields.  (During this, the villagers made their quiet escape.)

And the narrator picked up his microphone, and led us through about a half-hour of Viking-style combat, with spears, hand-axes, saxes (long knives, the sign of a free man), Dane axes (long axes, really a hybrid between axe and spear), shields, Berserkers, swords, and all the other tools, implements, and traditions of Viking combat.

I felt kind of bad for the re-enactors; they fought — and fought hard — in long sleeves, heavy pants, heavier mail, with heavy weapons, under the hot, hot last-day-of-July sun.  They put on a heck of a show for us.

Then, once the combat ended, we wandered through the Viking village that was set up on the knoll.  Mom chatted with a couple of the ladies, who were knitting Viking-style; apparently one of them had studied it in England, and the other had learned it from YouTube.  O brave new world.  I snapped a bunch of pictures, and listened in on explanations here and there — one man, standing by his gold-hand-on-red-flag banner, said that the pennant served several purposes:  You could rally your own men to it; it would let your enemies know where you were, so they’d come to fight you; or it might scare your enemies away, if your reputation preceded you.

And after we’d toured the village, we had a bit of ice cream, and then we said à la prochaine to Gimli, headed home.

Happy belated Canada Day, and also happy Fourth to the Americans.

More like this

Published, woo hoo!

Today on my lunch break, for no other reason than “because I’m a nerd”, I punched my watch’s serial number into Google, expecting to find — I don’t know, maybe its incept date*. Nothing much, anyways.

Instead, I found a US Marshal forfeiture auction listing that included my watch.

That’s it in the bottom middle of the lot.

The things you learn.

[update] Apparently, the auction company in question “sells all the jewelry[etc.] seized and forfeited nationally for the U.S. Marshals Service.” So… do I have a drug dealer’s watch? Was it seized in a tax forteiture? The rather shallow mystery deepens a very little bit.

[2nd update] As it turns out, there’s no mystery here. What I took to be a unique serial number was apparently in fact a global product number. So it wasn’t my watch in the property auction; just a watch just like mine.
____

* See, there’s that nerd thing creeping in again.

My current WiP, Everything that Never Happened, is set mainly aboard a small 17th-century sailing vessel, a square-rigged ketch named the Mandalay. It’s not a coincidence that it’s a square-rigged ketch, just like the historical Nonsuch; ever since the first time I visited the Nonsuch gallery in the Manitoba Museum, I’ve been fascinated by the ship. I’m not a nautical type; I’ve spent my entire life on the prairies, and have seen ocean a total of three times. But something about the ship has always stuck in my mind, and I find myself constantly returning to it.

Maybe it’s just the name. I’m a sucker for a good name.

Anyways, sometime in February it occurred to me that, to really understand the Mandalay and her crew, I might be wise to learn more about the Nonsuch. I sent an email to someone at the Manitoba Museum, asking for any information they could give me, and also asking about tours. I received some information in the mail, a recommendation that I check out a book by Laird Rankin, who’s something of an expert on the Nonsuch, and an offer of a tour. To trim a long story to a short one, I went on a tour of the ship on Monday. Since the museum was closed, it was a quite private tour.

I spent three hours on and around the ship, asking questions of Robert, the museum’s resident Nonsuch expert. I learned a lot, and I took a lot of pictures. Some aspects of my story are greatly clarified for me now. Some of the things Robert told me will find their way quite directly into the novel.

And now I’ll get back to writing it…

All my Nonsuch photos

Right now there’s hoarfrost on everything.