When I arrived here at Bradley International Airport north of Hartford, CT last Sunday I was out of the terminal and on to the Hertz bus in just a few minutes, so I only got the vaguest sense of the state of the terminal. Now that I have (characteristically) arrived 90 minutes early for my flight, I’ve had a chance to understand just how 1972 it is.

I hasten to add that I speak here only of the ye olde terminal that is now home to Air Canada and a gaggle of discount airlines like Southwest, and some others that you’ve either never heard of, or that have gone out of business. It is not, in other words, the focus of the Bradley’s future.

It is, however, a remarkable time capsule of the architecture of my youth, and a visit here helps one understand why airports created in reaction to this era are full of light and open space.

It reminds me of a near-empty mall on the suburban strip in Denver that [[Mike]] and visited a couple of years ago, a relic of the big mall construction build of the 1970s that had fallen victim to the new and modern mall across the road.

When I asked the gate agent at [[Air Canada]] where I should hang out, he sent me here to the Sheraton Hotel, which appears to serve as the de facto lounge for the terminal — the lobby has a “We Proudly Serve Starbucks” coffee shop, and wifi is available for $4.95/hour (there are about a dozen others here, sucking power from behind plant stands, with laptops open).

It’s a beautiful day, and it should be still be daylight when we take off at 5:40 so I should get a good view of New England from the air.

I’m stopped here in Keene, NH for lunch at the Panera Bread outlet. They have free wifi, and a very friendly start page:

At Panera Bread, our WiFi is free and we welcome you to stay as long as you like. All we ask is that you give consideration to other patrons, particularly at busy times of day.

At lunchtime, for example, please try to use the smallest table available so that we can accommodate larger parties. Or, come back when things have slowed down and you can spread out your work.

Thank you for your patronage and consideration. With your help, we can all enjoy our sandwiches, salads, freshly baked bread and hot coffee — and free WiFi, too.

The is not only considerably more friendly than a “please limit wifi use to 10 minutes” rule, but also, I suspect, engenders a fierce loyalty to the brand. It’s smart friendly, in other words.

We’re firming up our spring travel plans and we’re looking for temporary housing in Copenhagen, Denmark from May 26th to June 11th, 2006. We’re looking for a child-friendly apartment, flat or house, centrally located and/or within easy walking distance of public transit. We’ve found a place!

Just how many “separated twins change places” movies can Disney make? There’s the original 1961 The Parent Trap and the 1998 remake starring Lindsay Lohan. And tonight here in my hotel room on The Disney Channel, Model Behaviour, a movie that seems to have essentially the same plot and stars Kathy Lee Gifford and Justin Timberlake.

The Disney Channel, by the way, is a brilliant example of well-integrated vertical evil. The channel is all Disney, all the time.

Before I got sucked into the twin movie, I saw Transamerica at the Peterborough Community Theatre. It was an excellent movie, and Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers were both brilliant.

It’s into the Prius and down to Hartford again tomorrow afternoon for the flight home to [[PEI]] via [[Montreal]]. It has been a good week at [[Yankee]] this week, but I’ve been away from home too long and it will be good to be back.

Having no meetings this afternoon, I left [[Yankee]] a little early and headed into Nashua, NH for some eating and shopping and movie-going.

My wonderful Born shoes have been gradually falling apart this winter, and over the last week they’ve started to leak, so my immediate priority was to find shoes (I tried to feel Proud in my Shoes From Proude’s last week, but they’re all outta Borns and seemed generally disinterested in my business).

I stopped at the L.L. Bean outlet, but they had nothing but preppy beach shoes and hunting boots. Down in the heart of the mall district I found a plaza full of shoe stores along with an Eastern Mountain Sports. While the shoe stores were full of heavy Vans and shiny dress shoes, at EMS I found a couple of perky, vital sales people willing to spend a lot of time with me selling the virtues of the Keen Bronx Canvas shoe. I spent about 30 minutes vacillating between the size 11-1/2 and the size 12, and finally settled on a nice greeny-brown (offically Oak Mold/Green) pair. The buying experience was so pleasant I halfway considered buy a kayak or yurt at the same time.

I’d decided before setting off to try to visit the Wilton Town Hall Theatre to see Woody Allen’s Match Point. Readers with good memories will recall, however, that I’d already seen this movie, in Geneva in February, something I’d completely forgotten; by the time I realized the error of my memory it was too late, and I was left without movie options.

Undeterred, I stopped in at Chiang Mai, the excellent Thai restaurant on Rte. 101 on the outskirts of Nashua. I ordered up the Gai Kapow (spicy chili-basil infused chicken) and some rice along with a “Thai iced tea” and left the table very satisfied.

The drive down to Nashua and back gave me the opportunity to experience podcasts like Big City People do: in the car. I listened to an episode of Daily Source Code on the way down and on the way back half an episode of TWIT and a good episode of the Lonely Planet Travelcast on Las Vegas.

I’m getting used to driving the Toyota Prius and it’s become really quite comfortable to drive now that I’m used to the gasoline engine shutting off at intersections and at other times when it’s got nothing to do. Mileage on the way to Nashua, which is mostly downhill, was 50 miles per gallon; on the way back up the hill to Peterborough it was a still-impressive 42.2 MPG.

As I flipped through the cable channels last night at the [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]] I stopped on the movie Sixteen Candles for a minute. In the scene I watched, a very young Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald were sitting in an open-topped Jeep in a garage.

And suddenly I realized that the entire course of my life had been changed by a Jeep.

Back in the early 1980s, one of the recruiting tools used by [[Trent University]] was a 10 minute film that told the story of a student arriving at Trent for the first time. She arrived in her cool Jeep, and as she pulled into the parking lot a gaggle of fresh-faced coeds emerged to help her move in. She then proceeded to benefit greatly from small-group teaching, stunning architecture and the proximity to the Trent Canal.

I was hooked. And I think it was the Jeep that sold me.

And so I went to Trent. Dropped out. Stayed in Peterborough. Left. Came back. Met Catherine. And the rest is history.

My old friend, housemate and business partner Simon Shields has just launched Isthatlegal.ca, a site he’s created:

…to share my knowledge, experience and research regarding law with those in our society who most need it - and with those who work towards a better world.

In many ways this project is an evolution of some early hypertext experiments that Simon and I hatched back in the late 1980s in [[Peterborough]] when Simon was running the Community Information Agency. This was pre-web, and mostly pre-Internet, but the nature of those experiments was similar — organizing information about The Law into a more navigable form.

Apparently Amy fell off Autumn yesterday. These are the things you overhear when lining up for a cheese danish here in Peterborough.

The other big news here is that Little Roy’s is closed for renovations; fortunately Big Roy’s next door has taken over the newspaper business for the duration of the closure, so it’s still possible to buy the Times. Indeed Big Roy’s is staying open until 8:00 p.m. every night (except Sundays) to compensate. When I questioned the cashier at Big Roy’s last night on the reason for the reno he said that Little Roy’s hadn’t been modified in more than 30 years and it was time for an upgrade.

Meanwhile on the personal front, my entire Peterborough morning routine has been thrown into a tizzy by changes in the schedule here at Twelve Pine. My routine — and am willing to admit here and now that I am a creature of habit — has included a refreshing [[Honest Tea]] accompanied by aforementioned danish and a bowl of fruit salad. The fruit salad man, however, doesn’t get in until later in the morning these days, so I’m left fruitless. It’s a hard adjustment.

It’s municipal election night here in New Hampshire tomorrow night. While not quite surrounded by the hoopla that greeted me when I was here for federal and state elections in November of 2004, it’s still exciting to be here at this time, what with democracy being so much “closer to the ground” than it is back home.

My favourite item up for voting tomorrow is on an amendment to the Peterborough Zoning Ordinance (it’s one of several on the ballot):

Peterborough seems to be at a crossroads, with factions supporting a sort of pure laine approach — “Peterborough for Peterboroughians” so to speak — lined up against a pro-business camp that wants a new grocery store and other abominations. The issues are, no doubt, much more complex and shaded; one only has to look up Route 101 to Nashua, however, to see what everyone’s either afraid of (or seeking), as Nashua is a veritable commercial wasteland (or paradise) compared to bucolic ye olde Peterborough.

A colleague at [[Yankee]], Jack Burnett, is up for the vacant Selectman position on tomorrow’s Peterborough ballot. Jack is winning the sign war, with his “Burnett Means Business” signs lining almost every street. If only because we’ve come to admire Jack’s razor sharp copy-edit skills, I’m prepared to throw my endorsement, such as it is, behind Jack (even if he does “Mean Business”).

If you want to get some idea of what Peterboroughians are in for when they go to vote tomorrow, take a look at the Ballots for Town Officials, Zoning Amendments, and ConVal School District — that’s meaty stuff there, the kind of stuff, alas, that is deemed too complex for we simple residents of Charlottetown to leave up to ourselves.

Perhaps the most controversial item on Tuesday’s ballot concerns a “special warrant” of $548,112 to acquire laptop computers (Apple iBooks, as it turns out) for every sixth grade student in the district. This proposal, explained by the school board here, would not only see schools acquire 300 iBooks and assorted other gear ($410,000), but would also bathe the schools in wifi ($44,000) and train teachers how to use them ($15,000).

In a story about the warrant, the Monadnock Ledger notes that not all are in favour of the initiative:

Although the board’s Budget and Property Chair Craig Hicks said he “would love to see every sixth grader with a laptop computer,” resident Tom Baker of Temple said giving laptops to sixth graders was “folly.” He predicted that to do this would lead to vandalism and losses. “I heard the worst thing you can do is leave students alone with a computer,” he said.

The Peterborough Transcript reports, however, that officials are not without answers to the potential dangers that rampant laptop use might lead to; the paper quotes South Meadow School Principal Dick Dunning:

The use of the computers away from school has been a concern of many, and Dunning said a plan has been developed to track the history of what computers have been used for.

“We will conduct random checks,” Dunning said, “and if we find the student has been using it inappropriately, they will receive one strike against them.”

If the student receives three strikes, the opportunity to take the laptop home will be revoked and they will only be able to use it in the classroom.

Apparently Live Free Or Die does not apply to the pre-teen set.

I will, alas, miss the Peterborough Town Meeting coming up on Saturday; word on the street is that it offers more democracy than you can see almost anywhere else, all packed into one fun-filled marathon day.

Left [[Charlottetown]] later yesterday afternoon on what seemed like an endless Dash 8 flight to Montreal (I understand why they invented jet planes). Glided through U.S. Customs pre-clearance on a cloud (it’s much, much, much faster to go through on a Sunday night than on a Monday morning).

Walked the entire length of the international terminal to Gate 87 to catch my micro-flight to Hartford, Connecticut and found half a dozen others waiting. Our departure time came and went. Ten minutes after we were to be in the air a harried gate agent showed up and we found that the original gate agent was MIA and the air crew were trapped on the other side of the security doors, unable to do anything.

The “air crew” on the tiny Beechcraft plane was the captain and co-pilot cum flight attendant. The best part of the flight was the taxi to the runway with the cockpit doors open coming up right behind a giant British Airways jet; otherwise it was about an hour in the air and uneventful.

Bradley Airport in Hartford has taken a page from the Hamilton, Ontario airport design book: drab, featureless and confusing. It was additionally full of shifty-looking types.

I expected the Hertz counter to be as deserted as every other stop on my trip. I was wrong: for some reason everyone was waiting in line there, and I stood in line for about 15 minutes. Fortunately my time in line allowed me to overhear someone at the counter being handed the keys to a Toyota Prius. As I’ve tried and failed to find someone to rent me a Prius for several years, when I got to the counter I asked if I could swap out my Subaru for a Prius. Initially it looked like this wasn’t going to happen; fortunately an eagle-eared clerk next door tracked one down for me, and so five minutes later I was in the future, trying to figure out how to power the thing on.

I figured it out (key fob in slot, press Power button — easy). And then spent another five minutes navigating through the dashboard computer, figuring out how to tune the radio and defrost the windows. The 121 mile drive from Hartford to Peterborough, NH took me through Massachusetts and Vermont, making for travel through two provinces and four states in the space of an evening. The drive was very, very foggy — “can’t see the centre line” foggy at times. But I took it slowly, and didn’t have to do much navigating, as it was mostly a straight shot up Interstate 91 and east on Route 9 to Keene, then Route 101 to Peterborough.

I arrived at the venerable [[Jack Daniels Motor Inn]] at exactly 1:00 a.m. and fell almost instantly to sleep.

Gas mileage for this leg: 47.7 miles per gallon. Meaning that it cost me about $5.60 in gas to get here. More on the Prius as we get to know each other.