A brief review of Saratoga Springs, NY:

It's a lovely town, located about half-way between Montreal and New York City.  In July, there is the ballet; in August, there are horse races.  Pick your month and our crowd carefully.   The Victorian mansions are probably equally beautiful in either month.

The food is good, from all reports, and we can recommend The Wheat Fields. The place is overrun with charming hotels and bed and breakfasts, but if you can afford it, we highly recommend the Saratoga Arms.  (No, no-one is paying us for these references!)

We (my life partner and I) spent the weekend visiting Saratoga Springs, New York to see our nephew dance with the New York City Ballet in Swan Lake.  What an exciting thing for a ten-year-old from Ohio, even if he did have to put up with the jealousy of the upper-east-side juvenile Manhattanites, who responded to his being given the prime position among the boys with name-calling and generally making his young life miserable. 

The ballet, the second newly choreographed Swan Lake we'd seen in four months, was lovely.  The prima ballerina was stunning; our nephew was poised, strong and elegant (not to mention brilliant and making our whole trip well worth our while!).  And the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra was mesmerizing in their playing.   All that, combined with being outside on a crisp summer night, in a lovely town developed as a summer playground for rich New Yorkers in the nineteenth century, made it an idyllic summer retreat.

Of course, driving over seven hours each way was draining, especially as there is only one driver in my household unit, and I'm not it.  That's right; I don't drive.  Never have.  Almost 50, and never drove.  I'm often struck by how strange that makes me, but never more often than in America.  (By America, I mean the United States of... not the continent.  Canadians would never call themselves Americans, no matter what the continent is called.  But more about that another time.)

It may be because we often drive long distances to get to America in the first place.  (Note: the "we" is the royal we; he drives, I am the passenger.)  It may also be because, with the exception of visits to Boston or New York City, we spend copious amounts of time in cars, driving to and from one small town or another suburb to visit friends and relatives.  Whatever it is, I often spend a good part of the drive back from America thinking about how remarkable it is that an entire country has evolved around everyone being able to skillfully navigate in a large, heavy piece of machinery that costs about as much as an annual salary of a full-time, minimum-waged worker. 

Now, we use a car here.  In fact, my life partner drives to work. But he doesn't need to.  There is a bus only two blocks from here that takes him to within a block of his workplace.  We also drive to see friends, and it certainly allows more spontaneous visiting.  But, we could visit our friends using buses and/or taxis.  Only a very few friends live in places we can't get to easily using public transit or affordably using cabs. 

I suppose it's possible that there is a life on the edge of Canadians cities and near Canadian towns that I'm totally unaware of, because I don't drive.  I mean, maybe it's not just America; maybe it's everywhere in Canada, except the places you can get to without driving a car.  But while being a Canadian who doesn't drive is peculiar, it's not un-Canadian.  In America, one feels that it is almost heretical to not drive.  But then, who said all heresies are bad things?

A final note on the American way: both of these newly choreographed Swan Lake's were done by North Americans.  And in neither of them does the swan die.  The prince dies in the first, killed by the villain.  The villain dies in the second one, but the prince still loses the swan.  Must all North Americans let the pure and white and clean survive all the nastiness?  The swan doesn't get her man in either version, but she does survive, while at least one man doesn't.  What does this mean for the (North) American way?

Update: That missed presentation?  The prof sent reassuring email, saying it wasn't a problem, and could I make the presentation this Tuesday? I can!

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