Two thumbs up for Hungary.  Budapest very cool.  Pretty buildings.  Scary Terror House.  Tasty goulash.

Got to see the Red Bull Air Race from Buda Castle.  A gorgeous day, a view over Buda and Pest, the Danube meandering along, all apparently insufficient.  Also had to see planes flying underneath Chain Bridge and in and out of big floaty witch's hats and loopdilooping in the air. *mrowr*

Danes are unreasonably fond of their flag.  Granted, it's quite pretty (and doesn't have a mess of someone else's flag taking up a significant quarter - always a plus in my book).  It's the world's oldest national flag, and apparently drifted down from Heaven and helped win some battle.  But they're unreasonably fond of their flag.

It's weird.  It doesn't really seem to be about patriotism.  There's a deep streak of irony through the Danish psyche that wouldn't allow that level of uncoolness.  It really truly seems to be about the flag.  They fly it all over the place and print it on all sorts of things and use it as a decoration.  In a key piece of WTF, it's apparently the way to indicate a birthday.  The damn thing is everywhere.

That said, this seems a bit extreme.

I'm an enormous L M Montgomery fan.  I've read many of her books at least twenty times, and not just because I was trapped in a town with a crappy library.  I best remember the day I met Charles by how much I freaked out when I discovered he was from Prince Edward Island.  It's Anne Land!  (Though, truth be told, I vastly prefer weird snobby Emily to goody-two-shoes Anne.  And arty Teddy is so much hotter than stodgy Gilbert.)  There was no way I was passing up the opportunity to PEI it up when I was over that side of Canadia.

I went light-house spotting through Nova Scotia over to Prince Edward Island, through adorable Charlottetown up to Anne's part of town.  Peggy's characterisation of PEI as "so cute I could puke" is apt.  I played Spot-the-Obscure-Montgomery-Reference: Ingleside Lodge Motel and Kindred Spirits Country Inn were topped by Shining Waters Family Fun Park.  Of course, I went to Green Gables.

From PEI (across the Confederation Bridge!), I meandered back through New Brunswick.  I stopped in at Shediac, because I had found it impossible to believe that it wasn't just Australians that built enormous fibre-glass versions of things - the Big Lobster set me straight. All trips must have a highlight, however, and this one was spontaneously dropping in on the incredible woman who is Charles' mother.  She is so cool.

Ed and Sean getting hitched was a lovely excuse to visit Eastern Canada.  They picked Halifax, Nova Scotia for the deed, so Marky-Mark, Kindy, Yammy and I converged there.  Mark in Dublin was actually geographically closer to Halifax than Kindy and Yammy in Seattle.  That Canadia is damn big.

The Edding was lovely.  Ed looked like Princess Grace, Sean wore a skirt and it was a Catholic service so I knew all the words.  Apparently the modern term for a sporran is a 'junk bag'.

There was karaoke at the reception, which was damn entertaining.  Must have been the booze.  Highlights were the groom doing Prince's "Kiss" complete with falsetto, the bride doing Fergie's "London Bridge (Oh Shit)", and the Croatian doing "Blame Canada".  Mark and I deafened Kindy with our homage to Nick, "Anthem".

We inspected Halifax closely, and it was very pretty.  However, the most important discovery we made was at McDonald's.

Ugh!  Who would be silly enough to eat that?!

Uh oh.  Not a good sign.

Huh.  Mark.  How surprising.

So what did you do on the weekend?  Bumbershoot?  PAX?  Burning Man?  Nice, nice, nice.

I BOUGHT A BLUE WATERING CAN!

Me for the win!

Oh, we did this too: