Sorry for the delay in this post – it was caused by a combination of not wanting to post much about jobs before I had one sorted and being rather busy organising everything before I leave Kansas. So I’ll be faking dates again.
Well I went to Nova Scotia. It was mostly positive. It was quite clear that he wanted me to join his lab as I was out up in some rather nice places and that was on top of the rather expensive last minute flights. My first night was spent in the Hilton Garden Inn near the airport and the next two nights in a hotel near his lab. Well I say hotel. They’d got me an apartment at the hotel that included a large kitchen, bathroom with jacuzzi bath and a desperate living room – it was totally over the top for one person!
The people in the lab seemed really nice and my new boss, Sean, seemed like a nice guy as well. The only real downside I could see was the windowless office. I got taken out for a pub lunch – including beer – and then had dinner with Sean in the evening at a really rather nice, and expensive restaurant – including wine. The other major thing of note from my visit to his lab was my visit to his orchard where he’s growing a thousand apple trees to help in his long term goal of being able to select the crosses most likely to be good crosses before growing them and waiting for fives years for them to bear fruit. I think the coolest thing about the orchard was how all the trees were being grown on dwarf root stock to stop them growing too big – I didn’t even know that was possible.
It turns out that although Kentville, the town the lab is based just outside, is nothing to write home about, Wolfville, just a 15 minute drive away is a really rather nice university town that seemed like a cool place to live. Between the two is New Minas which is basically one big shopping centre. Certainly not somewhere I’d want to live but at least it will make shopping easier – I would imagine there’d be very little you’d have to go into Halifax for.
On the day after my interview I went for a short hike before heading back to the airport. Both on the way there and back I stopped at a popular overlook and took some picture. I stopped on the way back to see if the tide was noticeably different as the Bay of Fundy has the biggest tidal range in the world. While noticeably different it wasn’t anything too amazing but maybe I just had my timing wrong. As for the hike itself, I knew the path went towards the sea on the other side of the peninsula but it started to look like I’d never get of the forest and see the sea on that side. Just as I was about to give up I found a side ath that led me down to some quite nice views. Photos from the Nova Scotia trip, including of my hotel “room” are here.
On the job front I also heard that I hadn’t got an interview for the Southampton job. I also had an informal interview for a job in London which went well enough that he made it sound like the formal interview would be, well a formality. Having spoken to him I had a difficult decision to make but in the end I’ve decided to take the Canada job for a couple of main reasons. Firstly, it’s an opportunity to work in Canada which appealed more than London and, secondly, although it may make making the next step in my career slightly harder it’s more likely to lead to any future job being in an area I’m more interested in. As such Canada was too good an opportunity to turn down – I’m much more likely to be able to get a London-based job in the future than one in Canada.
Making a decision on the job took a few weeks – a lot of which was spent waiting for replies to e-mails – so now back to where we were. The weekend after visiting Nova Scotia I headed down to Arkansas with Seth and Rob and met up with a lot of other people there. The first day was spent at HCR. Seth, Rob and I started the day doing some trad cracks. The highlight for me was first top-roping and then leading WMA. I top-roped it clean but unfortunately had a foot pop on lead. I also later sat on the rope to sort out a rope tangled round my foot but may have been able to avoid sitting on the rope if I had wanted to but there seemed no point as I already wasn’t doing it clean. I’d top-roped WMA with Carol on my very first Arkansas trip and told myself then that I would lead it before I left the US so it was nice to get it on lead, even if a little annoying that it wasn’t clean.
The rest of the day was spent doing a few sports routes before Rob and I headed to Sam’s Throne Sunday morning. It was Rob’s first visit to Sam’s Throne and I think he was rather impressed – as he should have been given that it’s wonderful. I seconded Rob up a couple of classics and led a couple of less-classic, but still very good routes, myself. They were not however worth the R and X dangerous grades they got in the guidebook. Yes, there wasn’t a nice vertical crack to lace with gear but if you looked around there was more than enough decent gear on both so that you were never facing a big fall. Photos from Saturday are here.
As I’d been away for four weekends on the trot I designated the next weekend a rest weekend and I honestly can’t remember what I did so it can’t have been very exciting!