new context

For a brief period of 24 hours I was in Cambridge on a site visit for a text installation I am making there. I travelled cross-country from Oxford to Cambridge with the bus. It was fascinating to travel through the English landscape after so recently being in Canada. The changes are subtle and the countryside is devoted to agriculture. The fields change in size and by the time I reached Cambridge they were huge and ripening.

The bus travelled slowly from one conurbation to the next, stopping in adorable stone villages and huge new towns like Milton Keynes. Agriculture filled the void between developments. The skies are huge and seem to grow as the hills lower and turn to ripples on the horizon.

It became a study of blossoming cloud and chasing thunderstorms. Two days of finding rain and running for shelter in the city and watching more of the same from the bus window.

Countryside from the bus

Snatches of views

Cambridgeshire

the road

This had been the first time I had traveled so widely in Newfoundland and Labrador. I am beginning to appreciate its size. Driving was such an experience. There was only one moose moment when a teenager ambled over the Trans Canada highway in front of me and was having too much fun on this asphalt thing to move away for some time.   

Sometimes the only way to fully understand a landscape is to move within it. I have seen so much road and so many trees. I've driven through strange boreal forest and arctic tundra. Landscapes supporting the thinest of berry bogs and raw moonlike rocks. 

the road along the bay of Islands

Bay of Islands 2

RV for two with trailed car

I am fascinated by the way other people travel. This RV was for only two and the car was trailed from the back.

bend in the road 

Newfoundland has so many long and straight roads.