Sideshow Tour Diary #7 | Scuttling, Shuttling, Farts, and Sore Parts

My partner and fellow poet Carmen Ellison came on this entire tour and took almost all of the great pics you will see here. Carmen and I rode shuttle vans and buses all over the place. Here we await the Robert Q shuttle from London to Toronto. From there, we will fly to Sydney, NS, and then shuttle across province (with some help from my mom and her trusty blue Yaris).

The best cab/shuttle moment of this mini-tour definitely happened in Sydney. After some long days of special eats, insufficient sleep, and jetlag, our stomachs were not in great shape. On the way from the Sydney airport to our hotel (a $15 fare, by the way), what smelled like the worst’s most foul fart seemed to hotbox the taxi. Carmen and I looked accusingly and gigglingly at each other, and with panic tried in vain to get the windows rolled down. Finally, through embarrassed titters, one of us managed to ask the driver to roll them down—at which point he had a great laugh. Turns out we were driving past a sulphur mine! I now have an excuse for all future public farts.

I also found out while on this mini-tour that my paternal grandfather was a cab driver in Halifax.

A poetry-tour dispatch from Invisible author Lucas Crawford (Sideshow Concessions). Catch Lucas between readings here on the Invisiblog for the next couple of months.