Dwelling on the visual images Highly Amusing Fact #2 conjured up, I was reminded of my cousin who also plays the cello. In the past few years he has moved from Vancouver back home to Nova Scotia, west again to Vancouver, then to balmy Sioux Lookout in Northern Ontario, and thence to Toronto proper. Not only does he play the cello, he also drives a nice shiny deep cherry red Volkswagon Beetle — not one of the new ones, an original. He also owns a canoe.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

He drove across Canada. Now, a Beetle doesn’t have a lot of room to begin with, but when you’ve crammed it with all your personal possessions there is considerably less room. As most people do, he lashed that canoe to the top of the Beetle. (Yes, go ahead; pause and appreciate the humourous mental picture that sentence conjures up.) The only thing left was the cello. My cousin, being of innovative stock that thinks outside the box, picked it up, tucked it inside the canoe, and drove East.