Charlie Puth’s song Cry features Kenny G.

Puth explains how that came about.

I have to hand it to Laura, personable owner of The 5th Wave Espresso & Tea Bar: she created her business from scratch, survived a move from Queen Street to University Avenue, and, after her less-than-optimal space on University became untenable, has now resurfaced in what might turn out to be her best resting place yet, inside the Red Island Cider tap room on Longworth Avenue.

It’s such a perfect match: The 5th Wave has always been a morning business, Red Island Cider has always been an afternoon business, so it lets a space that would otherwise be unused for half the day find a new use, it allows each business to promote the other, and it bolsters the community hub that Red Island has always sought to be.

I enjoyed a nitro cold brew at the bar this afternoon; it’s powering me through my afternoon.

Twelve years ago I had an idea: if I could figure out a way to read my electricity meter in real time, and post my usage in public, and then convince some friends to do the same, perhaps the social pressure with being public with something that’s usually not would reduce our collective usage.

This idea became The Social Consumption Project, and I received a microgrant from the City of Charlottetown to help fund it.

I identified a simple, inexpensive, USB device, the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1, that could read both electricity and water meters in Charlottetown (which sent out their readings, unencrypted, to allow meter readers to read them on regular drive-bys), and I came up with a Raspberry Pi-based solution for reading meters and uploading readings to a web-based database,

Over the life of the project there were 8 households that allowed me to read and publish their consumption data. While the meter-reading part of the solution was rock-solid, the “hooking a Raspberry Pi up to home wifi” part of the solution was not, and the Achilles heel of the project was that when things went wrong I had to haul a monitor and keyboard to my friends’ homes, interrupt their day, and figure out where things had gone wrong.

Partner homes eventually dropped off, one by one, due this complexity, to the point where our house was the last one standing. But our own AMRUSB-1 and Raspberry Pi have been dutifully gathering and archiving water and electricity usage data since the very beginning, just under 800,000 readings in all, ever since.

Until the morning of April 23, 2026, when our electricity meter got swapped out for a new “smart” meter, as part of Maritime Electric’s meter replacement program, and the radio went cold.

We were always in a funny situation here in Charlottetown with regards to meters: Maritime Electric’s meters were new enough to emit radio data in the clear—older meters needed to be read face-to-face—but old enough that the idea that sending out this data in the clear was a privacy issue. 

(To their credit, the idea that consumer-level technology would allow the data to be read by civilians when the meters were first installed wouldn’t have appeared possible.)

Those of us interested in our consumption were the beneficiaries of this “kind of smart meter” interregnum between dumb and smart. But now it’s over.

For posterity, I’m publishing the entire archive of electricity readings here, 785,211 readings in all, running from October 26, 2014 until April 23, 2026 at 9:51 a.m., when the old meter was disconnected: electricity-readings-archive.csv.zip.

Here’s what out consumption looks like, year by year:

Here’s what it looks like on a chart:

(The increase in 2023 is something I dove into earlier this year, and traced to roof heating wires and a dehumidifier.)

Here’s the same data, but with seasons highlighted:

What’s clear from this chart is that our usage has seasonal variations, and that the summer is where we peak. I’m almost certain this is due to air conditioning, which we’ve used every summer, and more intensively in recent years.

While our real-time home data archiving has ended, there’s a promise, sometime soon, that Maritime Electric’s planned customer portal, using the new meters as the data source, will provide the same data:

More data on your usage: AMI metering will provide you with detailed energy usage information that you can easily access via your account. Over the next several years, we’ll be rolling out a new customer portal. Once available, this system will allow you to view your energy consumption online rather than waiting for your monthly bill. You’ll be able to see how daily habits, seasonal changes, or new appliances impact your usage and find opportunities to save.

In the meantime, our water meter continues to broadcase our water usage, in the clear, over the its radio, so we’ll continue to gather and archive that.

The deep spark that gave rise to all of this was this piece in WIRED from 2001, which I noted in 2007, and which hung around the back of my mind for another 4 years before I took action. I couldn’t have predicted that, all these years later, the machine I built would be still chugging along, albeit without one of its important sources.

I learned in May that doing a hard thing together with your partner—a thing that stretches you, a thing you think that maybe you can’t actually do—is a good way to take your relationship out for a ride, so to speak. 

I imagine for some it would make fault lines more evident, break things; in our case, it drew us closer together, taught me more about what “doing something together” actually feels like, when you sink into it, and ended up being loads of fun.

From the morning of May 11, 2026 to the afternoon of May 16, 2026, Lisa and I cycled from Brussels to Bruges. It was Lisa’s 60th birthday present to me.

Neither of us had ever cycled anywhere farther than across to Stratford and back until a month ago; facing up to the prospect of cycling more than 50 km in a day—like cycling to Borden from Charlottetown, in Island terms—was daunting. Visions of exhaustion, tire punctures, cycling in driving rain, and simple overwhelm, danced in my head. It wasn’t like we were proposing to climb the Matterhorn, but for us this was going to be a stretch.

Here’s how we did it.

Booking a Cycle Tour

We booked the tour through Calgary-based 10Adventures, which, in turn, outsourced local logistics to Belgian Bike Tours. 

We were happy to have a Canadian contact to arrange things for us, and to pay in Canadian dollars; we were happy to have a Belgian contact arranging the tour, booking hotels, providing route information, ferrying our luggage from hotel to hotel, and acting as an emergency contact if needed.

It certainly wasn’t the cheapest way to cycle from Brussels to Bruges, but this was our first long-distance cycle tour, and we wanted to shave off as many of the things we could shave off to let us just focus on the cycling.

How It Worked

The tour started with an overnight in Brussels, followed by 6 days of cycling, ending with an overnight in Bruges. 

The tour booking included 7 nights of hotels (with breakfast), bicycle rental, route planning, and luggage delivery. 

Every morning we’d drop our luggage at the hotel front desk, head out for a day of cycling, and our luggage would be at our next hotel when we arrived.

Where We Cycled

The route was deliberately choosen to not simply be a straight shot, but rather a mix of villages, towns, cities, and countryside. 

From Brussels we cycled to Mechelen, a mid-sized city, then to Antwerp, to the rural community of Dendermonde, then Ghent, then the town of Maldegem, and finally to Bruges. 

We found the route remarkably well-curated, and we enjoyed the daily mix of different scenery and surfaces (we generally did not enjoy cobblestones, which, fortunately, were rare).

The route was FLAT, very flat. Here’s what the elevation profile looked like:

After some hilliness getting out of Brussels, we were essentially cycling on straight ahead, with almost no ups or downs.

Here’s how our days broke down:

Day by day it looked like this:

Wednesday distance was short: the weather forecast included rain, wind, thunder and lightning, and possibly hail. We weren’t eager to be trapped in the middle of rural Belgium in that, so we opted to spend the bulk of the day in Antwerp, and took the train to Dendermonde (ironically, via Mechelen, where we’d been the day before), meaning we only had a short ride from the Dendermonde rail station to our B&B.

Friday the distance was also shorter than expected: Lisa took a fall off her bike, on slippery cobblestones, on Thursday evening, as we were nearing our Ghent hotel. She hurt her wrist and her shoulder, and the shock of it was a lot. While she was recovered enough by morning to continue the trip, her bicycle needed repair; we found our way to the excellent city-sponsored De Fietsambassade Gent behind the train station, and while they patched up her bike, we enjoyed a tour of the nearby S.M.A.K. contemporary art museum. The later leaving time necessitated making up time, so we took the train to Waarschoot and cycled to Maldegem from there.

In both cases, going off piste was a blessing in disguise: we got a little time to recuperate, and to see bits of Antwerp and Ghent we would have missed.

The Bicycles

Our bicycles were hybrid Dutch-style touring bikes (we had to option to scale up to e-bikes, but decided we wanted to do the cycling under our own power). 

Here’s how they looked when we first encountered them in our Brussels hotel, where they’d been delivered for us:

The bikes had a single pannier on the back rack, and a handlebar bag mounted to the front: we used the pannier to carry rain gear and backup dry clothes, and the front bag to carry maps, chamois cream, phone chargers, and so on.

We provided our body heights as part of the sign-up process, so the bikes were adjusted for us. I found, perhaps because I am long-of-torso and short-of-legs, that my handlebars were too low to be comfortable; fortunately we came across a cycle repair station on the second day of cycling, and I was able to adjust them to be just right.

We took the bicycles out on the streets of Brussels the night before our formal tour started, and that was a good move: it let us get used to the position, the gearing, the saddle height, and the vibe of cycling in the city. 

For the first 30 minutes I thought “there’s no way this is ever going to feel comfortable,” but then I settled into things, and my bicycle, give or take, was a comfortable home for the next week.

Our Daily Routine

The immovable schedule points of our morning routine on the tour were the start time of the hotel breakfast (generally 7:00 a.m.), and needing to have our bags at the hotel front desk by 9:00 a.m.

We usually got on the road by 8:30 a.m., cycled for an hour, stopped for coffee and a snack, cycled for another hour, stopped for lunch, cycled for another hour, stopped for coffee, and then cycled to our destination.

The “cycling day” was about 8 hours, with 3 to 4 hours of that actually pedalling.

What It Felt Like

I had no idea what longer-distance cycling would feel like. I suspected it might be boring, but, in truth, it never was: there was always something around the next corner, and my mind settled into a meditative routine of taking in the scenery, adjusting my position in the saddle, making small gear adjustments, stopping for water, chatting with Lisa, navigating. 

It was never boring. What a surprise.

I also suspected that it would be very physically taxing, that I would end each day as though I’d just done an 8-hour workout. But cycling on a well-fitted bicycle over flat terrain with plenty of breaks turns out to be pretty easy, all things considered, and while we ended each day tired, it also felt like if someone said “there’s actually 10 km more today” we could have pulled it off. We might have complained, but we could have done it.

It wasn’t a given that Lisa and I would be compatible cyclists. We had some inkling that we were—we’d been cycling before, and had been “in training” for a month of cycling before we left—and we are, you know, in love.

But what is she wanted to go faster and I wanted to go slower? Or if one of us wanted to pack it in? Or break less often?

None of this happened: we established a good, sustainable pace, and we got through each day, sometimes cycling beside each other, sometimes with one or the other of us in front. It was smooth.

As to our physical comfort, I wrote about this in a post all its own: suffice to say that good cycle shorts and liberal use of chamois cream were important.

None of this is to say that we didn’t find waking up every morning and facing down a day of cycling daunting, especially if there was rain in the forecast  the transition was usually uncomfortable and a like nerve-wracking. Inevitably, though, 30 minutes into cycling, we’d be fully back into it.

Navigating

Our tour was self-guided, which is to say that we didn’t have a group of other cyclists with us, nor was anyone leading the way.

We were given the route in three ways: a set of daily printed route maps was waiting at our hotel when we arrived; we were given access to a mobile app with the route pre-configured; and we were emailed the GPX files of each day’s ride before we left Canada.

We ended up navigating in two ways.

To start, I imported the GPX files into Komoot, and, with my phone tucked into the waterproof sleeve of my handlebar bag, I used its turn by turn voice and map navigation to guide us. This worked, though it left me needing to always be in the lead, and “in charge” of the route.

Eventually we found our way to using the knooppunt system, which was baked into our printed route guides. The system seems complicated at first, but, once you learn it, it’s very simple: the route is described as a series of numbers, and those numbers appear on signposts along the path or road. You’re always cycling toward the next number: once you arrive at it, you switch to following the signs for the next number, and so on.

Using this system let us share the navigational load, detach from technology, and pay more attention to the road. It also kept us more connected, as we were forever shouting back and forth the route numbers “31 to 28 … 31 to 28.”

The trickiest parts of every day were cycling into the hotels, as generally this meant leaving the number system behind and reverting to phone navigation, with a lot of twists and turns. We figured it out, but not without some missteps and wrong turns.

The Weather

Paying close attention to the weather got baked into our living and breathing. We used the Buienradar mobile app regularly to track rain (as well as thunder and lightning). And of course we paid a lot of attention to the sky.

We had good advice before we left to invest in rain gear, and we followed it: we both had good raincoats and rain pants, and that let us cycle, in modest comfort, through showers. 

The weather was very changeable, and we often got in and out of our rain gear several times a day. We were lucky to only experience two real downpours, and in both cases we sheltered under trees until they passed.

We were proud of our decision to cut a day of cycling from the tour due to weather. It let us see, and set aside, our completist natures, injected some extra agency into our spirit, and the detour into Antwerp gifted us a lovely day at a museum, a lovely meal, and a visit to a top-flight art supply store. 

Highlights

Too many to mention them all. Mostly the feeling of daily accomplishment, and being together. 

But a few:

• Cycling through a neighbourhood of very fancy homes north of Brussels on our first day.
• Robot-made coffee near the Atomium.
• Pulling into our first hotel at the end of day one, in Mechelen. An amazing feeling.
• Sauna and swimming, followed by room service in our Antwerp hotel.
• Finding the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp, and weather conspiring to allow us to spend a morning there.
• Taking a ferry across the river to Schellebelle.
• Deciding not to skip the loop up to Laarne, and thus getting to see the castle there.
• Stumbling upon l’Apéro d’Oc in Ghent.
• Taking our bikes on the train.
• Poppies. Everywhere.
• A man on a horse carrying a dog riding up to us while we were sheltering from the rain.
• Coffee and chocolate at Mr. Blend.
• Stumbling upon Urban Café.
• Suppers, in general, were tasty, varied, and the fuel and the delight we needed at the end of each day. 
• Reaching our hotel—and the end of the tour—in Bruges.

Because we were always moving, the tour, in my memories, plays as a series of flashes against a constantly moving background; in that sense, the real highlight is more the entire experience than any specific meal or sight.

Lowlights

• I found it hard to sleep the first 2 or 3 nights: coming down off the high of cycling, being in a strange hotel room, anxiety about the next day, all contributed.
• On the first night, and on the very last night, I had some morning charlie horses in my right calf. They passed quickly, and I was able to stretch them out, but I was afraid they’d ground us. I addressed this with oral rehydration salts and staying better hydrated through the day.
• Lisa falling off her bike in Ghent was traumatic. The shock of the fall itself, fear that she’d sprained or fractured her wrist, and, later, pain that developed—and that remains—in her shoulder. It was a lot. It could have stopped us cold. She is lucky. 

Would I Do It Again

Absolutely.

Should You Do It?

Absolutely. But with caveats.

We were newbies, but we’ve cycled in cities, we know how to navigate, and we’re generally fit. I couldn’t have done the tour as much-less-fit Peter, 10 years ago: I would have been exhausted, likely would have injured myself, and I would have been a dangerous cyclist.

Doing a longer-distance cycle tour should definitely not be your first time cycling, or your first time cycling since you were young: it’s a different thing entirely from cycling here in Charlottetown, and you need a basic level of fitness, physically and mentally.

We also benefited from 4 days of cycling, on e-bikes, in Liège before the tour started and that taught us a lot about European cycling culture: who yields to who (both according to the rules, and what the local custom is), how hand signals are used, how bells are used, and so on. That training was instumental in a smoother, safer exit from Brussels a few days later.

The Celebration Video

Although it has nothing to do with cycling, and was assembled only once we’d reached Bruges, this video that Lisa posted somehow sums up the spirit of our adventure. Such happiness. Let’s just say that to get me into that spirit, cycling 225+ km together was a necessary precondition.

Bill McKinnen, in A Question of Margin:

One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human.

McKibben is among the smartest and clearest communicators about the climate crisis. 

As Lisa relates here, we had the joy of encountering a Royal Delft Peacock Symphony cup in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport this week, a cup significant because it was the subject of a print that Lisa carved and printed last year and exhibited at The Gallery.

To see and feel the actual cup—her reference had been a photograph—was remarkable.

One of the joys of our recent trip was renting app-based e-bikes from Dott (in Liège) and Lime (in Rotterdam).

The scheme is similar for both. First, you download their app and set up an account and payment method. Once you’ve down that, it’s as simple as walking up to a bike, by happenstance or by locating one on the map in the app, and scanning a QR code. The bike unlocks, and off you ride

There are various rules in place, depending on the city, for where you can leave bikes. Liège seemed generally more permissive, whereas Rotterdam had more restrictions. Once you’ve found a legal place to leave the bike, you “end the ride” in the app, the bike locks, and off you walk. It’s very freeing to be able to just leave the bike, move on, and find another one later on if needed.

The bikes were powerful, at least compared to the Dutch bikes, powered by our legs. If you’ve never ridden an e-bike, it can feel like getting on a horse and immediately galloping. Or like you’re a superhero. Hilly terrain is reduced from a pain in the ass to a little bit of extra pedalling. 

We had bicycle helmets with us to use on our cycle tour from Brussels to Bruges; despite helmet usage in Belgium and the Netherlands being optional (and relatively rare, though increasing), we wouldn’t have ridden without them. It was worth the additional layer of safety to cart them around with us, and after a while it was just natural to have them with us.

In both Liège and Rotterdam they ended up being our primary way of getting around, and in both cases I think doing so enhanced our relationship with the cities and their geography.

Both cities are extremely bicycle friendly, with cycleways or dedicated bicycle lanes almost everywhere. Many intersections have dedicated bicycle cycling (with call buttons located a bicycle height, convenient to the path). By comparison, cycling in Charlottetown feels barbaric.

There were times, especially in Rotterdam, that having powerful e-bikes under us, while riding through the chaotic life of the city, with myriad other bikes and pedestrians and cars, felt just on the edge of too much.

But we made our way. And it was generally a joy.

One thing we needed to be concerned about when cycling longer distances than we were used to — 45 to 55 km per day — was the health of our nether regions.

Everything I read suggested that there’s nothing that can shut a cycle tour faster and more definitively than the chafing, pressure sores, and infections that can result from not paying attention.

So we paid attention.

We both got outfitted with cycling shorts from Outer Limit before we left, and supplemented with another pair from Kameo in Liège. These are padded shorts that fit tightly. You wear them right against your skin, with no underwear, and they serve to cushion your sit bones and reduce chafing. 

Wearing them off the bike feels like wearing an ill-fitting diaper; wearing them on the bike is much more comfortable than just wearing street clothes.

Between cycle shorts and skin we lubed up, several times a day, with a healthy spread of chamois cream—also from Outer Limit—in any area that might experience chafing. 

I was very liberal with the chamois cream: I slathered it everywhere.

That we finished the ride is a testament to the fact that it all worked.

After day one I did have a little sensitivity in the “apex of the intergluteal cleft,” and I jumped right on this with an application of Inotyol zinc oxide cream—the pharmacist said “it’s the one grandmother’s have always trusted,” and I was sold. The issue didn’t return.

The day after the tour ended, I was afraid I was developing a pressure sore, and I applied zinc oxide cream there too, and that seemed to address it.

Managing all of this required a suspension of disbelief after a lifetime of thinking cyclists wearing cycle shorts were just showing off (and weird looking). I’m glad I was able to muster that, as the tour that resulted was all the better for it. 

Thanks to our pro cycling friends Cynthia and Matt for advice and counsel.

For decades, my practice when travelling to Europe was to make one of my first stops upon first landing the cell phone shop of whatever carrier had the best deal on a prepaid SIM card. I’d end up with a combined package of voice, texts, and data for the time I’d be away.

The introduction of the eSIM — a SIM card, but without the card, that gets virtually installed into the phone via an app — has made things a lot simpler: no need to make the visit to the shop, as the entire transaction can be done from an app; no need to fiddle with SIM card cutters (yes, there was such a thing); and “topping up” — always the Achilles heel of any low-end SIM card, happens in the same app, so no more visits to tobacco shops to purchase top-up minutes.

This last trip, to Belgium and the Netherlands, I decided to go one step further, and to dispense with a plan that included voice and text, and go data-only. I choose Jetpac, somewhat at random, and the process of selecting a plan and installing the eSIM proved easy and relatively inexpensive.

The open question: were there going to be circumstances where I’d miss having a real European telephone number, with the ability to send and receive texts and make voice calls.

Here’s what happened on the ground:

• In Liège, the app-based ebike rental scheme was Dott, and the Dott app required confirmation vis SMS during the initial setup phase. I worked around this by setting up a free 3-day try virtual SMS from Hushed.
• In Ghent, I needed to make a voice call to the organizer of our bike tour, to get permission to make a repair to Lisa’s bike. I was able to do this by buying some voice minutes to use inside the Jetpac app, which acts as a voice-over-IP app for making outgoing calls. The only downside: they couldn’t call me back, because it’s outgoing-only.
• To communicate with Android-owning Belgian and Dutch friends to coordinate lunch plans, we used Signal.
• To communicate with home (and with each other), we used Apple’s iMessages app and FaceTime.

All in all, I didn’t missing the native texting and voice calling abilities, and for future travels I plan to repeat the data-only plan.

Yesterday we climbed down the ladder from the loft bed in our Rotterdam Home Exchange at 6:30 a.m.; almost 24 hours later, clumbed into bed at home in Charlottetown.

In between we took a metro to Rotterdam central station, a train to Schiphol Airport, flew to Toronto, had a layover there, and then flew to Charlottetown. In the way all transatlantic travel feels when it’s over, it feels like magic, like it shouldn’t be physically possible to move so far so fast.

Our trip was a delight, a combination of resting in place (in Liège),  moving under our own cycle power (from Brussels to Bruges), with a coda of the maximum modernity that is Rotterdam. Along the way we got to spend time with friends (here, here), a lovely addition.

In the book shop at Schiphol I came across the book How to Travel, and the chapter “The Pleasure of the Romantic Minibreak,” which starts:

One of the stranger aspects of relationships is that we  may, in order to sustain them, need to go away together every now and then. 

In theory, it should make no difference to love quite where we happen to be. But in practice, the furniture may have to alter, so that we can. The familiar backdrop of home keeps us too tightly and punitively tethered to whom we have so often been – which may mean, to the less impressive and more unkind versions of ourselves. The sofa remembers that argument we once had on it; the kitchen keeps us connected to some unpleasant scenes that unfolded in it over too many evenings. But the new surroundings have no such memories. They allow us to start afresh and rediscover wellsprings of affection and generosity. 

More than anything else, it’s those “wellsprings of affection and generosity” that I will remember from this trip: lubricated by miles on bicycles, cactus beers, accidental finds, accidental falls, by the myriad pleasures of being a connected partnership engaged in a grand adventure.