When I talked to Burke about doing something canoe-related on the weekend, I was appalled when one of the options presented to me was a paddle under two hours in length. That would make the crucial drive to fun ratio about 2:1, which I deemed unacceptable by the Johanna weekend algorithm. I was sold on a five hour paddle with two possible extensions (*of course* we’ll do the extensions, I thought to myself…) and thus a ratio closer to 1:3.
The five hour paddle was the Big East River, from well above Arrowhead Provincial Park (where Burke’s office is) to Lake Vernon (the straight line distance from end to end to paddling distance is a ratio of about 1:10) (Correction. It is 1:2.6. My need for precision required that I look at the map. Total paddling distance: 27 km. As the crow flies distance: 10.5 km). Before we could start, though, we had to deal with all the normal logistics of a day paddle: shuttle cars, get boat, put on bug dope (though I was the only lemon-scented person in the canoe yesterday) and change mind about what to wear at least three times (then again, I think that was just me too). 
On top of that, I proclaimed that I had never, ever been to Arrowhead before, so of course that had its desired effect of getting Burke to show me some stuff, like the waterfall and the lookout. Consequently, by the time we put in, my drive : outdoor fun ratio was already close to 1:1 (though I’d only driven the one way to Huntsville at that point).
The Big East is one of those rivers you’d curse if you were on a long canoe trip and you hit it at 3 p.m. and just wanted to get to your site – so close as the crow flies, so many paddle strokes away. 
Make it an increasingly sunny afternoon, though, and it’s the perfect lazy river to explore. It has carved its way through massive sand deposits, and thus in places has huge sandy banks. It’s got the mature river morphology of many meanders (including often seen evidence of cut-off oxbows) and requires a minimum of alertness (ie. you can’t totally lie back and nap) because the rapidly eroding and changing channel also means plenty of debris and treestumps to be avoided.
Maybe it’s because I poked fun at the whole biogeek mode last weekend, but Burke seemed very restrained in the ecology interpretation department (or maybe it’s because, as he later hinted, he figured I was disinterested in learning new stuff). Despite the limited amount of stuff he talked about, the ratio of what he explained to what I retained is about 15:1. Here is a list of things I did learn: white trilliums turn pink as they age. 
The holes in the bank are bird nesting sites, and the birds were swallows (there are many kinds, including the somewhat obviously named bank swallow). The spotted sandpiper is a very common bird, and one that I can now sort of identify. If you find a nest and you visit it at two or more intervals, you have a much better chance of accurately figuring out what’s going on with respect to when the eggs were hatched. Some bird chicks and their nests are hard to identify, so you need the parent to visit while you watch. There is such a thing as a “bat detector”, which is not a late-night infomercial commodity but something that picks up high frequencies – and that if you are carrying a bundle of keys, the bat detector goes batshit because their rubbing against themselves gives off a frequency picked up by the device. A rapidly eroding meander in this system erodes banks at the rate of a foot (!) per year, prompting parks people at Arrowhead to winch the whole observation platform back every single year. When mergansers are agitated, they start to make all sorts of clicking noises. The Breeding Bird Atlas people divide the world into 10x10km squares based on UTM grids. There is a provincially rare sort of bulrush on Lake Vernon.
And that, alas, is all that I retained from the educational aspect of this trip. But if the information imparted : information retained ratio is 15:1, the information imparting : fun ratio is about 1:5 (and I know they’re not mutually exclusive, but here’s how I make the distinction – I already know how to have fun, but I know diddly about birds). That’s what the day really came down to: it was a lot of fun. Not just because I hadn’t been in a canoe or on an inland waterway so far this year (and in spite of the weird aluminum stains on our hands and the blackfly and mosquito density) – I got to see something and go someplace I’d never been to, which already guarantees a high fun rating. Add to that lots of interesting things to look at, 
like anthropogenic erosion-control structures along many of the cottage-lined banks in an effort to stop an entirely natural process that would, however, result in your house teeter-tottering into the river at some point. And Burke knows lots of other stuff to talk about besides ecology (a fact that was demonstrated only too well when his team kicked my team’s ass at Trivial Pursuit the night before), so the company was great too.
An entirely fun weekend, as far as I’m concerned, and worth the drive to Huntsville. If I include the barbecue the night before (but not the Trivial Pursuit game, because I am a sore loser!), the poking around before launching, the paddle, and the pub dinner we enjoyed after the endless paddle (we failed to bring snacks. About an hour before we finished the five hours, I started the annoying “how much longer, I’m hungry” routine – which resulted in destroying the rest of the Girl Guide cookies in Burke’s truck and no further paddling extensions because the pub was calling our names), the ratio of driving to fun was about 1:7. A most satisfying ratio, that.