End of Tour statistics

[Atop Signal Hill in St. John's; behind me, in the distance, Ireland]

As mentioned in the Water Ceremony post below, the Tour is now officially over, and tomorrow we turn the car around. Notice, I beg, the licence plate in the photo above: how many cars reach St. John's with California plates? No one has commented on them since Montreal, but on this blog the world can behold our vanity.

Speaking of vanity, here are some end-of-Tour statistics.

Total days of Tour: 50
Days featuring a performance: 28
Days driving: 15
Days off / devoted to logistics: 8
Ferries taken: 7
Total kilometers travelled: 11 675
(=Total miles travelled: 7,254)
Total cups of Tim Horton's coffee enjoyed: as countless as the grains of sand in the Libyan desert
Total hours of documentary digital video footage filmed: 46
Total gigabytes of documentary digital video footage: 552
Number of print interviews given: 4
Number of radio interviews given: 7
Number of TV interviews given: 1
Number of blog entries: 61
Total schools performed at: 16
Total school performances: 29
Total public performances: 13
Total performances: 42
Total audience for school shows: 1315
Total audience for public shows: 292
Total audience: 1607
Average length of performance, in verses: c. 450
Total verses performed: c. 18900
Total verses in the Iliad: c. 16000
Average length of time to deliver one verse, in seconds: c. 5
Total length of time spent performing verses, in hours: c. 26

Dave and I would like to thank all the hosts at public shows and teachers at school shows along the Tour, without whom the project would not have been possible. Lorenz von Fersen and Jim Oborne provided invaluable assistance; our parents, Marg and Jim, always thought that we would make it to the end. Moira Johnson and Tracy Theobald at Moira Johnson Consulting did an extraordinary job on the publicity. Rudyard Griffiths and Alison Faulknor of The Dominion Institute, the Tour's sponsor, lent their remarkable talent for organisation and coordination to The Plains of Abraham Project, and the dedication of Annie Forget, who lined up all the venues (an immense task) and liased from start to finish, was almost superhuman. Lastly but most warmly, we feel a great debt of gratitude to the Tour's patrons, who believed in Canadian epic poetry. I hope we have been worthy of their trust.

He's looking away from the screen now, so I can sneak in one last comment: in praise of Dave. You know, there's not many people who could put up with a guy like me for a week, must less six -- and that almost 24/7. What a brother. What a guy. He's been as busy, or busier, than I've been the whole time, and he only grumbled when he saw I didn't want to grumble alone. Behind the cameras, at the wheel, on the phone half the time to media and contacts days in advance, his dedication is what's kept me going. I can't imagine a single instant of the Tour without him (and there wasn't one!); I'd take my hat off to him if I were the hat-wearing type. Salve, frater!

[Dave on the (Atlantic) edge of the continent]