Pilot Summer Day: a visual report

The Pilot Summer Day is a much-loved affair that tends to involve an important talk about the state of our company, great food, a team activity, and absolutely no trust falls.

This year, we headed to the Evergreen Brick Works, a beautiful spot in the middle of Toronto. Here is how we spent the day:

Café Belong made the scones for our morning meeting. They were so good some of us may have eaten three seven.

We learned some amazing things about Evergreen, about floodplains, about biodiversity, about the history of Toronto. We learned about the innovative techniques used to build and retrofit Evergreen’s facilities. We kept thinking about the scones.

What’s neatest about the Evergreen Brick Works is the way a once highly industrial space is now a canopy of green. It’s a tucked-away pocket of calm in the city, the kind of place you call a best-kept secret, except in a less clichéd way.

The former Brick Works themselves are repurposed as event venues these days. The kilns are covered in beautiful graffiti. Is that Leonard Cohen on the wall back there? Faithful guide, Andrew, if you are reading this, please let us know.

If you get one day a year to bond with your colleagues in the out of doors, you hope that nature cooperates. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day. Beeautiful, even. Sorry. Not sorry.

Good design is about attention to detail. Like the simple little vases on the table that we noticed without noticing.

Pilot is the kind of office where people offer (and accept) bites of each other’s food.

We are a mirthful bunch. This guy, in particular, is full of mirth.

Bike tours are where you really see what your colleagues are made of.  The hardcores hit the trails and did a bunch of cool stuff and bragged about it. The rest of us stuck to gentle, paved paths.

We ended the day with beverages. As you do.