For pictures from Mendoza, click here. Quick final post. I´ve got 20 minutes to wrap up this blog, pick up my laundry at the Bubbles Lavados up the street, and meet the group for supper, and a briefing on tomorrow´s activities. We arrived early in the morning to this beautiful city. Jody and I opted out of any city tours or any responsibilities. Instead, I got some laundry together, and explored the city on my own. Local busses, trolleys, and just plain locals in general. I´m really enjoying practicing communicating down here. I ended up getting a private tour of the city hall by a security guard, who took me to the roof of the building for some very impressive views and chit-chat, even though we were both out of our language comfort zones. It was quite cool. I then went to a very large park honoring San Martin, the man largely responsible for liberating Argentina. There is a mountain-top monument to this, the greatest of National heros. The location is known as Cerro Saint Gloria. It was a nice view, and nice moment. Then, local busses back here, and now I´m writing you. It was a bit funny, because a lot of the tour group opted to take a bus tour of the city, paying a bit of coin for it. My personal city tour, using local busses and my own two feet, was almost the same thing, but cost me 3.5 pesos, instead of 25+ pesos paid by the rest of the group. Of course, I didn’t go quite as far, but I still saw most of the main sights, and even crossed paths with them twice! Well, gotta go. Just realized it´s October 31st. Hope everyone´s having a spooky night, and I guess we´ll see you in less than a week now. Till then, enjoy the week!
You may also like
Hey gang! Okay, so the title is a little misleading. All the same, this post is about a little trip we recently took to Mont Tremblant. This trip was a week and a half ago, and was Alix, Matt, Jody and I who spent the weekend there. The weekend was actually a thank-you prize that I received at this year’s Quest for a Cure as a result of being the team that raised the most money for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Center. I was given a free weekend at a 2 bedroom condo at
06/02/08
So, what is Waitangi Day you ask? Well, it’s a national holiday here in New Zealand. Sort of like Canada Day, but not quite. There aren’t massive celebrations everywhere, but it is a significant date for Kiwis. This is the day the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by the queen, which recognized the land claims and rights of Maoris. Of course, things are still not settled for Maoris, so as a result, there is not much celebrating, but rather, a fair bit of protest on this day in certain parts of the country. However, it is still a federal holiday, which means food places all charge 15-20% extra if you want to eat. Ha ha. Guess I’ll be eating noodles and peanut butter sandwiches today! At any rate, I’m still in Fox Glacier township right now, enjoying an almost complete day off. My only activity was about 25km of biking and hiking, to check out the stunning views of the Southern Alps from here. The rest of the day is hopefully for laundry, Internet, phone calls, etc. etc. Yup, I’m resting and getting ready for the next few days. Read on and check out the map for a bit more info.
Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas. By the time you actually read this, it will of course be late on boxing day, but I have a good excuse for being a bit behind. I’m in the magical Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and have better things to be doing than blogging all the time. However, I can’t seem to help myself. When everyone else has gone to bed, or whenever I can steal a few minutes, I try to fire up the old computer machine and try to dash off a few lines, which brings me to this post. I wanted to get this fired up and online before we left for some internal trips for the next week. We’ll be away from Riyadh, and I’ll be unable to do any blogging while on the road. So this post will have to keep you entertained until we get back here to the Diplomatic Quarters. However, I can assure you that this will be a great little post, as we did some pretty unique things on Christmas day over here. Last year, I found myself at an all day cricket test in Auckland, NZ, and this year, I have a similar experience to share with you all, but you’ll have to read on to find out exactly what it is. You might also want to just check out the pictures on flickr that were put up from the day!
Good day my dear readers. If you have been a longtime follower of my blog, you may wonder where I’ve been in the past month, and if in fact I’m just eating bon-bons and kicking back through the summer. Well, quite the contrary my friends! Things have been as busy as ever, which is why there has been a marked lack of blog updates. In the past while I’ve had a lovely Canada Day paddling adventure, gone to the States for the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race (don’t worry, that’ll be a whole post!), changed jobs, worked on gear reviews, saw my sister and family off on a new adventure to Belgium (for the next 4 years!) AND worked on wedding preparations! Yup, I (and the ever-lovely Deanna) have been quite busy indeed, but this short post should at least serve to bring you up to speed on our latest adventures. As usual, you can find most of my pictures on flickr shortly after events, and also, Deanna is becoming a bit of a shutterbug and has her own flickr account now too! So twice the photos! Read on now for a taste of recent events.




