Sitting in Nate’s in the Ottawa airport waiting for flight.
Last Canadian meal before beef time!
Dreary weather is looking in on us from the outside world. Overcast and the like.
I’m peering out at a robin’s-egg blue Air Canada plane at gate 17. Ours is next to it.
C-GJWO is our equipment. Airbus 319. Looks air-worthy. We’ve got about 1:15 till lift-off 0:45 till we board.
Update: there was a gate change, we were actually at Gate 15. Don’t know what the tail ID was. Sorry kev.
Hi all. Aren’t you all lucky. I’m writing my second post in the same day. The only reason is that I’m on the road (again), and have little else to do in the evening here in my hotel room. My plan is to just take it easy tonight, and rest up for my race this weekend. I’m in Montreal, and get back tomorrow at 7pm. Directly from there, I’m loading up the car and heading to the race site. I won’t be back until Sunday night. However, at least this gives me a chance to catch up a little bit on my blog backlog. In the last post, I filled you all in on my fathers’ happy [re]wedding day. Well, obviously that wasn’t the only thing that I did in my 4 days in Nova Scotia, so I thought I’d just write a little post to let you know what other fun I got up to while at home. If you’d like to see some pictures of what we did, have a wander over to the flickr site, and check out the folder from our Nova Scotia weekend.
23/03/08
No, that’s not a typo in my title. I mean to spell it like that. Why? Well, because I spent the better part of today in the Luckie Strike cave system on a caving expedition being led mostly by me! Of course, if you’ve been following along in my stories, you were already aware that I had planned on caving today, so this will come as no surprise to you. If you haven’t been following along, well then shame on you 🙂 After a good night of sleep at the Kiwitown Holiday Park, I was picked up my Emma from Absolute Adventures and whisked off to their cave system for a day of fun. From there, it was back to the train station for the final leg of my journey back to Auckland, and where I started my grand bike tour over three months ago. It was a bittersweet moment, and had some sense of finality to it. To read more about the caving and the final trip to Auckland, read on. Sorry, no maps of course, as the GPS remains dead. [No blog picture until I convert the pics from CD to my USB key, probably not till I get home]
Well, after a slow start, things are truly humming along now on the Fijian Islands. Unfortunately for me, this leg of the journey is almost over, and it’s back to the mainland tomorrow night. However, that still leaves me almost 24 hours on one more island. Oh geez, I just realized that I haven’t written in a couple days though 🙂 So of course, I do have some additional strories to share with you all about my last couple days in the South Pacific. The weather has definitely done a complete about-face, now that Daman has left Fiji for good, with limited damage having been inflicted. I’ve realized that if I try to write about everfy last thing that happens to me while I’m away, you’ll probably all get very tired of reading my stories, so I may have to try to shorten up some of the adventure-log stories. However, much as I write for all my readers, I’m also writing for me, and this serves as my travel journal as much as anything else. That being said, read on if you’d like to catch up with ActiveSteve!
02/03/08
What’s that? You’re wondering why I say Edinburgh? Well, Dunedin is Edinburgh in Gaelic as it turns out, so my journey today was really to get to Edinburgh, not just Dunedin. As you can see by the picture, I had yet another very soggy day on the bike. In fact, this was the very worst day that I endured to date on the bike. I had to endure very heavy rains, cold winds, and numb appendages. For a while, I was actually concerned that I might end up with hypothermia. As a self-check, I kept singing to myself and talking aloud, to make sure I wasn’t mumbling. Of course, I’m getting a little ahead of myself yet again, so why don’t I start my story of the day from the beginning once again for you all. In the meantime, check out the map that I put together, and the pictures along with it. My camera was literally floating in a pool of water within my jacket pocket between pictures. However, I went the extra step for you today. Enjoy.
