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.
Good news everybody. Today I can finally write about getting out of the safari vehicle and actually doing some real hiking. Mind you, I’m not talking about a multi-day challenging trudge or anything, but at least the dust in my nose would be from kicking at the dirt rather than by driving through it, so that’s something. Our first foray into the hills was a hike up Mount Lemagrut, which is one of 9 craters in the Ngorongoro conservation area. Although we’d be trekking up to 3100m this day, we were starting out at about 2400m, so the overall altitude gain and loss wasn’t going to be that great. This would however serve as our first acclimatization hike of sorts, and give us an idea how we might do as a group on the more challenging days ahead of us. This is also the first time I’ll be sharing a nice map of the trek with you all. As you might expect, I carried a GPS with me for most of the trip, and made a number of maps to show you where we went. Along with the map you can also head to flickr and check out the set of pictures and videos from the day. Once you’ve taken all that in and set the scene, come on back and read the rest of my tale!
Howdy folks. So, another day, and another 86km into the bike ride. Actually, it was a little more than 86km, since I went to the grocery store after finishing my day’s ride. I could’ve just had take-out again, but I decided it would be better to pick up some fresh fruits and veggies to munch on, along with the requisite pizza. However, I’m getting ahead of myself yet again, you’re probably more interested in what happened today anyway. I did in fact change my original plans of heading to the absolute north of the island by bike, and opted instead today to cut across the middle of the Island in order to reach the Bay of Islands, which are a beautiful part of New Zealand, and where I decided to spend at least two days. Read on.
Jody and I had plans to go see Monty Python’s Spamalot at the theatre in Toronto on August 12th, along with Alix, Matt, and Andrew Raven. The tickets were bought months ago, and the time was finally approaching. Well, rather than simply go see the show, Jody and I decided we’d make a long weekend of it and hit Paramount Canada’s Wonderland for some serious thrill-ride action! We took the Friday off, so we could hit the park outside of the crazy weekend window. I think it was a good plan. Even though we did end up waiting an hour for one of the rollercoasters at mid-day (Top Gun, if you’re interested), most of the waits were much more reasonable. We also got to do a lot of front seat rides, and multiple trips on our favourites. There are a lot of rides at the park. We had some faves, and some not so good. The thing that sucks on some of the rides is the beating your body takes. They have a new ‘flying’ coaster, called Tomb Raider, and we really didn’t enjoy the bone rattling that went with it. As usual, our favourite was the old-school woodies. Wooden Coasters are just more thrilling. Sure, they don’t do inverted loops or anything, but they feel rickety, and you only have a little lap bar holding you in while you whiz around at top speed! We like them so much that we capped off our visit with seven consecutive runs of the Wild Beast, without even getting off the coaster. It was pretty quiet late at night, so the ride attendants said we could just stay on. It was crazy! When we finally went to bed that night, I still felt like i was riding a coaster! If you’d like to check out some pictures of that day, check out the folder on Flickr.
A well known saying goes something like this. Never put anything smaller than your elbow in you ears. Well, I’m never one to listen to sayings, and I guess I paid the price this past weekend in New York City. On the upshot, I got to experience private health care. On the downshot, it ain’t any better than public health care. But I digress. It all started on the [long] bus ride to New York. It was an all-nighter, and to pass the time, I brought my MP3 player to listen to old BBC radio broadcasts of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy. To do this, I was using my Shure E3 headphones, which are in-ear headphones to block out noise, which I also use on stage when playing music. Well, wouldn’t you know it, at one point, I tried pulling out the earphone to hear someone talking, and the damn bud stayed in my ear!! I’m talking waaay deep in my ear.
