Good things do Happen!!

Well, here I am sitting at a rather high altitude over our great nation. We’ve been airborne for about an hour now, and far below me is no doubt the roiling waters of the great Atlantic Ocean. It always amazes me what clever creatures we humans are. Conquering the skies with our mighty flying birds. I hadn’t intended to actually spend much time blogging on this first leg of our journey to Saudi Arabia, but what can I say? Circumstances have lead to this outcome. What circumstances? Well, mainly the fact that the onboard entertainment system is kaput. Yup, no fun movies to pass the time. Too bad. I was looking forward to watching Tropic Thunder, and probably Hellboy II or Christmas Vacation, that all-time classic holiday movie. I guess I can’t complain though. I’ve got my iPod and I’m rockin’ the Pink Floyd with my sound isolating earphones, so that I don’t have to listen to the myriad of crying babies on this red-eye flight to London. Jody seems rather oblivious beside me, having dozed off even before we left the ground! Good for her, she’ll be well refreshed when we touch down in the great city of London for our 24 hour layover. What? A layover? Weren’t we supposed to fly out Sunday and just stop for an hour and a half? Well, read on to find out what happened. Click here for pictures.

Hello everyone. Well, it’s been over two weeks since we got back from Saudi Arabia, and I figure it’s time I try to make sense of the whole experience and maybe give people a sense of what traveling a bit in the Middle East is like. We had a lot of people ask us about our trip, and I was never really sure how to answer that question. The general answer was simply ‘different’. How can you summarize a place that is literally worlds away from your own home? Although I’m still not sure I can fully illuminate everyone, I’ll do my best to shed a little light on this corner of the world. For starters, I’m happy to report that we’ve got all of our pictures posted now in a single collection. There are pictures from Jody, myself, as well as pictures Andrea snapped with her new fancy-pants camera that she got over the holidays. Feel free to check them out on flickr. As an added bonus, I even put up a whole set of videos you can check out and laugh at. After you’ve gotten a suitable sense of our travels, come back here and read on.

Well, Happy New Year to one and all! Sorry for the recent lapse in communicating with the world. You see, Jody and I were off in Cuba enjoying a week of fun and sun over the holiday season. I’ll post a few more entries over the next few days about Cuba, but generally speaking, it was a fantastic week! Lots of pictures can be seen here. Every day was between 22 and 29 degrees, with mainly bright and sunny skies. Mind you, yours truly didn’t pick up much of a tan, but rest assured, I drank plenty of rum and spent much time in the water 🙂 The ironic exception to the weather of the week was on New Year’s Eve! We started our day off with plenty of sun and beach walking, followed by my attempts at sailing and windsurfing. From there, Jody and I took out a tandem kayak and went out snorkelling in the water near the hotel. Lots of fun fish. We had an underwater camera, so hopefully some of those shots will turn out. Later on, we had supper at one of the A La Carte restaurants, which we’d booked early in the week. It was very nice, a good way to have New Years Eve supper, away from the big chow hall. The meal was a feat of gastronomic indulgence, as we had a full 7 course meal lasting 3 hours! However, as you can see by this picture, sometime around 10pm, the skies unleashed monsoon-like rain! It was insane. In the span of 15 minutes, the normally dry walkways all over the resort were under ankle-deep water! The rain kept up for almost 2 hours. This made it rather unpleasant to attend the mainly outdoor festivities that the resort had planned out. I feel sorry for all the work they had put in only to be ‘dampened’. As a result, Jody and I ducked back to our cozy room to enjoy the evening in dry comfort. After all, we had a nice covered balcony from which to watch the world. I’ll say this much for the Cubans and New Year’s. They LOVE fireworks! They had shows that were almost the same calibre as the Canada Day fireworks in Ottawa! No joke! It was amazing. At midnight, they had a show of almost a half hour. It was a great way to enjoy the complimentary bottle of champagne that the staff had placed in every room (and complimentary quart of rum, which we took home).