Travelogue

Hello hello my dear friends. Hope you’re all doing well. As for me, well, it’s been a whirlwind 24 hours in jolly ole England. I’ve just cleared all the security hurdles, and now find myself with a couple hours to kill before we board our flight for Riyadh. What better time to fire off a blog post than right now? I’ve even had a chance to download the pictures from my camera and get them captioned, so hopefully I’ll be able to upload some of those in the near term as well. If not, then I apologize. At any rate, the arrival into London went very smoothly, and there were no issues getting our bags and getting through customs. Before we knew it, we were starting the longish trek to find the tube station which would whisk us into London proper. We decided to just buy some day passes so that we could get to a few of the sights a little easier than on foot. Read on for a full dump of the day, and what we got up to in our brief time, made even more complicated by the fact that we were a little tired. Click here for pictures.

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 gang. Well, right off the bat, it looks like I’ll have to apologize for the non-catchy title. I simply can’t think of a better title than what you read at the beginning. Since I’ve been back from my extended trip to NZ, I haven’t really taken any substantial time off from work. Actually, scratch that, I haven’t taken any time off apart from stat holidays. However, since Jody’s cousin Renee was getting married in BC this summer, it gave us a great excuse to book a nice week of vacation over on the far left side of Canada. The trip ended up not costing us too much, since we flew out on points, and then stayed mainly with Jody’s folks on Gabriola Island. As a result, we managed to squeeze in a couple fun activities while we were there, and spend quality time with the family playing extreme bocce, watching the Olympics, and enjoying some great home cooking. There are of course many pictures up on Flickr, which you can check out at your leisure. I also put together a map of one of our activities, a hike up Mount Benson, one of the nearby ‘peaks’ in Nanaimo. When you’re done checking that stuff out, come on back and read on for more details on the week.