Travelogue

I’ve got to start off by saying that I’m turning 31 this year. Over the past few years, more and more of our friends are getting married, and more frequently these days, they are going forth and procreating! Congratulations go out to the latest couple to tie the knot, Greg and Alyssa. The actual wedding took place a little while ago in Panama, but not everyone was able to make that trip. As a result, they threw a reception in Toronto, and a good contingent of the Ottawa fiends (yes, fiends, not friends 😉 were invited, and subsequently made the trek. Although the marathon is only 3 weeks away, that didn’t prevent us from partying like the old days! As can be evidenced by the numerous pictures (and several that we haven’t shared), we still know how to get up to no good. I’ve got to say though, as much as I love an open bar, they really slay me. I’m quite sure LI would have fared far better had I not been subjected to the ‘last call’ rush. The result was me skipping my final 32km training run of my program on Sunday. uckily, I’d already done 2 – 32k runs and a 30k run in the past month and a half, so I’m gonna guess I’m good to go. We only went down to Toronto for a single night, so we really had to make it worhwhile. I headed down with Alix and Jody, and once we arrived there, met up with John, Dana, Rachel, David, Kevin and Amy. Our car arrived around 12:30, and we were lucky enough to get checked in at the Delta Chelsea right away, even though check-in isn’t officially till 3pm.

As I alluded to in a previous post, Jody and I ran into a few snags on our way home from Cuba over the Christmas Holidays. Namely, we got stuck in Cuba an extra day due to mechanical problems with our Zoom Airlines plane. The picture you see here is at around midnight, when we were told to go back down through customs. Why is everyone standing there you ask? Well, the authorities had no idea why we were sent there, and we all had to go back up to where I was and around the airport another way to get to the baggage. Just one of the ‘little’ snags in this dismal experience. In any case, we’ve sort of waited for almost a month, hoping to receive some sort of explanation or apology for all the problems. However, there was no word from either Zoom or Go Travel Direct. As a result, we ended up writing a strongly worded letter outlining all the shortcomings, and sent it in to their customer relations departments. Now we just need to wait and see what they have to say. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, read on to see the full text of the letter we sent.

So a while back, I promised to blog a bit more about Cuba, and specifically about our snorkelling adventures while we were down there. Well, we finally got around to posting the pictures from the underwater camera, so I guess now is a good time to write about that. Gotta love those little disposable numbers. We took one down with us to Cuba over the holidays to catch us in underwater action. It helps a lot that the water is pretty clear, and that there is cool stuff to be found. The picture to the left is of a piece of brain coral that was in the water in the beach in front of the resort. We took some pictures during our Jeep safari day (see the crazy drunk russian post), volleyball action in the pool, and snorkelling in front of the resort. Overall, they turned out pretty good. The coral in the area we were frequenting weren’t the really colorful stuff, but we’ve definitely decided we’d like to do some more snorkelling elsewhere in the world. I had brought down one nice set of mask / fins / snorkel that I bought at MEC, and we decided we’ll have to buy another set.

Hello there loyal readers. My sincerest apologies for the delay in posting any additional tales of intrigue on our recent trip to Cuba. I had to fact-check all of my information for fear that the Somking Gun might find me to be a fraud as they claim to have found Jim Frey’s book “A Million Little Pieces” to be :-). But seriously folks, I’ve just been pre-occupied with welcoming in 2006, and figuring out just what the hell I plan to do with it! At any rate, allow me now to magically transport you back to Cuba. Picture it: Cuba. 2005. December. One of the things that you may read about Cuba is that you really shouldn’t try to drive there. Cars are unreliable, and drivers don’t have that Canadian sensibility (hunh? what? Last I checked, there were plenty of idiots on the road here too!). Well, after our full day of Jeep safari in Cuba, I will concur. However, the drivers you really have to worry about are the damn tourists. And in our case, the crazy drunk Russian tourists (ed. note: this is not an anti-Russian post, just an anti-Russian-that-was-on-our-jeep-safari post.) 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).