Hey gang! Okay, so the title is a little misleading. All the same, this post is about a little trip we recently took to Mont Tremblant. This trip was a week and a half ago, and was Alix, Matt, Jody and I who spent the weekend there. The weekend was actually a thank-you prize that I received at this year’s Quest for a Cure as a result of being the team that raised the most money for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Center. I was given a free weekend at a 2 bedroom condo at
Howdy sports fans. Well, I guess this really isn’t a sports-related post, as my season is sort of over for 2007, but there are sports and games involved. That is, if you consider drinking beer and schnapps a sport! Yup, Jody and I returned to our October tradition of heading to Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo. In the past 7 years, I’ve been there 5 times, and Jody has been there 4 times. Each year, a different crew of us head down to Alix’s parents place, where we sleep in the basement, have a delicious Turkey dinner on Saturday, and of course head to the local sights and Festhallen for some Bavarian treats. Although there’s not a whole lot to tell you about the weekend (you sorta have to be there to understand it), I’ll still give you a little sense of the fun. Also, you can head over to Flickr to check out some pictures from the weekend. On with the tale.
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.
My final excursion while in the Dominican Republic was a full day Catamaran excursion. Possibly the best part about this excursion was the fact that it departed from my resort’s beach, so I really didn’t have to displace myself too much in order to make it there on time at 8am. This was a good thing, because I was a little bit worn out from the Tuesday night activities. What were those activities you ask? Well, that was the night I met up with Penelope and Melissa at the beachside grill a la carte restaurant, after which I went to the casino night with Go Travel direct. That turned out to be pretty lame, so I ended up going back to the resort for the nightly show, which ended up being the light-bulb eating dude! That was a good call, and put me in the mood to have a few drinks while I watched. Anyway, long story short, I was definitely ready to hit the ocean the next morning, but not in the mood to join the ‘party’ aspect of the day. Yup, as might be expected, this was no ordinary catamaran. This was the party catamaran! Open bar all day long. However, I didn’t touch a drop till we were actually anchored back at our starting point late in the afternoon. I just couldn’t justify drinking all day. That and the fact that I didn’t know a single soul on the boat, since none of the people I’d met were on this excursion. However, it was still pretty cool. Read on for more.
Alright, so they said that I was a little out of my mind. They said that I had a high risk of getting seriously injured. They said that most people really don’t do what I wanted to. But as you have no doubt asked yourself many times, who exactly are “they”? Of course, I’m talking about the fact that I had decided to do some cycling while I was in the Dominican Republic. After all, I had gone to all the trouble of packing my bike in an airline flight box, dragged it to the resort (literally) and re-built it there the first day. I was staying at a place called Playa Dorado, which is not exactly in Puerto Plata, and just up the road from two places called Sosua and Cabarete. These are two places quite well known as being surf towns, and having great beaches. I didn’t feel like paying the $60+ USD that the organized excursions wanted to charge for going there. Plus, you were stuck on their schedule. Taxis were another option, and would have cost about a quarter that, but really, I was determined to experience at least a little of the Dominican on two wheels. And so I formulated my plan.