Travels

The first excursion I signed up for was a ‘Caliente Night’ with Go Travel Direct. As you can imagine, this night was supposed to be hot and spicy. So what exactly is Caliente Night you ask? Well, simply put, it was a pub crawl of northern Dominican. We were set to hop on a converted school bus, and tour around for the night. This bus was no normal bus though. It had a thatched roof, and.. wait for it… a bar at the front! Yup, the Go Travel reps would be serving us from the free-flowing rum onboard. To start, we were heading to Puerto Plata to view the sunset at an old prison. From there, supper in a typical restaurant. Then, the bar hopping began. We would stop at a road-side disco at one point. Next, we were heading East towards Sosua, and ultimately ending up at Cabarete. These are surf towns. Cabarete has the distinction of being the site of the Kite surfing world championships. Neat-o. So, just how did the night shape up? Well, read on, dear friends.

Good day all. When you last left your hero, he had just arrived in Puerto Plata and was looking forward to a week of food, drink, sun and fun. Sadly, your hero has just realized he’s getting waaay behind in his blog posts, and may have to shorten a few posts in order to play catch-up! After all, we’ve got the Dominican to write about, a winter poker night in Calabogie, not to mention a crazy weekend of double races! Whew. Given that on average it takes me an hour just to write one posts, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out I’ve got to speed things up. I wonder how much it would cost me to get a ghost writer to do my posts for me? After all, my plan is that once I’m older, I’ll just dump all my blog posts to a ghost writer who’ll then write my best-selling autobiography 😉 Of course, I’ll have to do a few more interesting things first, but I’m working on it! Anyway, back to the beautiful Blue Bay Getaway in Puerto Plata (Playa Dorado to be exact). Let’s see just what I did to pass those lonely days.

Howdy all! I guess it’s high time that I write a bit about my recent last-minute vacation down to the Caribbean, isn’t it? As I mentioned in my last post, as a result of changing jobs, I decided to take a week off between the two jobs to refresh myself. Incidentally, for those of you who are wondering what this new job is, well, let’s just say I opted to stay in the Government for now. I received a promotion in the CRTC, and as such moved up a few floors, got a coveted window cubicle, and have an entirely new workload. Whereas before I was a Senior Analyst, dealing with applications and tariff filings, I’ve now moved into a Network Evolution Policy role. This means that I’m much more self-directed, and will be researching and reporting on a range of interesting topics such as net neutrality, digital rights management, new media, and so on and so forth. As you may imagine, this is much more interesting to me than what I was doing before, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this new post 😉 Staying in the CRTC has also guaranteed that I can still go ahead with my plan to take a leave of absence and head to New Zealand. However, there have been a few high-level changes to it. First, I’m only going for 4 months instead of 6 months. Second, I’ll be leaving at the beginning of December, rather than the beginning of September. Regardless, it’ll still be an awesome trip no doubt, and will carry me through the cold Ottawa winter! Anyway, I’m rambling on about work, when I should be telling you about Puerto Plata. Read on!

Click here for pics from the last 2 days in Buenos Aires and the flight home. Arrgh! Although I should be happy that we arrived back in Canada safe and sound, I can’t help but feel a little sad that I’m no longer living the life of a rich man in Argentina. The flights back were pretty routine. The only real snafu was Jody sadly lost the pendant on a nice necklace that she picked up while we were down there. It was a sad moment. The trip took us about 15 hours of total flying time, and a combined 2 hours of lay-overs in Santiago and Toronto. I used my last pesos to buy a couple beers and waters in Buenos Aires. I ended up spending all but about $5 US of all the money I had converted.

Click here for pics from the last 2 days in Buenos Aires and the flight home. Last day in Buenos Aires left. We started the day getting all our bags ready so that we could check out before deciding what to do with our last 6 hours. By 9am, we had our bags packed, and left behind the counter. We hit the hotel restaurant, where we hooked up for a final breakfast with most of the group. 2 of the group had left the night before at 2am, heading off to Rio. Lucky for them, they had more vacation left to enjoy. Sadly, Jody and I were facing work in under 2 days. The last weekend. Boo. We had to make a decision on what to do. We had a little bit of shopping left to do, but we were also interested in visiting a world-known landmark, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. This is arguably the world’s best opera house. It has a long and storied history, which I couldn’t possibly get into in this brief post. We’d heard it was beautiful, but on our first weekend in town, had walked by it, and thought it wasn’t open, due to construction. We’d later learned it was in fact open, you just had to find the right entrance. The only obstacle in our way was that we hadn’t made reservations, and heard you really need them to get in. Oh well, it was our last day, and we wanted to take the chance. Read on…