Travels

Howdy all, Steve here, reporting from the Hostel Estoril in Buenos Aires. I’ve made an executive decision as to how I’ll keep you posted while we’re over here. Flash blogs. Meaning, just short little posts filling you in on the basics, and some of my thoughts. Hope you’ll understand my brevity. There are better things to do than write on a machine. But thankfully, for the time being, the hostel has hooked me up with free access to updated the blog. The posts will be pretty much straight translations from my notebook, where I’m organizing my thoughts. When I get back, I’ll update these with pictures too hopefully. On we go…

Jody and I had plans to go see Monty Python’s Spamalot at the theatre in Toronto on August 12th, along with Alix, Matt, and Andrew Raven. The tickets were bought months ago, and the time was finally approaching. Well, rather than simply go see the show, Jody and I decided we’d make a long weekend of it and hit Paramount Canada’s Wonderland for some serious thrill-ride action! We took the Friday off, so we could hit the park outside of the crazy weekend window. I think it was a good plan. Even though we did end up waiting an hour for one of the rollercoasters at mid-day (Top Gun, if you’re interested), most of the waits were much more reasonable. We also got to do a lot of front seat rides, and multiple trips on our favourites. There are a lot of rides at the park. We had some faves, and some not so good. The thing that sucks on some of the rides is the beating your body takes. They have a new ‘flying’ coaster, called Tomb Raider, and we really didn’t enjoy the bone rattling that went with it. As usual, our favourite was the old-school woodies. Wooden Coasters are just more thrilling. Sure, they don’t do inverted loops or anything, but they feel rickety, and you only have a little lap bar holding you in while you whiz around at top speed! We like them so much that we capped off our visit with seven consecutive runs of the Wild Beast, without even getting off the coaster. It was pretty quiet late at night, so the ride attendants said we could just stay on. It was crazy! When we finally went to bed that night, I still felt like i was riding a coaster! If you’d like to check out some pictures of that day, check out the folder on Flickr.

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.