Travels

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).

A well known saying goes something like this. Never put anything smaller than your elbow in you ears. Well, I’m never one to listen to sayings, and I guess I paid the price this past weekend in New York City. On the upshot, I got to experience private health care. On the downshot, it ain’t any better than public health care. But I digress. It all started on the [long] bus ride to New York. It was an all-nighter, and to pass the time, I brought my MP3 player to listen to old BBC radio broadcasts of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy. To do this, I was using my Shure E3 headphones, which are in-ear headphones to block out noise, which I also use on stage when playing music. Well, wouldn’t you know it, at one point, I tried pulling out the earphone to hear someone talking, and the damn bud stayed in my ear!! I’m talking waaay deep in my ear.

Well, Jody and I had such a great time visiting New York that we’ve decided to make a return visit in the next few weeks. Andrea is currently working down there representing Canada and the Department of Foreign Affairs on their mission to the United Nations. Or something like that.
At any rate, we’ve booked tickets to head down there from Ottawa on the bus. It’s about 9 hours each way, and we plan to make the trip on the red-eye. So we leave Ottawa at 10pm Thursday, and arrive 7am Friday. Ths shitty part is on the return trip, we get back to Ottawa at 7am on Monday. Oh well, straight to work for us!
Another funny thing that I learned is that on Greyhound, you don’t actually reserve a seat, you just get a ticket, valid for up to 1 year. That’s a bit scary, but the guy assured me if we get in by 30 minutes before the bus leaves, we should get on. Here’s hoping! All that remains is that we get our camera back from the shop by then, We haven’t had out camera since Peru. The lens wouldn’t open anymore. Woes us…

Huzzah! After a long wait, we’ve finally started getting our pictures from the Peru trip online. At the same time, we’ll also be slowly adding pictures from the thousands we have from other trips, parties, activities and adventures. As you might have guessed, we’ll be using Flickr. We got a ‘pro’ account, so we’ve got plenty of storage space, and will allow registered contacts the ability to actually download the high-res versions of any of our pictures, should you wish to re-print them for anything.

To get to the goods, head on over to my flickr site. If you had my other Flickr site as a contact, you may want to remove it, since I’ll be porting all the pictures on it to this new account.

I’ve also decided that I’ll try to start adding content to this site on a regular basis, so if you’d like to bookmark it, or get feeds from it, I’ll try to keep you up to date! Jody will also have an account, and will perhaps add her thoughts on occasion as well.