Dromedaries, Dunes, and Deserted Ruins

Sunrise in the Sahara

Welcome back to another, and perhaps my final post on our adventures in Morocco. My apologies for the slight delay between posts. I was off to Toronto for a conference, and had other family obligations. At any rate, on the plus side, we now have all of our pictures put up on flickr. I’ve even added a folder of videos as well, with a few clips that I shot in various places. For this post, I’m going to take you on two unique journeys. The first will be a camelback ride out into the dunes of the Erg Chebbi, where we spent the night in a Berber camp. The second part of the story will be our exploration of the ancient Roman ruins of Volubilis, an expansive site which was one of the farthest trading posts of the Roman empire. Both of these little adventures was pretty amazing, and this was the first time that either of us had ventured by camel into a desert, and spend the night under the stars in the desert. Once you’ve had chance to peruse the desert pictures and Roman ruin pictures, hop on back and read the whole tale.

The Highs and Lows of Morocco

Early Dawn Light

Welcome to the second post detailing some of the awesome experiences Deanna and I had in Morocco. This time, I’ll take you a bit off the beaten path, and talk about two particularly awesome experiences. Namely, the high of trekking and climbing in the High Atlas mountains, including sumitting the highest peak in North Africa, as well as the lows of heading to the depths of the deepest caves in North Africa, the Friouato Cave system. For Deanna, these were particularly fun, as she had never climbed a mountain before or gone cave exploring. In another post, I’ll visit a first for BOTH of us, but this time, it’s all about Deanna’s firsts. If you check into flickr, you’ll eventually find pictures from both, but for now, only the Atlas Mountain pics are up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the collection though. For now, I’ll just give you a bit of the blow by blow in written words. Enjoy!

Marvelous Morocco: Medinas, Medersas, Minarets and Mosques

Hassan II Mosque

Hello world! It has been simply far too long since I’ve taken the time to write a few words to all my dear readers. This is partly due to a number of distractions at home and with work, and partly due to the fact that Deanna and I were quite busy jet-setting. As you may have guessed from the marvelous alliteration in the title, we were off to Morocco taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of that amazing country. I’ll split the story into 2 or 3 posts, starting with this one. In this post, I’ll focus on the cities that we visited. Our trip was broken into bits of urban exploration, then some adventures in the mountains, desert, and caves. We covered a lot of ground and had a lot of experiences in our two weeks, far too many to cover in full detail. So here’s hoping I can be somewhat brief! Of course, there were also a LOT of pictures taken, and we’ll sort those all by day or location to make it easiest. You can check out all the pictures over on flickr. We’re in the process of creating one big collection with many sets. Keep checking back for more pictures as we post them. Have a look now, then head back here to read more.

Fencing and ‘Festing for Fun

Darcy supervising

Good day friends. I bet you all thought you wouldn’t hear from me again until the winter race season started, right? Well, I’d hate to leave you all wondering just what it is that ActiveSteve does when he isn’t racing or training ;-). Hence this short little post to keep you all well informed. It’s not secret that I’m not really one to sit around eating bon-bons. If I’m not doing something, I get bored. So I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a homeowner, because there’s ALWAYS something to do when you own a house, even if it is a new house, as I’m learning. Also, given that my training and racing takes me away from home a lot, it also means that I don’t get to see some of my friends as much as I’d like, so this is also a chance to do a bit of catching up with some of my good friends, as well as spend more quality time with my best gal Deanna! This certainly won’t be a long post, so you should have no problem getting through the whole thing, as well as checking out my two sets of pictures, first being my fence re-building project, and the second being some pictures from this year’s Beau’s Oktoberfest in Vankleek Hill.

Glancing Nervously Behind at the FAC Fall Classic

Finish Line Photo

Welcome back friends! What an exciting tale I have to share with you this time. In this blog post, I’ll be taking you step by step through my experience at this years Frontier Adventure Challenge Fall Classic, a 12-hour adventure race which took place in the Muskokas. To be more specific, it took place near Rosseau, at the Muskoka Woods camp. This race was the last race I had on the schedule for what I’ll call my ‘summer season’. After this one, the plan is to basically take the next month to month and a half pretty easy. Recover and do some light training before gearing up for the winter race season. Because of that, I was heading into this race with pretty high hopes, even though I’ve been going pretty hard over the last month. My chances were improved by the fact that I was teaming up again with my new friends on Adrenaline Rush; Adam Mallory and Mark Honsberger. Read on for the full story. As per usual, don’t forget to check out some pictures that I snapped, as well as the race video I shot for Get Out There magazine.