Caliente Night

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.

Fun in the Sun

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.

Heading to Puerto Plata

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!

Great Winter Day in Ottawa

Greetings humble readers! Well, as you can see by the date stamp, it’s been a couple of weeks since I last wrote a post. Don’t assume that means that you haven’t all been in my thoughts, or that I haven’t been doing anything interesting. Quite the opposite! There’s big news on the Steve front of ActiveSteve.com. Specifically, I’ve accepted and started a new job since I last posted! As a result, there was a flurry of activity on my end, but a distinct lack of time to write all about it. Rest assured, I haven’t given up on my scribing duties, just had a slight lapse. Anyway, here I am, in time to write a little story about some training I did about two weeks ago. As you are aware, Adventure Racing doesn’t sleep in winter, and as such, I was trying to get in some cross-country ski training before my next winter race. Conditions were pretty much perfect, and I was supposed to meet with a team-mate of mine to do about a 20km loop in Gatineau Park. Read on for this gripping story 😉 If you’d like to see some pictures head over to Flickr for the folder of pics I took.

Putting a Little Iron in my Diet

Many of you are no doubt aware that I’ve gotten a bit of a racing bug in the past couple years. Since joining the public service, I’ve had much more predictable hours in my work week, which has lent itself well to being able to put in a lot of extra hours training and racing. As a result, last year, I raced in a record-setting 15 different races in the span of 10 months! Not only did I greatly increase my race volume, but my results have been dramatically improving as well. On the adventure racing front, I managed to podium finish a few times, including 2nd place in the 48-hour Quest For a Cure (2-person male category). In the triathlon world, I decided to take a stab at a 1/2 Iron-distance race, and finished with a time of 5 hrs. 11mins, which was a great time for a first try! I’m hoping that this year will find me able to put in just as much passion into racing again, and I’ve decided to yet again try to raise the bar for racing. I don’t mean racing more often, but taking on greater challenges and trying to podium every chance I get 😉 It’s only February, and I’ve already raced in 3 different events! A leg injury has been somewhat hampering my podium chances, but I’m addressing that. So can you guess what the title of my posting means yet? Read on.