Barbados

One of the things we were meaning to do while we were in Canada was do as the Canadians do, and take a "sun vacation" during winter.  As Australians, the Caribbean sounds ridiculously opulent because only rich people go there - most people who want a beach vacation can fly to Queensland, Bali, Thailand or many other closer places.  So we picked the most ridiculously opulent-sounding (to us) place we could think of to take our first Caribbean vacation - Barbados.

It's a good year to take a sun vacation - there's some sort of bizarre weather phenomenon called the Polar Vortex happening across Canada and the US meaning that this winter has been absolutely freezing - well below average temperatures.  As we left home at 6am on Saturday morning at -20 in our thermals, winter boots and winter coats, crunching over 3-4cm of ice and shielding our eyes from the blowing snow that was coming down, we were very glad that we had booked the trip.

The view from our room - we were staying on Accra Beach which is one of the main beaches on the island, and we decided to spend a bit extra for an ocean view room, which was well worth it.  Every day in Barbados when we visited was 28 and sunny, with occasional cloudy periods and rain showers that turn back into brilliant sunshine 10 minutes later.  A bit of a change from -20 and snowing.  

We took a catamaran trip up the west coast of the island, stopping to snorkel with sea turtles and over shipwrecks.  

The water was crystal clear and beautiful, and just cool enough to be nice on the hot day.  Rum punch is ubiquitous in Barbados and alcohol was free on the boat - our couple of drinks paled in comparison to the British tourists on the boat with us who had 2 drinks each before we even left port and then danced drunkenly to Rihanna (one of Barbados' most famous exports) on the front of the boat all the way home.

We hired a car and drove around the island over a couple of days - it isn't very big and you could drive from one end to the other in a couple of hours.  It's mostly flat with a couple of big hills in the middle.

Obligatory flag shot.

We saw this monkey running along the side of the road while we were driving.  

We were staying on the sheltered west coast of the island - this is the eastern side which is open to the ocean.

You can see the difference in the water.  Very few beaches here either!

An ominous-looking old lighthouse.

We followed a suggestion to check out this beach which is only accessible over these rocks - but don't worry, there's a path of concrete steps poured on them... unless the tide's coming in.  Then your feet get awfully wet and you grab onto something so that you don't get washed away.  Bad idea!

The next day we drove out to St Nicholas Abbey, which is an old plantation house and rum distillery in the northern part of the island.

The house itself was beautiful and nicely restored....

... and the distillery behind it was hard at work distilling rum.

The still... huge!

Rum aging in oak barrels...

... and the final product!

Which we enjoyed in a nice glass of punch.  It's ok to drink at 10:30am in the Caribbean!  It was delicious :)

 We thought this chandelier hanging off the giant tree was a nice touch.

Really big trees!

Sadly we only had 5 days there, and we then returned to -10 and a foot of snow on the ground.  Sun vacations - a Good Idea™.

BlizzCon!

One of the great parts of living in Canada is that we're much closer to the rest of the world, where the fun stuff happens.  This year we decided we'd splurge (that doesn't sound like us at all!) and take a trip to BlizzCon!

BlizzCon is the annual conference run by Blizzard Entertainment, which is the company that makes World of Warcraft.  I've been playing World of Warcraft for 9 years now and Stephen's been playing it for around 6, so it's high time we went on the pilgrimage of our people.  We arranged tickets with a group of our guildmates, so in the end 3 of us from Toronto met up with 1 from LA and 1 from San Diego.  A full party!  Unfortunately we had 1 tank, 1 DPS and 3 healers, but that couldn't be helped (after all, the coolest people are healers).

BlizzCon is held in Anaheim, California, so we were looking forward to escaping the cold Toronto weather and seeing some sunshine for a few days too.  

We flew in late Thursday night for the convention start on Friday morning.  This is the queue at 7:30am - the convention actually started at 11am.  I do have a photo of the queue outside closer to the time but unfortunately my phone keeps freezing so I can't upload it.  

We waited in the queue and got some pretty good seats... where we waited another 90 minutes until the actual show started.

The main hall was huge - it's hard to get a sense of the scale, but this is one side of the hall, and it went all the way up to where the screens stop at the other end with chairs.  It went back a lot further than this as well.  There are a lot of nerds :)

Mike Morhaime (CEO of Blizzard Entertainment) at the lectern (and on the big screen)!  And then they announced the new expansion!

Statues around the Convention Center of Blizzard characters - here's Tyrael...

And Thrall riding a wolf...

Illidan!

And Kerrigan!

The WoW stage - complete with Dark Portal guarding statues on each side, which I thought were awesome.

A Lego Horde shield...

And Lego Thrall!

The demo machines for the new expansion - which we played for about 15 minutes the first time and about an hour the second time.  It was good fun although annoying not being able to play the roles we're used to - for example if you chose a druid, it gave you the option of being a cat or a tree, so Stephen couldn't tank for our dungeon group.  That was irritating.  Not to mention the awful keybindings!

A meeting stone IRL... unfortunately we couldn't summon any of our other friends or guildies.  I did try.

There was some pretty epic cosplay around - I really liked the fog beast.

  We think the one on the right is Tyrael but aren't sure who the one on the left is.  Anyone know?

Our guildie Darkmists getting into the spirit of the convention.  You no take candle!

A multitude of paladins with some awesome looking weapons.  The attention to details in these costumes is just phenomenal!

Hardware demo - imagine playing with this setup!  That's 3 screens wrapping around for nearly 180 degree view.  I wish!

Here's our group - yes, we made guild shirts for the occasion.  Hooray for us!

The convention was two days long, and we left each day totally exhausted after spending 9 hours watching panels and playing various demo games.  We had a great time - although in hindsight we made a number of common first-timer mistakes like not staying in the right hotel, arriving too late to go to any parties, not having internet access and not really meeting any new people because of these things.  Next time!

A Couple of Days in the Netherlands

In mid-July we met up with Stephen's Dad and his partner Anne in the Netherlands, where they were visiting Stephen's Grandparents and other family members.

We started off our trip in the best possible way - by locating the frites vendor at the airport and ordering a big serve with mayo each.  Nom!

We were staying at Stephen's Uncle's holiday house, in a place called Vinkeveen - it's about 20km from Amsterdam, but is actually in the countryside - there were sheep farms literally 5 minutes away.

Vinkeveen is a very strange place - it has many fingers of land jutting out into the lake, which were apparently left behind when they finished dredging peat.  As a result, the land is rather unstable.

I didn't get any good photos when I was there, so I hit up Google StreetView for this one just now - that isn't an optical illusion, the houses really are tilted like that.  The majority of the houses were on bizarre angles, apparently due to the peat compacting and settling over time - even the house we were staying in was on an obvious angle (although it's hard to see from the photo above).  This was very confusing when getting up in the morning and made the whole trip a bit surreal.

Between the weird sinking peat fingers are many canals, which played host to a never-ending stream of Dutch people on boats of all shapes and sizes, parading past our dock.

We even joined the parade at some points.  Here's Stephen's Dad Harm and his partner Anne driving the boat.

Stephen and his Dad did some important fence-painting while we visited.  Don't ask why they're wearing matching clothes.

Aside from the family visiting (which I unfortunately didn't take any photos of), there was plenty of time for touristy side-activities, courtesy of Stephen's Dad, who is keen on Stephen learning about his Dutch heritage.  Stephen is in general rather dismissive of his Dutch heritage in regards to everything except mayonaise on fries and potatoes.

We visited the kaasmarkt (cheese market) at Alkmaar, which is apparently a traditional-style cheese market, running like it's the 17th century.  I wanted to go as I missed it last time I was in the country - I am not sure what I was expecting from the cheese market, but it was very odd.

These men are cheese porters, and they load the cheese (gouda in this case) onto their little sled.  Those things that look like brown suspenders are actually shoulder harnesses - they hook the bottom of those to the ends of the sled and carry the cheeses around in a kind of weird shuffling run.  

 

You can see them unhooking their harnesses here.  The different hat-colors apparently signify different cheese-porter guilds.

Once the cheeses have been sold, they get loaded onto these carts and pushed around at a run to somewhere else - the whole thing was very confusing and I have no idea what was going on, but there were cheeses and it was fun.

 Being a touristy kind of place, there were also people selling things and dressing up in crazy clothes - here's a woman wearing clogs and a funny traditional hat.

I always assumed that the canals were an anomaly of Amsterdam that people just associated with the Netherlands in general, but apparently this is not the case.  We drove around a large portion of the country (well it isn't very big) under the guise of teaching Stephen about his Dutch heritage and also looking for pannenkoeken (I was heartily on board with this venture), and the whole country is riddled with canals.

Here are picturesque canals in Alkmaar.

Here are more picturesque canals in another town.

And even more picturesque canals in yet another town.  Yes, the whole country is covered in canals.  I learned my lesson.

I made a list of delicious Dutch foods to eat before leaving, which Stephen's parents obliged in taking us to.  We didn't think it would be so hard to find pannenkoeken in Holland, but it was!

Pannenkoeken are Dutch pancakes - like big thin crepes.  They layer toppings on top while it's cooking so that the toppings bake in - this one is apple and raisin, but they put all sorts of things in, including bacon and cheese (which is delicious).

Once you get your pannenkoeken, you put powdered sugar and special syrup (stroop) and roll it up to eat it.  Delicious!

We also visited a special poffertjessalon while we were there, which was open for the summer months.

We ordered many many poffertjes from the chef, which he made on his gigantic cast iron poffertje pan.

 And here they are, with apple and powdered sugar and cream!  Yum!  (Although 20 poffertjes each was a bit much.)

We had a great time in the Netherlands again and it was great to see Stephen's Grandparents, Uncles and Aunts and cousins (who have all grown a lot since last time we saw them 4 years ago).