Five Years of Bliss

 Today June 21 or yesterday (The Summer Solstice) depending on how you count it was Geordie and I's 5th wedding Anniversary! That is a whole hand!  So here is a picture from that lovely warm first day of summer in 2007!  

 This picture was taken in 2005 and was our first little vacation together. We are camping at Falcon Lake in Manitoba. We swam, went horseback riding and hiking, made an inukshuk and picked blueberries! This is back when Geordie wore white undershirts alot. He doesn't any more.....not sure why......

 So here we are now in 2012 in Sooke, BC. After eye surgery, a big move, and (at least for me) a couple of hair cuts this is us now. Loved the eye surgery, not the surgery itself but the results.  I appreciate all the wonderful time we have together and love the fact that I have had five whole years attached to the best man in the world that I love so much. I hope we have five million more.

Latvian Market

We got around the Baltic countries mostly with regional buses which typically had pretty long drives between cities, so we'd stock up on food before each one. Going between Riga and Vilnus we got some supplies at a series of old zeppelin hangars which had been converted into a huge marketplace.
There was a wide range of foods to eat there including some rather suspicious looking dried fish which we declined to be adventurous enough to eat.
We did end up with some nice cheese, butter and delicious dark Russian-style bread. Having completely neglected to bring any cutlery we managed to get our food ready with a nail file Kathryn happened to have in her bag and made some very tasty sandwiches on the bus.

La Brea

Back in 2008, Kathryn and I were down in LA visiting her brother and seized the opportunity to check out the La Brea Tar Pits. Because after years in the movie industry, when I think of Hollywood, I think of a terrified and witless brute thrashing itself to death in several meters of steaming waste. The pits themselves are a bit of a shock to find as the city is so built up around them that you simply come to a green area full of puddles and pools of tar. Apparently there is so much tar in the area that its not uncommon for it to start seeping through people's basement foundations.
The on-site museum had an excellent selection of bones for Kathryn to admire and enjoy along with a lab for analysing bone and pollen samples and the like. One of the strangest displays was a rack of dire wolf skulls several times the number shown in the picture below. Being pack hunters with a strong alpha leadership system it was apparently not uncommon for whole packs to get caught in the tar following their top dogs. And with so many large animals in the tar as well its not surprising that wolf packs would get greedy about the chance for so much fresh meat.
Speaking of tar just popping up out of the ground, there were frequent pools at random throughout the grounds. Kathryn and her brother Steven were totally hypnotized by this and spent many happy minutes poking in the tar with sticks and generally making a mess.

The Sedlec Ossuary

This small and unassuming church in the Czech Republic was well worth the daytrip out of Prague and into the countryside. While Europe is littered with churches in general, this was one we made a point of going out of our way for. Cemeteries that are hundreds of years old often have a problems when they fill up and people keep dying, so the basement ossuary had long ago been filled with exhumed skeletons.
In the 1870s a woodcarver was paid by the ruling family to organize the bones and in so doing created some of the macabre art imaginable. The chandalier below contains at least one of every bone in the human body and the ceiling is lined with skulls. Each corner of the room featuers a huge stack of limb bones and there are four pedastals with the most sinister cherubs playing trumpets you can imagine.
Rounding out the collection is the family crest of the ruling family made out of bone. When your family crest already involves a crow pecking the eyes out of a Turk, you have a pretty sinister reputation, but when you have that enlarged to 12 feet tall and made entirely of human remains you are treading well into supervillain territory.
Needless to say, with her interest in all things skeletal, Kathryn was in hog heaven in this particular place. I'm not sure I would ever want to meet the God that has a house like that, but its a fascinating place to see either way.

The Soviet Bunker

When Kathryn and I were in the city of Riga in Latvia, one of the features offered by our hostel was a visit to an old Soviet bunker which had been converted into a shooting gallery. The two of us and 4 British guys (which we believe were on a bachelor party) were led across town and into an innocuous shed which was the entrance into the bunker. The stairway down is shown below.
The picture of us below is from the lobby area of the range and had all manner of weird guns and gear that you could pose and have your picture taken with. The experience itself involved 5 shots from each of a 9mm pistol, AK-47 and a pump-action shotgun.
Although photography in the bunker was not permitted, one of the guys in our group took a quick shot and I was able to get a copy of it afterwards. Kathryn then proceeded to put all us men to shame with shotgun headshots and a little line of assault rifle fire across the heart of her target. Meanwhile the rest of us bungled with one of the other guys shooting my target by mistake and the lot of us heading back afterwards with a lot less testosterone sloshing about than on the way down.

Chichen Itza

We spent our honeymoon in the Mayan Riviera of Mexico and while there, took in the ruins of Chichen Itza on the very same day it was declared one of the official wonders of the world. This giant pyramid known as El Castillo dominates the centre of the cleared area and is breathtaking to see. After some injuries by clumsy tourists it is no longer open for climbing but the view from the base remains unforgettable.
The Mayan people were brilliant astronomers and the ruins of this observatory were very captivating to me. There were statues of the heads of Mayan astrologers around the outside and the main dome had been designed to look like a snail. For any apocalypse nutters out there, we had it tiredly explained to us that the end of the Mayan calendar is the beginning of a new cycle and the world is no more likely to end on any December 31st than the end of 2012... just because you're out of calendar doesn't mean you're out of time.
This is the top of the Templo de los Guerreros (Temple of the Warriors) which has a reclining statue at the top and was flanked on the sides by hundreds of columns.
The Mayan people were fascinating and their lack of written language combined with their cruel decimation at the hands of zealous Spaniards leaves many of these places as enigmas I wish we knew more about.

Lobstering

My father's family has been catching lobsters in the North Sea since the 50s and when Kathryn and I went out to visit in 2006 I was sure to include an outing in our travels. When the tide goes out on some rocks near my uncles house, the lobsters that have gone in there to feed at high tide are stranded and you can find them if you poke under rocks just right. My uncle is doing just that in the picture below.
This picture shows you the gear involved in lobstering. The hip waders keep the water out of your feet and the pair of gaff hooks help you keep your balance on the slippery rocks as well as poking around under rocks looking for lobsters and pulling them out if they are defensive and attack your gaff.
Once you find one and can pull it out from under the rock you have to grab it out of the water and put it in a backpack of seaweed. This can be trickier than you'd think as they thrash quite a bit when you grab them and can be easily dropped if you don't know what you're doing. Kathryn is shown below as a mighty hunter that also ate most of that lobster.

Flashbacks Intro

So to spare our few brave readers the next 9 months of duck photos before we get on a new adventure, I thought we'd share some old pictures from before we started this blog and some of our trips and travels prior to our move.

Our first adventure together was a long-weekend camping trip to Kenora in 2006. Just the two of us for a few days out relaxing and seeing if we could put up with each other for extended stretches. Turns out we both liked it quite a bit and a trend was started.
The following year we took a summer expedition to Europe, starting in England and working our way through the former western block before ending in Istanbul. Kathryn was supposed to go on to Israel for summer work, but there was exceptional conflict in the area that year and her funding was pulled. Since we had gotten engaged a few weeks earlier we were quite happy to return home together and not have several months apart at all. Below is the pair of us seconds after our engagement in the tower at Dunstanborough Castle.
And the following year we had our honeymoon in the Mayan Riviera of Mexico. The picture below was taken at our resort before we went riding around on a tandem bicycle.