Australia and New Zealand

Melbourne, Mornington Peninsula, Great Ocean Road, Apollo Bay, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Hunter Valley, Sydney, Queenstown, Glenorchy, Milford Sound, Te Anau, Franz Josef, Hokitika, Lake Tekapo, Mt. Cook, Wanaka. (12th December 2009 to 10th January 2010).

What a trip!

Here are some photos.

Finally, an update!

After a year or so of only putting photos and other stuff up on Facebook, I've decided to revert to good old-fashioned blogging...

Here are some travel photos from the last year taken in Lille, South Africa, La Plagne, Verbier, Bruges, Copenhagen and the South of France.

And here's a really bad quality video taken in Verbier.

Dolomites 2008

Last week we thoroughly enjoyed our third annual skiing/snowboarding holiday in the Val di Fassa area of the Dolomites. This year we stayed at La Cacciatora, a spa hotel with great food and wine, and a friendly atmosphere. The snow this year was much better than last year - with 30cm of fresh powder falling on the Tuesday after we arrived. Overall the Val di Fassa is a great all around resort: although there isn't a lot of expert terrain, the scenery is great, the on-mountain food is superb, and it's a bit cheaper than some of the other European resorts we've been to. Another cool thing is that all of your runs are tracked using a chip in the lift pass, so you can check your overall performance at the end of the holiday. I skied 37 vertical kilometres over the week which seems OK considering we had a few slow mornings...

We'd love to go back again next year, but in the meantime here are some pictures of the mountains.

Hong Kong

It has been a while since the last post, but we've finally been somewhere new worthy of writing about and taking some pictures of. Hong Kong is great: the dim sum is delicious, the skyline is spectacular, and shopping is superb. The only negative thing about it is the pollution, but apparently the government has set some targets to improve this in the near future. I hope it works.

Here's a slideshow of some pictures we took.

Canada

Here are some photos from our recent trip to Canada. We had a fantastic time and it was great to see everyone.

New shoes

Remember when you were a kid and you got a new pair of running shoes and every step felt like a limitless bound? Well it sort of still works - at least for the first 50 metres anyway...then I've found that they pretty much feel like the old shoes again. Oh well.

Tour de France in London

Last Saturday we checked out the prologue for le Tour de France in Hyde Park (where else?). Here's a slideshow with a few pictures from the event.

Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau at Barbican Hall

Yesterday evening we had the pleasure of hearing these two jazz greats perform some of their latest material at Barbican Hall. The interplay between the piano and guitar was great, especially when Pat brought out his "Pikasso guitar" near the end of the set. I think I'm going to buy the new album.

Muse rock Wembley Stadium

Last night we checked out the Muse gig at the new Wembley Stadium - their second show in two nights, both of which I believe were sold out (or very close to it). I think Muse are a cut above the other rock bands out there right now when it comes to the level of proficiency on their instruments, but they put on a great visual show as well. I've seen a lot of light shows before - but during Muse's first encore, they had acrobats suspended from giant balloons rise above the crowd and dance gracefully in the air. Very cool.

Bohemian Rhapsody

Last weekend we celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary in Prague. In addition to checking out most of the tourist attractions we also had an absolutely fabulous meal at Kampa Park restaurant which we thoroughly recommend.

I also learned that Prague is the capital of Bohemia; apparently our modern usage of "bohemian" stems from a false belief that all gypsies came from there - although they did frequently pass through the area...

Anyway, here's a slideshow of some pictures we took.

And here's an admittedly slow-moving video of some touristy stuff:

Seeya Seattle

Today I'm heading home after two weeks of professional development training in the greater Seattle area with about 70 colleagues from 23 countries. Activities included building bridges out of newspapers and masking tape, geocaching (which I hadn't heard of before), role playing in a plane crash survival scenario and an interesting personality profiling exercise which you can find here. My results were as follows:

It's fun to observe different types of behaviour in these sorts of team building exercises and how competitive people (myself included) get even in contrived scenarios. Overall I think most people had a good time but now I'm happy to be going home.

We're coming to Canada!

It's official. We'll be arriving in Calgary on August 22 2007 @18:55, and leaving Calgary on September 8 2007 @21:20.

First week at the new job

I've just finished my first week at the new job and so far impressions are pretty good. My days mostly consist of meeting people and going for coffee, but I'm sure the 'real work' will start soon. Everyone seems to be enthusiastic and helpful which is nice.

Colombia Slideshow

Click here for a slideshow of Colombia pictures taken December 2006.

Video: Laura snowboarding in Italy