-
The Making of My Blog – Part 3
It was just after returning home after our trip to France last fall when I first started to put together the details of how I was going to build this new site. I had looked at a couple of different programs that fell into the…
-
The Drudgery of Business Travel
It can easily be said that travel is a passion of ours. Barb and I look forward to our Excellent Adventures each year and spend most of the year before that planning them. Business travel, on the other hand, has little in the way of…
-
The Making of My Blog – Part 2
Getting the words down is always the most difficult part. What I mean by that is that when I’m on the road in some faraway place, it’s one thing to collect interesting notes in my notebook for my Excellent Adventure emails that I have sent…
-
The Making of an Excellent Adventure 2005 – Part 1
As of a few weeks ago, we have officially begun our 2005 Excellent Adventure trip planning. Even by our standards we are ahead of the game as we’ve even bought our tickets to Italy already. Our trip this year will be unique as we will…
-
The Making of My Blog – Part 1
About 6 months ago (while we were planning our recent trip to France), I decided that I wanted to change the way that I was sending out my Excellent Adventure updates. As most of you know, I was previously just sending out emails to a…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Final
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 11, 2004 Shopping as an art form Some of you may have picked up from previous Excellent Adventures that Barb and I have a liking for shopping when we travel to Europe. This is pretty much true…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 5
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 9, 2004 Driving like maniacs No trip to Europe would be complete without commenting on the driving habits of the locals. In general, there’s lots to be envious of in France as the have an excellent highway…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 4
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 7, 2004 Food Glorious Food Day 6: Today began with an early morning delivery of our breakfast courtesy of Patrick. It consisted of the freshest croissants and a baguette – something that we have found that the…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 3
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 4, 2004 Day 4: As today was our last day in the Burgundy region, we ended up spending it in Dijon again and did some shopping. We really planned on doing most of our shopping in Paris…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 2
Note: this email was originally composed on Oct. 1, 2004 Preface: I`ve been having lot`s of computer problems since I got here. I am now sitting in front of (gasp!) a Macintosh at the local post office writing this. The last post office I was…
-
Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 1
I was thinking to myself the other day that we really like the airport. Ok, so were at the airport right now waiting to fly out to France so whats not to like you’re probably wondering? Fair enough question but we *really* like being here.…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Final
The Rock, Cats, Monkeys and Nutella Final Week: We left Sevilla after picking up our rental car from the train station and headed south towards Ronda where we would be staying for the final week. About halfway during our two and a half hour drive,…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 5
Of Ham and Football Day 10 (cont): We had a few hours to kill before heading out to the football game so we took the opportunity to get our laundry done. We usually end up doing this boring (but necessary) task about once a week…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 4
So What’s Wrong with Spain, Anyway? Over dinner the other night, Barb and I were talking about our choice to travel to Spain and that relatively few other people that we know had express interest in going to Spain as well. As far as Europe…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 3
To Tel Aviv and Back Day 4: It is now our third day in Barcelona and Barb still doesn’t have her luggage. The thrill of “winging it” has pretty much worn off now and Barb’s morale continues to decline on an hourly basis. What she…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 2
The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly on the Plane. Good News! When we were checking in at the Air Canada counter in Vancouver, we were told that we would be upgraded to business class on the flight to Toronto. Frankly, this was surprising as one…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Part 1
So another year has passed and we find ourselves again sitting at the airport boarding gate waiting for our flight to start our trip to Spain. I find that this is really the best part of the trip when all of the work of planning…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent French Adventure – Final
This will be the final chapter of our Excellent French Adventures. Before I continue, I wanted to expand on the experience that we had at the George V hotel that we visited a few days ago. When we entered the front of the hotel, there…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent French Adventure – Part 4
I was asked how many people are getting this journal. The number is now at 51 people and it has grown with every trip for the past 2 years. It is being sent to 5 countries outside of Canada from Germany to Indonesia. Our adventures…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent French Adventure – Part 3
One of the issues that we were obviously going to be facing was the language issue. For the past 25 years, whenever I told anyone that I was originally from Montreal, I was always asked “well, you must speak French”. My answer was always that…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent French Adventure – Part 2
Oct. 11, 2002: We arrived in Nice, France on Friday afternoon after making our connecting flight from London Heathrow. We were in possession of our bags within 5 minutes and this was a good start to the trip. Our hotel in Nice is cheap, clean…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent French Adventure – Part 1
So here we are again with a couple of hours before our flight on our next adventure. By this time tomorrow, we will have checked into our hotel in Nice in the south of France. We’ve sporting our French-English phrasebooks and other assortment of guidebooks…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Final
This will be the final installment of our Excellent German Adventure story. Dec 29: Our story continues with us arriving at the Frankfurt train station. We took a short 2-hour ride from Baden-Baden and were met at the platform by Anette and Frank. We first…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Part 6
It’s been about 10 days since my last update as there has been some difficulty in getting access to a reliable Internet computer for a while. Anyway, here’s what’s been going on for the past while: Dec 21: Today we left the town of Garmisch…
-
Barb and Baden’s Excellent German Adventure – Part 5
On Monday we were finally set to go for our scheduled tour of the BMW factory in Munich. Needless to say, this was going to be a highpoint of the whole trip for me. The BMW head office and main factory in Munich was built…
