black velvet..if you please

Yikes! I've been home for about 72 hours and Calgary and the rest of western Canada has been hit hard with winter and all the fun things that go along with it like; -30, a freezing cold wind from the NW, and snow blowing across the prairie faster than it's falling from the sky. Anyway, I tried to warm up by going for a pint. Since I was recently in Ireland I ordered a "Crown Float" , which for those of you who don't know it's a cider topped with a Guinness crown. I must say that it was an utter failure in Ireland (but really who would ruin a Guinness in Ireland?) and at Ceili's Pub in Calgary this evening. So, in my efforts to find out why it was so hard to get a good crown float, I thought I'd ask all knowing Google. To my surprise it the first hit was and article from the U of C campus newspaper the Gauntlet. Here's the link to my beloved drink! http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/a/story/8036 and a recipe for those that want to try it at home or give a bar tender a rundown of the spoon technique!! http://www.extratasty.com/recipe/675/black_velvet_aka_crown_float

Heading Home

Hi Everyone,

D and I are on the last leg of our trip, well actually D got to go home on an earlier flight yesterday and I am just living large in a hotel in Dallas, Texas. Everything really is large here. I have two giant TV's in my room, a king sized bed, and a huge bathroom and this is just the budget hotel for a person on the "Distressed Passenger Rate" (it's sweet if you can pull it off). We spent the previous night in the Gatwick airport, which was actually okay using a handy tip from sleepinginairports.com We hit up the chapel and got some shut eye. We even turned off the light for a while, but some airport employees who also use the area for napping on their breaks came and told us it had to be on. Anyway, my big beef was not the light, but actually someone that came in around 2am and snored the entire night. I couldn't believe that they didn't wake themselves up with the noise. D and I are getting quite good at living in airports....maybe I'll start a website. We even washed our hair in the bathroom in the morning!

See ya north of the 49th!

Andi

ps - we found this doll in Granada, Spain. Nice, eh?

Happy New Year!

Hi Everyone, I guess it's catch up time on the old Blog! Demitri and I are now in Belfast visiting Julie and Stu, and almost finished our trip. Where to start...in summary, we left Barcelona on the 7th of December and headed for Lisbon. Spent a week in and around Lisbon and along the south coast of Portugal. The next week we travelled in southern Spain from Seville to Granada and into the Sierra Nevada mountain range where we climbed the highest mountain on the Iberian Peninsula (one of my highlights). Tried to get some snow in the Alps for Christmas, but there is some sort of drought that did not foster skiing. We managed to get some turns in regardless (or at least we skidded around on the icy, windswept slopes for a week). We'll be headed down to Dublin in a few days and then it is back to Canada where I will likely blog more regularly; however, possibly about less exciting things than I've been doing for the past 3 months! I'll add some pictures from our travels as a New Year's resolution.

Happy New Year