Carrying on from my spur-of-the-moment trip to the UK the week before, I headed to Columbus, Ohio on Thursday, November 18th to visit my friend Ken the Vet and go to the OSU vs. Michigan football game. Unlike the UK, however, this trip had actually been planned for a couple of months.
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All of the pictures from my “Gone to England for a pint, Back Sunday” trip are now online. 🙂

You can find most of the pictures from my trip here.

So, Tuesday afternoon I decided I needed to get away, so I went on the Air Canada website and bought a ticket to London. I flew out Wednesday evening and arrived at Heathrow Terminal 3 Thursday morning around 11:30. After clearing customs, I hopped on the next Heathrow Express into London where I made my way to Kings Cross station and caught the WAGN express to Cambridge. I stashed my luggage at the train station and spent the afternoon exploring Cambridge before meeting up with my friend Rob who is doing contract work for a company there. I also picked up a vodafone SIM card for my cellphone so I wouldn’t rack up roaming charges when I wanted to make a call here. I also took a guided tour of the River Cam in a punt. If you ever have the opportunity, do it.
We headed to the School House in Horningsea, a self-catering cottage he’s staying in while he’s there. Then we headed to a local pub for a pint and dinner.
Friday, I explored more of Cambridge and walked through the grounds of Trinity College. I bought a couple of souveniers before I met up with Rob around 16:00. We drove back to London where I surprised his wife, Yuki, and his mom. (They didn’t know I was in the country — the looks on their faces were priceless!)
Rob and I headed off to Dover today (Saturday) where we toured Dover Castle and saw the Dover Cliffs (yes, they’re really white!). Both are very impressive!
On the way back to London, we stopped at a truck stop where I happened to check for nearby caches. As luck would have it, there was one about 30m along a trail at the edge of the truck stop, so we grabbed a flashlight and headed off to find it. Trading a travel bug and leaving a poppy quarter, we signed the log and continued on to London. We did one more cache near Rob and Yuki’s to drop off the travel bug I had acquired (it wanted to go to Scotland, not Canada) and then headed home.
I head back to Ottawa tomorrow (Sunday), so you’ll have to wait ’til then for the pictures. 🙂

The week has been one of the worst I’ve had in the last few years for a variety of reasons, so I decided that some “fun” was required. I headed out to do some geocaching after dark, weather be damned.

So I called up Bev the Diver (someone I dive with) and convinced her to head out in the rain to find a new cache called The Radish-on Travel Bug Hotel located in the middle on the woods in near Bells Corners. In recognition of the need for extreme sunshine, I released a new travel bug called Donald the Sun Worshipper whose goal is “to visit as many warm sunny places as possible and get his picture taken relaxing on the beach”.

We homed in on the general cache location and found a side street with access to the forest paths to park on. Armed with flashlights, chemical light sticks and my GPS, we headed into the woods to find the cache. I guess we spent about an hour round-trip doing the cache including about 20 minutes of searching for the cache container once on-site.

I traded Donald for a Jeep travelbug and left a genuine Geocaching.com pencil.

The BBC has an interesting piece about the Inuit language online. It also refers to attavik.net which has a content management system which supports Inuktitut.