After an uneventful flight we arrived in Quito in good spirits only to be told that our bags were still in Houston. Continental has not improved much. As they have a flight every day we hope to see our bags tonight at midnight. We spent a pleasant day walking around the Old Town in Quito and visited the requisite churches and squares. When the late afternoon rain started we retreated to our hotel, the Hilton Colon. A nice, well-located hotel. Frances' raincoat was, off-course, in her checked bag. My socks should last another day, but if the bags don't arrive tonight [View Full Entry]

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Hiking in the Canadian Rockies has long been a favourite past-time and we magaged several hikes this summer and fall. On Wednesday we joined the Dogtooth Hikers from Golden for a hike up the Beahive behind Lake Louise. The weather was marvelous and much to our delight the Agnes teahouse had not yet closed for the season. We could not resist having a large pot of Earl Grey tea and 2 cookies at a cost us $16. Here are pictures from some of our summer hiking. [View Full Entry]

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The first two weeks of September were spent sailing through the Gulf Islands with Ian and his girlfriend Sarah and friends from Golden. Great winds, great weather, great sailing and a close encounter with an orca made for a very pleasant two weeks. We had decided to spend a week visiting with old friends who have been moving west. In Surrey we walked on the beach with Bob and Chris who took a break from packing for a trip to France. We had dinner and stayed with our neghbours from Calgary 15 years ago, Stu and Kathy, who are also in [View Full Entry]

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For all you concerned photographers, I took my camera memory chips into the local computer wiz who was able to recover all my pictures of Egypt that I thought I had lost by picking up a virus in an internet cafe. Now I am busy trying to wittle the 1300 pictues down to a showable number. [View Full Entry]

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An elderly woman in one of the many museums we visited said that if we wandered around we would see many beautiful things. Well, we've wandered around and we have seen many things. Some were humerous, like the Irishman in the cafe off to find cheaper ice creams for his young sons. Then he told us it was his wife's birthday and she had gone shopping for the day. The shops in Florence are filled with exquisite shoes and clothes cut to show the female figure at its best - and he was worried about the price of ice creams! We've [View Full Entry]

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Our three month sojurn has come to an end with this our last day in Rome. We have done all the normal tourist agenda; the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Forum, and the Spanish Steps. Sitting in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican it ocurred to me that Michelangelo preferred the male form. Young boys in fact. The lady in red sitting next to me, having heard me comment on this fact, told me that he was gay and that he rarely painted females and when he did they looked more like men with balloons than women. To illustrate her point she [View Full Entry]

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What can we say about Florence that hasn't already been said, and by all the famous writers and poets who have visited? David is spectacular and so is the scenery. K's main disappointment is the amount of scaffolding covering a fair number of the monuments. He says if Italy can afford to spend millions on restoration work, then they should be able to afford toilet seats. My only disappointment is that, because of K's hectic schedule I don't have time to try on any of the beautiful clothes in the numerous stores. One evening we attended a free choral concert in [View Full Entry]

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In Carrera we toured two marble mines, one open pit and one below ground, with an old mining museum and a couple of shops that sold marble fashioned into beautiful objects including two pedestals I would have loved to take home with me. The price was very reasonable if only we didn't have to pay for shipping and duty! The marble from these mines has influenced construction and culture of the region since Roman times. Many of the cathedrals and monuments are built with the white-grey marble, including the statue of David that we hope to see in Florence. We drove [View Full Entry]

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On Wednesday morning we watched Parmigiano Reggiano being made, a process that has gone on daily since 1200. The cheesemaker combines untreated milk from the morning milking with partly skimmed milk delivered the evening before in large copper vats. After adding whey from the previous day along with a natural enzyme, the milk curdles. It is cooked for a few minutes while the cheese solids seperate from the liquid and fall to the bottom of the vat. The cheese is lifted from the vat and placed in forms for a couple of days before being immersed in a saturated sea-salt solution [View Full Entry]

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We had been in Italy less than three hours before we ran foul of the ticket inspector for not validating our train tickets. Having asked specifically for tickets for a particular train and whether seats were assigned etc., it never occurred to us that they had to be validated in a small yellow machine tucked away in the corner of the station, and our salesman, who spoke good English, did not offer this information. The ticket inspector fined us 5 Euros each and, when we complained, pointed out that the maximum fine is 50 Euros, muttering about L'Anglais as he wrote [View Full Entry]

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