June 10-15 Chillin in Santa Barbara June 15- Canadian Brass concert in LA June 16-25 Hanging in Toronto June 25 Canadian Brass concert in Sainte-Petronille, QC June 26- July 1 Spending time with Lisa, Alex and Tilly in England July 1-3 Sight Seeing in Athens, Greece July 3- 7 With Canadian Brass in Corfu, Greece July 8 Jeff's horn and organ recital in Tongeren, Belgium 1st International Brass Festival July 9 Canadian Brass in Dordrecht, Holland July 10 Canadian Brass in Eindhoven, Netherlands July 11-12 Canadian Brass in Tongeren, Belgium 1st International Brass F [View Full Entry]

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After just about 24 hours of travel, we're home!!! At least home in Santa Barbara. It's strange to be back among the reality of computers (although we had ours with us), cell phones, driving on the "right" side of the road, and our instruments.... (although I had mine with me all along, it wasn't used AT ALL!). So, here we are amongst reality! The time difference between Thailand and California is 14 hours. When we were posting our blogs in Thailand at the end of the day, all of our family and friends were just waking up to a new day [View Full Entry]

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Hi all! We just stopped in Tokyo on our way home! Nina's heritage is half Japanese, and she's never been here!! We were only here for 3 hours, so she did all she could while in one of her motherlands. We'll put some pictures up now, if we don't get pushed onto our Tokyo-LA flight. Nina is bursting to see so much of Japan right now. The Duty Free. The amazing sushi restaurant. The ummmm...other duty free shops. Air planes! ...and excited to hear everyone call her "Miss Yoshida-san". She definitely looks like she is home here. We might come back [View Full Entry]

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What can I say but, "WOW!!!" We've just had 3 days of SCUBA diving. We did a total of 7 dives. 4 of the dives were for Open Water Certification and 3 were "Adventure Dives." We had one fellow student in our class named Veronika, from Germany. Our supervising instructor was Stiofan, born in Derry City, Ireland, our dive instructor was Claire from London England, and our dive master in training was Jesus from Venezuela. So many things to describe...doing the training, 5 sections in class out of books, and 5 sections in the pool with equipment. Then we wrote our [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone! Well, we're going to sleep now after two days of SCUBA training here in Koh Tao! It's amazing...yes, I need to find some new superlative words...now more than ever, cause this place is monolithically incredibly awesome!! ...you will see from the pics! Sorry we've been away from email for a few days. Here's what we did! We left you at Koh Phi Phi. Here are some more pics of our time there. We walked to the beach on our last day there, and it was at low tide. Funny what ya miss when ya leave your hotel room at [View Full Entry]

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Day 7 and 8 Thailand We got to sleep in todayyyyy!! Yayyyy… This would have worked better if we weren’t out with our Zip Lining partners from California (thanks Matt and Leslie! Too fun!). We still woke up very rested, and ready to trek! We were loaded into our truck and taken to a meeting place/market where we grabbed the usual water and I thought I should grab a white hat in case we ended up walking in the sun all day, or were “stuck” on elephants! ☺ I grabbed a white hat that I could eventually use in our Canadian [View Full Entry]

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I don’t know what to say about the past 3 days except BEACH!!!! We’ve finally arrived to the completely relaxing part of our trip. Day 9 started with a 11am pick up from our hotel in Chiang Mai. We woke up pretty early because we had to meet with our tailor, Nick, one last time to get Jeff’s last few shirts and to give him our address so he could send my dresses. We enjoyed our included breakfast and amazing fried rice one last time, and sat down and actually watched a few minutes of CNN! The most exciting news of [View Full Entry]

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Thailand Day 5 So Day 5…here we are in Chiang Mai and we have a 7 am pick-up to take us to the “Golden Triangle.” What is the Golden Triangle you ask? Where Thailand, Burma, and Laos all meet! It’s a tourist attraction…but we thought it was not something to pass up. So…we hopped on a bus with 7 other people and started our drive. We really had no idea what to expect…but we’re always looking for a new adventure! Our tour guide took informed us that we would be in the van for an hour before our first stop which [View Full Entry]

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So we've switched it up a bit and I (Nina) am going to write about Day 6 too. We're a couple of days behind in our blogging, as we've been away from our computer for a few days (more to come in the next blog), and I've got some extra time on my hands, so I thought I'd give it a go! I really don't know what to say about Day 6 Thailand except for "ZIP LINING!!!!" It was QUITE the event!!!! Jeff and I woke up for a 7:45 am pick up. We enjoyed a great breakfast at our hotel [View Full Entry]

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Thailand Day 4 Good day, and welcome to day 4! Day 4 actually starts on day 3, which, if we’re keeping track, is day 2 because we lost a day on our way here. Anyway….We left the internet café and went across the street for highly recommended “street desserts”….of which we got 5…of which we liked 5! We went to the train station an hour early and dared each other to talk to the monks. Luckily we both chickened out, because the next day we read that it is forbidden to talk to the monks. We passed our time watching the [View Full Entry]

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