I have just settled into my room in Siem Reap after a long journey to get here. It is around 11:30 pm and I am quite tired from the last day and a half of travelling just to get here. The good news is that I should be able to get a relatively good night sleep, relatively early start and I anticipate not feeling the effects of the time change too much, similarly to Bangkok last year. Considering the extent of the journey, it was actually quite uneventful. My mom and dad dropped me off early at the airport on April [View Full Entry]

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Today is my last full day in Madrid and so I knew that I had to pack quite a lot in to make sure that I had seen everything I had my heart set on. I think that with any trip you plan those "absolute must see things" and also a few "would have been nice to see but I ran out of time". In my case, there are a few of the latter but all in all I am quite happy with the amount of sights that I have been able to fit in in four and a half days. [View Full Entry]

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The first thing that I want to say is ... OUCH! I'm not saying this to be lamented really because there are worse things that could be happening to me at this very moment. But can I just say that my calves are so freakishly sore from the incessant hill climbing of Toledo yesterday. My day started out feeling a little indecisive and therefore could not really make up my mind as to what I really wanted to do. There were still a few things that I wanted to do in Madrid itself but I was also really interested in two [View Full Entry]

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.... uphill both way OR buns of steel. I think that it is one of those words that have a few meanings, depending on how you use it in a sentence. I made my early to the Atocha Renfe Train Station. The subway route that I would normally would have taken had parts of lines under construction so I had to take a pretty long way out to get there. Now I know what rush hour on the Circular looks like ... good grief. Worse than the number 2 bus at supper time! The Atocha Train Station is actually quite vast [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday felt like a really slow day. The jet lag and lack of sleep hit me when I was going through the Museo del Traje. I went to bed early and had a relatively good night sleep. I wanted to cram as much into today to compensate for the fact that I had not gotten as much done yesterday. Mission accomplished! I left the hotel at around 8:30 am and right now it is about 8:00 pm and I just got back to the hotel. The first stop of the day was ... Dunkin' Donut for breakfast. It's right across the [View Full Entry]

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So I have made it safe and sound to bella Madrid. It was a relatively uneventful flight. My one concern was that I had a short connection and I wanted to make sure that I would be checked in all the way through so that I wouldn´t have to try and find a transfer desk with only a little over an hour for a connection. The plane was late in leaving so if you have never seen Caroline run through an airport, this would have been the show for you. I got on the plane and they had already boarded most [View Full Entry]

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As I mentioned in my previous entry, mom and I were staying at the Auberge Pomerol. The rooms were lovely and what made it even more unique was the fact that our day started with a continental breakfast brought to our door in a small wicker picnic basket. The basket had croissants, muffins, jams, yogurt, fruit, juice and teas and then we had a coffee maker in the room for the obligatory morning cup of coffee. It was hard to gauge the weather outside because we had this large tree in front of our window but it did not look promising. [View Full Entry]

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This is a weekend that had been planned for a little while, in part as a birthday gift for my mom. I say planned but by that I mean that the train tickets were bought and the hotel reserved but not much planning was done in terms of what specifically we would be doing and such. Mom and I had a general idea of what we wanted to do and I had bought a guidebook so that we would have some maps and general references but that was about it. It's not like we had never been to Montreal before but [View Full Entry]

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So pretty early on Thursday I get this email from my friend Sue which pretty much says something like this ... sorry for the short notice but do you want to come to the cottage this weekend? I ponder for all of two minutes and think that either I can stay home, go biking, do laundry, ironing and other chores, read up on Madrid and generally lay low OR I could get in a car, head to a cottage, catch some rays and relax with (knowing Sue) a cold drink and generally melt away any stress and anxiety in my life. [View Full Entry]

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Just created this gallery to upload a couple of short videos I took while I was in Bangkok. [View Full Entry]

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