As you may remember, we had as an objective to get to the famous national parks of Banff and Jasper in the Canadian Rockies before the start of the Canadian US and European summer holidays in July. Due to the bad weather in the region mid June and the detour we did to avoid this weather, we arrived a bit later and so we got to experience one reasonably calm week and one week of real ‘summer madness’. Continue reading
So we finally arrived at the foot of the Rocky Mountains but the weather forecasts were looking really awful. Luckily we have the luxury of having the time to wait. So instead of moving into the mountains at Banff National Park we threw the planning in the bin and manoeuvred around the bad weather. Luckily Southern Alberta has plenty of interesting stuff to keep us (and the kids) busy.
When we started planning our trip, there were only a couple of timings that were more or less fixed: friends that come visit on the one hand and visa or insurance restrictions on the other. But for Canada we had one more thing to keep in mind: the ‘silly season’ or ‘summer madness’ in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. As of early July, the National Parks (especially Banff and Jasper) are overrun by both local vacationers and international visitors. Most campsites are sold out months in advance and trails get super busy at that time. So we wanted to get to the Rocky Mountains before this started. We planned on spending about 10 days to cross from Ottawa all the way to Calgary (3500 km further) at the foot of the Rockies. That turned out to be a very tight planning as there was so much more to see and do ‘enroute’ than we had expected. Continue reading
Before moving on to Québec we spent some days in the New Brunswick province. After a couple of nice sunny days of spring, the weather went back to overcast skies and nighttime temperatures dropped to near freezing again. Time to get the winter gear out once more. Our first stop was at Hopewell Rocks a series of impressive examples of what the big tides of the Bay of Fundy are capable of. The rocks look just like islands (with plants and trees) in the sea at high tide. But at low tide they reveal all kind of erosion formations: giant mushrooms, ice cream cones or “flowerpots” (as they are officially called). In order to see the formations the visit needs to be timed right. When the tide starts to rise everybody is chased of the beach as there is nowhere to turn if you get stuck on the beach (as some tourists have found out).
So, we are travelling again! And what better place to start than Nova Scotia! In all honesty the choice of the departure point was a very practical one. When shipping a vehicle to the East Coast of North America there is a choice between Halifax in Nova Scotia Canada and a couple of harbors in the USA. We choose to ship to Canada, mainly for visa reasons. Shipping to US would put us under too much pressure to get to Mexico later this year (before our US visum runs out). So end of April we dropped off our van in the Antwerp harbor and mid may we flew after it to Halifax. And we soon realized that Nova Scotia would pleasantly surprise us. Continue reading
Our son Leon was born on an ‘indian summer’ night in October 2015. As we were not able to find him a day care until February, we were obliged to take up holidays to close the gap (maternity leave is 3 months in Belgium). So we decided to do what we like best: travel! So at just three months we took the little fella on his first trips abroad. Starting with a road trip to the snowy Alps to enjoy the best of winter and continuing on to Thailand to escape the worst of that same winter. We spent quite some time searching the internet for tips and tricks but didn’t come across a lot of useful info. So without wanting to turn our website into a “baby blog”, here’s some of our ‘lessons learned’ for people out there who might be contemplating the same thing. Continue reading
The first thing everyone thinks of when you say ‘Peru’ is… Machu Picchu! But when I was planning our trip, I started thinking “Let’s be original and go to Peru but skip Machu Picchu”. My ‘original’ be it slightly blasphemous idea was quickly vetoed and sent to the garbage bin by my dearest. In retrospect, and though I still believe one can have an excellent trip to Peru without seeing Machu Picchu, I’m very happy that I visited the site now. It wasn’t a walk in the park to get there (I must have really angried some of the Inca gods with my ‘original idea’) but it could become a lot more difficult to visit the place in the not so distant future.
a magical trip to Japan Continue reading
For years (12 years of Karate, 5 years of Ju-Jitsu) Japanese martial arts have been a huge part of my life. Even though injuries have prevented me from continuing for some time now, a lot of the philosophy and attitudes engrained in these martial arts will stay with me for the rest of my life. A visit to the ‘mother land’ of these arts was something that I had been thinking about for over 15 years. Apart from martial arts I also developed a great interest in the history of the country especially the Samurai era and the war in the Pacific. Moreover it’s Asia, my favourite part of the world! Still somehow after nearly 15 years of travel, I never made it to the ‘land of the rising sun’. There were three important reasons for that. All of which now prove to be very wrong. As I know that a lot of people have the same reservations, I decided to do some ‘Japan myth busting’ because it would be a real pity to miss out on this great destination because of these myths.
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As January came to a close I was getting very anxious. I had some holidays left that I needed to use before the end of April and we had no concrete travel plans whatsoever. March- April is a bit of a difficult period to fix a destination. Not yet really spring in most of the Northern Hemisphere and rainy season in quite a number of places on the Southern Hemisphere. We kept going around in circles, so I decided to pull out our favourite ‘Where to travel when’ book for some guidance once more. One picture immediately caught my attention as I opened the book to the April chapter. A picture of what seemed like ‘mother nature on XTC’. An explosion of thousands of small white and pink flowers against a blue sky: the famous ‘Sakura’ or Japanese cherry blossoms in full bloom. Sometimes all it takes is one picture to make me want to travel somewhere… Continue reading
It’s one of the phrases I’ve heard the most since my arrival on Belgian soil. It’s a really tough request because where do I start…Those 8 months on the road have passed in what seemed like a blink of an eye. But on the other hand we have seen and done so much that our first week in Africa in October seems ages ago. We would like to use this last post of this trip to look back at some of the many highs of the past 8 months and talk a bit about a number of things that have really struck us. Continue reading
