The UK

We arrived in London and were met by Mark who would be providing us a roof over our heads while we were in London. Mark and Col had been next door neighbours in Japan while they were on the JET program and it was the first time she'd seen him since leaving Japan in 2002. We were actually going to be staying at his parent's place in Baron's Court, when we first met Kitty and Tom we knew we had arrived in England as the first thing that she did after making sure we were settled in OK was to offer us a cup of tea. So English and so lovely! We went out for a quick wander around with Mark and then met up with all the ex-JET crew at a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown. It was kind of overwhelming to see how many people showed up after such a long time and some of the guys had travelled a long way to meet up with us all.


The Kagawa-ken crew

We had a good time getting back in touch (or meeting them for the first time for me) and then all went together to the Karaoke bar. We got our own room in the Japanese tradition and proceeded to sing and drink and sing the night away. We were having so much fun in our little room that on the way back from a drink's run I overheard some people saying "I wish we were in that Moscow room tonight - they sound like they're having a ball"


Chris and I singing Angel by Robbie Williams


The girls get into the swing of things


The Moscow Room inhabitants

Truly an excellent way to spend the first night in old London Town. We spend the next couple of days cruising around London catching up with the JET crew, watching a bit of World Cup football and we met up with Rob and Louise for dinner. I hadn't seen Rob since leaving Sydney to move to Edmonton and in the intervening few years he'd managed to get married to the lovely Louise and they were pregnant with their first baby when we caught up with them. Fast work!


On the banks of the Thames


Look kids! Big Ben!

We then hopped on a train and sped our way across the countryside to the west coast of Devon and the little fishing village of Bideford where Colleen's second cousin once removed lives. She owns and runs a lovely bed and breakfast up on the hill looking over the town and the water in the distance and we spent an excellent few days with her in the Devon countryside. We had Fish & Chips at a pub, Devonshire Cream Tea, visited the old world seaside village of Clovelly, drank some good local ales and got to spend half a day at her friend's farm playing with their sheep which was one of the highlights of the trip for Col. Mary Pat was a lovely and gracious host and we spent a lot of time wandering in her garden and just soaking up the tranquility of English country living. In fact her garden was very inspiring and I ended up taking a ton of photos while we were with here, most of the flower photos in the "Honeymoon 2007 - UK" Flickr set are from her backyard. A very worthwhile sidetrip to make while we were in the UK and we'll definitely try and look her up again (and maybe drop in on Tom & Sue's sheep farm again!).

Next stop on the luna de miele? Bologna, Italy...

Eastern Canada & Upstate NY

Niagara Falls. Honeymoon capital of the world. The romance, the incredible volumes of water, the insanely overpriced food and parking. Where else would you go to kick off a two years belated honeymoon? Well Toronto actually. First stop on the luna di miele was our friend's Sarah and Mario's place in Toronto. Knowing us well, after picking us up at the airport they immediately hunted out their favourite Indian restaurant in Little India for us to go to and begin our avventura degustazione - our adventures in food. This restaurant will go down in the annals of our food history as the most intriguing place, not only because of the Tardis like nature of it - I'm still not sure to this day exactly how many dining rooms they have there - but also because for the life of us we couldn't work out the system. You place your order at the front cashier and then take a seat where you want (and there are a whole bunch of options) and somehow magically without having been followed, with more than just a handful of people in the restaurant (increasing the options of where you could be) you sit down and your food that you ordered starts arriving. If it was my restaurant people would probably be given portable GPS units or something that allowed the waitstaff to figure out where you where, but that's an overly technical solution to a problem that's obviously already been solved. If only we could figure out how... maybe they have a huge control room feeding camera images in from every dining area and the waiters all have Secret Service style earpieces in "party of four has just entered the Tikka Carriage Room". I don't know. All I do know is that the food was ridonkulously good, the decor was memorable and we had a really good time. They even managed to upstage themselves by taking us to Greg's Ice Cream on Bloor St where we had a green tea + pumpkin cone and a banana + pistacho cone. We were sad to miss out on their famous Roasted Marshmallow flavour which Sarah promised was incredible but they were all out - we weren't the only disappointed customers that evening either as a parade of people came through while we were eating our cones and fully half of them asked for Roasted Marshmallow.


Sarah and Col enjoying themselves at the Lahore Tikka House


Two in the Tikka Taxi

Sarah & Mario introduced us to the huge variety of different food options in Toronto, took us shopping, showed us the unique sites and were all-around wonderful hosts. If we weren't heart bound in Edmonton it would be a pretty fun city to live in for us. Lots more photos from the Toronto part of our visit can be found on the "Honeymoon 2007 - Canada" set on Flickr

Next stop was Niagara-On-The-Lake which is a lovely little village on the escarpment that separates Lake Ontario from the US. Sarah & Mario had lent us their Protege 5 which was exceedingly kind and made for a great roadtrip car. It also saved us a ton of money on a rental car. This area is incredibly good for growing grapes, has its own enviable little microclimate that is slightly better than the surrounding regions and has a whole ton of history to delve into. And did I mention the wineries? They were good, very good and we even found an organic winery that had a great tasting room. Colleen's cousin Bruce and his wife Alexis live in Niagara-On-The-Lake, which was mostly the reason that we went there (always fun to visit relatives when you're travelling) and since they were at work when we arrived we decided to swing by this little tourist attraction called Niagara Falls on the way. I'd been there once from the American side with my family when I was 5 but I can say without reservation that I enjoyed it so much more as a honeymooning couple from the Canadian side. They really are an astonishing natural landmark and there really is an awful lot of tourist tack assaulting the senses if you let yourself wander too far from the river. We lucked out though and managed to get free parking in a seemingly unattended carpark and quickly walked past the casinos, tropical bird parks and candy stands to line up for the Maid of The Mist tour. While in Niagara, do as the honeymooners do, right?

Those ponchos are just so cute aren't they?

Incredible natural majesty

After visiting the honeymooning destination of choice we rocked up at Bruce and Alexis' place which was an adorable log-cabin based home with so much character and style and a huge backyard. It was great to hang out with those guys and catch up on what we'd each been up to since they'd last been out to Edmonton. Of course we had more amazing food there (sensing the beginning of a theme here?) cooked by the four of us and used their place as a launching pad for exploring some of the local area which included Laura Secord's house (she's the Canadian Paul Revere) and all those yummy wineries we'd seen on the way in.

Next stop after Niagara-On-The-Lake was Syracuse which is in upstate New York where Col's other cousin Jennifer is currently living and working at Syracuse University. To get to Syracuse we travelled through the beautiful Finger Lakes area of New York and saw a ton of corn fields. Lots and lots of corn fields. We also had the cheapest and yummiest pizza ever at a little town called Avon - two huge slices of freshly baked Hawaiian pizza and a litre of Coke for $5.75. Pizzaland in Avon - a definite roadside must.

We stopped off at Ithaca on Jennifer's recommendation and were amazed to think that people go to uni in this incredible setting. It's up on the top of the hill, has an amazing gorge running through the centre of campus and has a ton of charm and interesting architecture. We had a short walk into the gorge and were instantly transported into the wilderness. What a cool place to have right in the middle our your studies to get away from the hustle and bustle of campus life and chill out with the waterfalls and trees. They call Ithaca "gorge-ous" and it's not hard to see why.

My first waterfall photos were taken in Ithaca Gorge

Gorge-ous!
We met up with Jennifer which was fun as we hadn't seen her since she'd moved out from Vancouver. She showed us around Syracuse and took us out for dinner at a local hip and funky place called Ambrosia where we got to eat some seared ahi tuna and pork tenderloin. Starting out the first week of travel in the way in which we mean to continue! Jen made us some amazing cottage cheese pancakes for breakfast which we promptly stole the recipe for and then toured us around the Uni campus which again had some amazing architecture. It feels like there was a lot of money dumped into Universities in upstate New York around the turn of the century by the wealthy industrialist and railway barons of the time.

John Crouse Memorial College for Women at Syracuse University

One of the coolest observatories I've seen
From there we headed back to Toronto via Buffalo (where Ani Difranco is from!) and met up with Sarah & Mario again for one last night before flying out to London. They made us a traditional Quebec meal called fondue chinoise which was a great mix of Chinese fondue and great French ingredients. By the time we finished up our week in Eastern Canada and upstate New York we'd managed to see some amazing places and eaten food from Indian, Jamaican, Italian, Chinese, Quebec, Korean and Italian sources and also the great homemade meals that our friends and family made for us. A fantastic way to start the trip and we hadn't even made it out of North America yet!

The road less travelled

After attending the splendiforous wedding of Michael and Kyle at the Tunnel Mountain Resort in Banff and finally having the opportunity to try out the Banff Hot Springs (more something I've been wanting to do than Col) we were driving home to Edmonton and decided to take the "scenic route". Now I've always had a laugh at the sign on the Yellowhead just after Hinton that has "Scenic Route to Alaska" on it - Alaska's only something like 1500km away and I'm pretty sure that every route going that far is going to be scenic in some sense or other. This time we decided to try and get as far as we could towards Edmonton on the Monday of a long weekend without using the major roads - thereby avoiding the horrendous Alberta driving public at large and possibly seeing some neat stuff on the way.


View Larger Map

We had an awesome drive up through the secondary roads of the Alberta foothills, through ranche country (for some reason around the Calgary area they like to add extra vowels to words), past some really neat farms, seeing all kinds of animals both wild and domesticated, along some "interesting" sections of roadwork and detours, and with a fair bit of seat of the pants navigating, to within about 10kms of Edmonton all without using a major highway. It may have taken us an extra hour on the trip, but the lower stress levels, the interesting things we saw and towns we went through and then general relaxing nature of a trip with no real deadlines made it one of our best road trips ever. Here's to destination weddings and what comes after them!