Thursday, December 31, 2015

A Year In Review

Since it is almost New Years, I am going to jump on the bandwagon and write a year in review post.  Why? Because I can.
On the home front this year was pretty stable.  I still live in the same place, which looks pretty much the same.  I have the same number of kids, same dog, heck even the same cell phone.

What has defined the year tho is travel.  A lot of it.  So much travel, in fact, that I still have yet to blog about the last 4 months of the year.  The cool thing is that of all the travel I did this year, only two trips were ones I expected to make when the year started.

The following are some of my adventures this year, starting with one of the few that went off as planned.

In early March my wife and I headed to Las Vegas Nevada for The Great Scavenger Meet Up.  This event is where we finally met in person a group of amazing photographers that we've been hanging out with on Google Plus - a community centered around the +Chrysta Rae Photography Scavenger Hunt (a hunt that continues to this day, so go follow +Chrysta Rae to get in on the awesome photography action).  While there we made friends with several people in particular, who will make reappearances in my further adventures this year.

My next trip was not expected at the beginning of the year.  It was a trip to Switzerland for work in late May.  I extended that trip to also include a stop-over in Germany to attend a geocaching Giga event in Mainz.  All that travel is captured in a series of posts called European Adventure 2015, however the overview is:  Landed in Frankfurt and took a train to Mainz for a couple days. Then I trained to Zurich Switzerland where I spend the next 10 days. While in Zurich I hung out with +Sivani Boxall, a Scavenger friend I met in Vegas, who toured me around, introduced me to some locals, and drove us on a road trip to Liechtenstein and Austria.


When the year had started my wife and I decided that we wanted to take a trip to the UK, and even arranged babysitting with the grandparents for that trip.  However after Vegas we decided what we *really* wanted to do was take an epic road trip across our native homeland of Canada.  So we did.
While we were planning, fortuitous fate and fortunes grace shone upon us, and we ended up discovering that a Scavenger by the name of +Ron Clifford had need to also go across the country, so we ended up road-tripping with Ron.  Along the way we added +Liz Kaetterhenry to our caravan, and all of us drove across this country, and met up with many of our newfound Scavenger friends. Too many to mention, but a shout out to +Patt Dickson and +Paul Howard for letting us crash at their respective houses.

These adventures are captured in a series of posts called The Great Canadian Road Trip.

After that I took another trip for work, this time back to Las Vegas.  I had some grand adventures there too, but this is where I lost track of time and start my blog backlog, so I don't have any posts to share.  In October we went to the Going Caching mega event in Rome Georgia.  Somewhere in there I threw in a Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk. Finally we headed back to Canada to spend the holidays with family.

I had an amazing year for travel.  I was in at least 5 different mountain ranges, and 6 different countries.  I added 4 provinces, 2 states, and 4 countries to my geocaching map.  I made a bunch of new friends, and have more memories than even I can blog about.  Not bad, eh?

So that is my year.  I wonder what 2016 will bring.

Whatever it brings I am sure it will involve lots of travel and road-tripping, and you can follow along on Google Plus, Instagram, or (eventually) right here in this blog.
See you down the road in 2016!

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Christmas Aliens Attack

I opened some Lego minifigs I received for Christmas, which included an ancient Egyptian soldier, and an alien squid dude. I decided to make a scene out of them.  I call this:  Christmas Aliens Attack (because I am unorigional with titles).

What do you think?

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Always Keep An Eye On The Guy With The Big White Lens

A few weeks ago I was walking through the middle of Central Park, in New York City.  It was my first time in this section of the park, so I was a little overwhelmed at the scale, and all the things to see.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spot a photographer with a huge telephoto lens  (ya know those big white Canon ones that just scream 'I got more zoom than you!' ?  It was a larger one of those) jogging across the grass, looking up into the trees.  So I looked up as well to see what he was looking at, and saw a red tailed hawk, just hanging out in the middle of the city:

It was at that moment that I learned a valuable lesson:  Always keep an eye on the guy with the big white lens, cause when he swings into action, there will be something cool to see.

Also learned in the moment right after this one is to keep your camera pointed at the wildlife.  Because if I did, the next photo would be of a red tailed hawk swooping right over my head.  However, I learned that lesson about 20 seconds too late, so you get nothing.  Sorry about that.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Photography Milestone

This is Blue Ridge Outdoor magazine, October 2015 edition:
This is my photo on page 5:
Yep, I can now add "published photographer" to my resume.  Go me.

If you are curious, the story of this photo (not the article in the magazine, but the adventure I was on when I took it), is covered in the post "Geocaching Asheville".

Cheers!

Wordless Wednesday