It has been a very busy and event filled winter. I have only now managed to get all of the photos I have taken since last August up into the photo albums. I have added four new albums and hundreds of photos.

• August Long Weekend at the Chalet – For the August long weekend, we had all of our friends down to the chalet to ride and hang out.
• Fall 2009 – Photos from the fall, riding up in Collingwood and Thanksgiving with friends at the Chalet
• Christmas & New Year 2009 – Christmas and New Year photos from Beach Blvd, England and at the Chalet
• Winter 2010 – Photos from the winter at the chalet including several weekends with friends and a long weekend when my Dad, Doris, my brothers and their partners came down. Also includes my birthday in Meaford and Juliette’s Around the Bay Race.

Now that spring is here, we are really starting to appreciate the move to the new house. Being so close to the beach is wonderful. Every morning, Juliette and I get up early, make coffee and take Daisy for a walk on the beach to watch the sun coming up. I also love riding into work along the beach path. Juliette also just found out that she is moving to the Burlington Campus of the university, so we will be able to ride to work together!

Before I go, I would also like to send out huge thanks to Jen & Franco for taking Daisy into their home for the two weeks we are away. When I dropped her off this morning, she quickly forgot who I was as she tore around the house playing with Cusco and Lima. We are going to have one exhausted and happy dog when we get home. I just hope she doesn’t wear Jen & Franco out.

Check back soon, I will try to post from Spain and there will be plenty of pictures when I return.

¡Adiós

I have uploaded the photos that I took from the wedding to an album in the gallery. Hopefully I will find some time to caption them soon, but there are many great shots of the wedding and the family, so check them out.

My coworkers keep asking me if I am cold riding into work, but other than the day that the temperature dipped below -20°C, the main problem is actually overheating. I think it is a bit worse for Juliette though since she spends nearly an hour on her bike each way.

In other news, we have been enjoying our weekends at the chalet. There is a crazy amount of snow, perfect for snowshoeing, snowboarding and drinking wine in front of the fire. I have finally pulled the pictures off of our camera and put up albums for everything we have been doing lately. There is an album with mixed pictures from this Winter, another album with the Christmas photos and two more for surprise birthday parties we had for Mari and Tim back in November. Please check them out.

This is the MLS Listing while it lasts. I have also put up a bunch of pictures that I took with my cell phone and copied from the MLS site. I am going down again next weekend for a home inspection, so I’ll take and post more photos then.

The chalet is on 5 acres of land and looks out over a large pond on one side and off into the distant hills on the other. There is only one neighbour and plenty of woods on the property. I expect we’ll have snowshoeing, x-country skiing and biking trails cut in no time.

It has been ages since I last posted, so a quick update. Juliette did great on the Crank the Shield, the three day mountain bike race in Northern Ontario. It was a long tough race, but we managed to come in third.

A couple of weeks of weeks later, we flew down to Las Vegas for one day for Steve & Silvia and Cam & Lori’s Elvis wedding. We had a great time. I think it was easily the most fun I’ve had at a wedding. Check out the pictures, they’re fun.

I got sick right after the wedding and the next weekend, we found ourselves in Pennsylvania for the Iron Cross, the longest cyclocross race in North America. It was a fun, tough race. Neither Juliette nor I did very well because we were so beat from going constantly and being sick, but we had a great time hanging with the True North team. We’ll be heading back next year for sure.

There are plenty of new photos to check out and I will add more soon. I’ll also do my best to not leave it so long between posts.

If you want to see more pictures from the race, check out Dave’s photo album with hundreds of great shots from the race.

I have also uploaded a video that I took from the race and I have found another video on YouTube of a younger category. It has more of the singletrack sections, so it is fun to watch.

Thanks to Dave for taking the photos and for letting me upload these great shots.

It will take a long time to view them all. If you have a slow Internet connection, you may want to wait for the DVD or wedding album. If you want to print any of the photos, remember that there are three sizes of each one. Click on the thumbnails to view medium size images. If you want to download the large image for printing, just click on the medium size images to access the full resolution shots.

We are enjoying bike touring and planning on doing more, so I started a Bike Touring page where we can give descriptions of the tours we have done. So far, there is only one route, our Finger Lakes trip, but hopefully the section will grow over time as we do more trips.

Two weeks ago, Juliette raced in the Frontier Adventure Challenge in Huntsville. Her all female team raced a great race beating many teams and would have come in third place, but they missed the final cut-off. I posted photos of the race in the gallery.

We were busy last weekend. Saturday, Juliette, Tecla and I went out for a long, hilly, 107km road ride to build up our endurance for the adventure races later this year. It was my longest ride this year and it left me feeling a bit wobbly after that and the yard work all afternoon.

Sunday, Juliette and I took the five Buddhist Precepts at the refuge ceremony at the Blue Heron Zen Centre in Hamilton.

Monday, Tim, Tecla and I drove up to Old Baldy to climb there and at Young’s Crag. It was a beautiful sunny day and we had a great time despite the black flies. The sun seemed to be shining directly into my lens most of the day, so I only got a few good shots, but they are up in the gallery if you want to see them.

We woke to a sunny Saturday morning, grabbed our gear and headed straight for High Exposure, the most popular and classic route at the Gunks. We were lucky, there was only one party ahead of us when we arrived. The first pitch was streaming with water from the rain the night before, but I managed to get through it and up onto the beautiful face of the second pitch and then to the High E ledge without a problem. When Tim arrived at the ledge, he looked like a kid at Christmas, but I’m not sure what the look on his face was when he looked up at the huge overhang of the last pitch.

The last pitch was as amazing as I remembered it and when Tim topped out he was wittering away with excitement. We rappelled down the route beside High E and I got a few more pictures on the way down. At the base of the cliff, we found a couple dozen climbers gathered around the base, waiting for the route or climbing one of the many direct variations on it. I had forgotten just how busy the Gunks got!

We headed back along the cliff looking for another classic route to do. Tim wanted to lead, so we were looking for a good route for him, but everything had queues of climbers waiting for them. We kept walking South until we finally came to a free climb, Easy Overhang and started up it. It shared the first belay with the route Baby which two other climbers were doing, so we got to chatting with them a bit.

After finishing Easy Overhang, we decided to call it a day and headed into New Paltz for dinner. We ate until we were stuffed, had a couple of blueberry beers, then headed back out to the Gristmill for the night. Tim and I were hanging out in the van having a few more beer when Rene and Eva (the climbers we met earlier on the belay ledge) showed up. We talked about climbing and US politics over a couple more beer then decided to climb together on Sunday at the Near Trapps in hope that it would be less crowded.

Sunday morning we stopped off for breakfast and a coffee before heading up to the Near Trapps. We ran into Danielle and Mike from Deep River as we walked in. They were one pitch up Gelsa. We continued down the cliff looking for an open route until we finally came to Up Yours and Loose Goose. The pro on Up Yours looked a bit sketchy, so we decided to head up Loose Goose. Eva led up first, then after she brought Rene up, Tim led the first Pitch. Eva set off up the overhanging 5.8 variation above the belay in a great lead and I headed off across the wandering 5.5 pitch.

We all ended up shivering at the same belay high on the cliff. We couldn’t pick out a decent route through the wet and overgrown upper face despite Eva’s foraging half way up through trees, dirt and water, so we set up a rappel and headed down.

We walked back along the base of the cliff looking for a free route, but nothing was open and none of us felt like a hard lead, so we decided to call it a day. Rene and Eva started their drive home. Tim and I headed back into New Paltz for dinner.

During the night, the wind came up and the temperature dropped. We headed for breakfast and a coffee and hoped that it would warm up enough to climb, but by the time we got to the cliff the wind was howling and cutting right through us. So we decided to cut our losses and start the long drive home. Just then, Kit Moore showed up and not being put off by the cold headed up to the cliff leaving both of us feeling a bit guilty. Not guilty enough to get us on the cliff though, so we started driving.

As we headed home, the weather got progressively worse, so I think we made the right decision. I have put the photos up, so make sure you check them out. I got some great shots this weekend.

When we arrived at the airport, it was crowded beyond belief and it took us forever to walk through all of the terminals to our terminal where we found the Air Canada line stretching from one end of the hall to the other!  It turns out that the flight hadn’t even left Toronto and everything was chaos.  Juliette had to catch her Air France flight, so I kissed her goodbye and stood in line.

Eventually things were sorted and I several hours later I was on a bus to an airport hotel.  The flight was rescheduled several times, so I never managed to get out of the hotel, or much sleep either and eventually headed back to the airport the next day to catch the flight.  After several mishaps later, the flight was finally airborne and I was on my way back to Canada.  It was just in time too, today France was brought to a halt by a national general strike.

Juliette and I had a wonderful time and it was great to see her parents and spend time with Bob and Frankie who were great hosts.  We skied, snowshoed, hiked and explored followed by great food, wine and company.  I have uploaded the photos, but they are not quite in order and they don’t have captions yet.  There are nearly 300 after I paired them down, so approach with caution.