Pre-holiday madness

I believe Radiohead said it most succinctly, “You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts. You do it to yourself, just you, you and no one else.”

Ugh. So in an attempt to get my lead author responsibilities out of the way before I leave on my two week vacation (more on that later), I’ve been pushing myself, working overtime, as well as trying to accomplish all the outside-of-work things. Like baking for holiday celebrations at work, or going to the gym, or socializing. All of which I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “You can totally handle this. There are more than enough hours in a day. Ha ha ha! I dare say, it will be child’s play. Perhaps you should consider adding even more things!” (Imagine that transitioning into a British accent halfway through, because I sure am).

Unfortunately, it seems that the lead author responsibilities may not get fully resolved because of more than just not having two full work days to round out this week. I’m also waiting on the organizers to inform me of a few things and they are likely just as frazzled as I am. So I am doing my part and then, that’s all I can do.

I just did a bit of self-care and declined my husband and our friend’s invitation to join them in a post-game pint. Sitting, wrapped in my favourite fuzzy blanket, on the couch is pretty much what I want to do right now. Not that socializing with them would be taxing at all. But my body is crying out for me to just take this moment to relax and stop. So I’m multitasking by blogging while I sit. Because I’m apparently terrible at relaxing.

Two more days… Two not-entirely-full-because-of-meetings work days to finish everything and then we are on our way. Then two more family Christmas dinners, a friends brunch, hopefully a big movie… Some last minute laundry, cleaning and packing… And we’re on our honeymoon!

We didn’t take a honeymoon after the non-wedding in April, and we wanted Christmas Day to be for us this year, so what could be better than to plan a getaway that was for us over Christmas?

So we’ll spend Christmas in Paris, and then fly back through Iceland to ring in the New Year with almost 24 hour darkness and a trip to the Blue Lagoon spa, hopefully under starlit daytime skies. I’m beginning to get excited about it. :)

I may have time to share our experiences, but I won’t promise because it is supposed to be Us time. :) But I’ll post photos etc when I can.

And just because I started with it, here you go.

And home again

I started back fairly early. Our taxi arrived at Sandbjerg Gods to pick us up at about 8:45am and we headed to Sonderborg Lufthavn (airport). We were flying back to Copenhagen on the matte black supercool plane.

  
Totally rockstar.

I flew out with my Norwegian colleagues, but they were able to continue on whereas I had to pick up my bag and check in for the rest of my flights. So I had to leave the security area and go back in. Which ate up some time, at least, as my Heathrow flight wasn’t leaving until the afternoon.

I sat by the windows at the Yo!Sushi restaurant to have lunch. It was a cute multicoloured place with a conveyor belt carrying food around that you chose and ate.

  
It was fairly tasty, though I still prefer the sushi from my favourite place. But I was able to sit there, out of the flow of traffic and chill for a half an hour or so.

Then I stopped at the Starbucks right next door and got a nice warm chai latte, which I received when the barista called “Yenni”. The Danish J.

My gate was published by then so I started heading for gate D102. Which was past passport control. I stamped out of Denmark and was truly on my way home. I found more lovely seats on an upper tier heading towards my gate, but by that point I really needed to charge my phone so I sadly left the quiet, solitary, super comfortable chairs and went in search.

I found my gate and there was a wall outlet right beside a set of chairs near the deserted desk and locked door. It was baffling. There wasn’t a waiting area to speak of really. We were all confused because we could see people downstairs who looked like they were also at our gate. No, they weren’t, actually. We got pre-boarded and sent down to a holding pen. Then the next official lady started to allow us to board, first calling the business class passengers. But she was rushed by all sorts of people in our holding pen.

“Wait, no, you’re not business… Hold on… Ugh, forget it, fine. Go!”

Thus the rudeness of the mob meant that there was no orderly boarding process. I felt badly for her.

The flight from Copenhagen to Heathrow was quick, but we spent at least 20 minutes in a holding pattern waiting for clearance to land. While we were waiting, I took pictures of clouds.

  
And a neighbouring British Airways plane who was flying a bit below us.

When I got into Heathrow, I forgot about going through security again, so I ended up pounding 400mL of water from my bag so that I could keep my bottle. It was very handy for the long flight, to keep me hydrated. Once I got through all the checkpoints, I was face to face with the departures board. And I got a punch in the gut.

18:00 Toronto Delayed to 21:00, gate given at 20:00.

I marched over to the Air Canada Transfer Passengers desk and inquired. Yes, the woman said, I would be missing my last connection to Ottawa. They would provide me with a hotel and vouchers and rebook me on the earliest possible flight the next day.

I was so deflated. My schedule to get home had already been a gigantic slog that was another feat of strength (my trip to Sonderborg had been my first feat of strength that week). To add in an overnight stay in TO just made me want to cry. I wanted to be home.

There was also the possibility that I wouldn’t have clean clothes so I looked among the high end shops for a shirt to wear on the morning flight. The only one that would probably fit was going to cost more than $50 and was a sparkly silver that I knew I’d never wear again. So I risked it and didn’t buy anything.

I stopped in at the World Cafe for dinner and treated myself. As a rule, I don’t drink while flying because I have a hard enough time staying hydrated enough to feel human by the end of my transit. But I had a cider with dinner because, what the hell – I wasn’t going to be flying for three more hours anyway. I also may have had their deep fried mac ‘n cheese ‘n kale balls as an appetizer before a veggie burger topped with grilled haloumi cheese with a side of fries…

  
For the record, I did eat the micro-greens too.

  
Narm.

I bounced around Heathrow, successfully reading some of my book of yoga essays that my friend had given to me as a present during my nine wandering weeks. I had a big peppermint tea. I took off my hiking shoes and stretched a knot in my left calf and let my feet stretch out a bit.

Oh yeah, apparently Heathrow decorates for Christmas before Guy Fawkes Day. I didn’t mention it from my first passage on Tuesday, but…

  
Really, Heathrow? Really??

Don’t get me wrong. They are attractive interpretive trees (another was composed of bias bands looking like sparkle edged ribbons set on diagonals so that they built a tree), but it’s too early.

My gate was published even before 20:00 so I got to hustle to another far flung arm of an airport to wait for boarding of my flight.

  
I thought maybe I was wrong at this point. My footsteps echoed quite pointedly.

But I was right and it didn’t take long before we were rallying together to board. There was a prescreen process where a couple of officials looked at everyone’s passport and boarding pass. I couldn’t help wondering if it was to screen out potential Syrian refugees, because one man seemed to get many more questions than the majority of the white people going through. Hmmmm.

We had a minor mechanical thing that stalled our leaving, having had pushed back from the terminal already, and then just sat there for a while. So we had to taxi to a maintenance station to have maintenance staff reboot something, and then we finally took off, late. At that point there was no hope of me making my connection. So I tried my best to self-care during the flight. Alas, despite my seatmate leaving for the empty three seat row across from us (so she could lie down and sleep), I probably only got about 20 minutes of dozing while lying down across my two seats. I spent most of the 8 hour flight reading or writing in my journal. I would occasionally flip on the map to know where we were in transit.

  
Bye London.

When we touched down in TO, there was a helpful lady standing at the top of some stairs with a package for each of us who missed a connecting flight. We were given our luggage back, and we were given a breakfast voucher (which I forgot to use) and put up in the Crowne Plaza. After waiting for the shuttle bus and then waiting to check in at the hotel, I managed 2.5 hours of sleep in an actual bed (glorious) before I got up, showered, changed into my last outfit I didn’t get to wear (yay clean clothes!) and waited for the shuttle bus back to the airport. The lack of sleep was making me very wobbly.

  
Good morning, Toronto.

Happily, we took off and got to Ottawa quickly. I got choked up as the tyres hit the runway, I was so glad to be home. My husband  was waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator. And then, we went home and slept for three more hours. ;)

And that was my Denmark trip. I have a lot of work to do coming out of this.

The trail less travelled

We restarted our meeting punctually and slogged through the initial part very slowly. We hadn’t made much headway through our document before we stopped for a quick coffee break. We had a lot of work to do and we were all worried that the little outing we were planning after our quick lunch might eat into our productive time.

However we motivated ourselves and got through more of the agenda and our document before lunch. But still, the rest of the document seemed insurmountable and I considered staying back from our walk to help push our work forward. We had realized that many of us were supposed to miss the last scheduled hours of work this morning, because we all had flights to the rest of the world. So we really needed to finish our work by 7:30pm, since that was when our fancier group dinner had been arranged.

But even our co-chairs decided to go for the walk so I joined them. I walked with the forward, faster group, since my colleague and I had explored this route the day before.

  
And we kept following the path along the river. It was a gorgeous day, and we all were wondering at the great warm weather. I found a neat beetle on the path, if they needed any more evidence that I was (am?) a field biologist.

  
He has purple feet!

And then I found a little juvenile frog, who looked like a wood frog to me.

  
I had to zoom in to the maximum to get a halfway decent picture because he was so tiny and he kept running away from the crazy lady on the ground making weird happy sounds at him.

Then we were at our destination – a replica of the Nydam boat. One of the local group members told us about the discovery, all the broken weapons inside the boat, and their theory about why. Apparently the Nydam holy lake contained 5 captures warships, sunk into the lake as an offering to Odin, and the broken collected weapons from those 5 warships as well.

  
The ship in the shelter – they were re-sealing the floor wih tar. It smelled very piney.

  
Inside the boat – there was room enough for 30 oarsmen and 20 additional warriors. They usually fill the bottom of the boat with about 2 tonnes of rocks for ballast but they don’t know if the Angles (it was an Angle/German warship) would have done that. But otherwise the ship isn’t super stable.

  
The interpreter said that they had looked everywhere to find an appropriate tree for the keel beam – it had to be very large and an oak. They finally found one in the forest  nearby the lake and they were able to convince the landowner/farmer to allow them to harvest it for the boat rebuilding.

Because of the local history, the Nydam boat is in a German museum to the south, since they had been a part of Germany for about 60 years. So the landowner/farmer was quite happy to contribute to the rebuilding of their boat. The local group is also continuing to archaeologically excavate the holy lake site (now a field because the lake was filled with detritus over the years).

We headed back to our meeting and were very productive for the rest of the day. I credit the fresh air. We even finished earlier than we anticipated. Then we had some time before our fancy dinner.

  
The dining room of  the manor house.

  
The sitting room we had found in our explorations the night before.

  
The library with many Danish books.

It was a lovely meal and a good time to connect with different colleagues.

Now I’m on my way back to North America. I’ll blog about that tomorrow. :)

  
Danish outlets look so happy/cute.

  
Roses still blooming outside of our meeting place.

Sonderborg

On Wednesday morning, my colleague and I spent a bit of time in the morning exploring the Sonderborg waterfront and the Sonderborg Slot (Palace). It began still pretty foggy out and gradually cleared during the day.  

 
We walked along the waterfront to the marina, watching gulls (potentially silver gulls, according to the information panel for children) crack open common mussels on the promenade. The trees were strong and interestingly shaped and some of them were not identifiable by this North American biologist. We also saw a bigger sea gull dancing on the lawn of one of the marina buildings. He was really just standing in one spot, repeatedly shuffling his feet. We wondered if there was something wrong with him because he didn’t seem to be pecking at anything, just shuffling. Then I suggested he was the marina’s special dancing gull practicing his routine for that night.

  
Then we walked back to the Sonderborg Slot, or palace. It has been a palace for a long while, and you can tell that it has been rebuilt a few times by the mosaic of different bricks and stones. Some of those were due to damage from warfare, and others seem to be renovations. We walked around and explored a ruined tower that had been excavated. Unfortunately a rather deep puddle existed in the tunnel leading to the open room in the tower so we didn’t enter but there were tower stairs that lead down to a locked gate, where we could look in to see how large the tower had been. Sadly, the museum part of  the palace didn’t open until 1pm so we weren’t able to go inside and learn more of the history, since we had to go to our meeting – the whole reason we are in Denmark to begin with! But we did learn about the German bombardment of 1864 when the region came under German control, which ended in 1920 when it reverted back to Denmark.

  
Patchwork brick and stone on the palace

  
The ruined excavated tower

  
The wet tunnel

We walked into a couple of the town’s side streets nearby but then decided to just go to Sandbjerg Gods and to explore the manor grounds there.

  
Really cute houses in Sonderborg.

The taxi ride didn’t take very long and we dropped our stuff in our rooms and went for a walk on the Nydamstien.

 
First we met a curious Highland bull. The electric fence was humming.

  

 We took a well travelled and marked path through the woods, which were predominantly oak, beech and perhaps an ash (not sure which variety). It was actually very mild here so the trees were still turning colours and had most of their leaves. It was fascinating to see the hallmarks of long human habitation in the   area being borne out by some of the patterns of vegetation. We passed many raspberry canes and rose bushes travelling along a field edge, and then came upon a living fence of beech trees.

  
We turned around after we reached a fork in the road (one less travelled) because we anticipated the arrival of more of our colleagues. Which was fine because we were halfway through the 7.7 km circuit.

And then our meeting began in the afternoon, in a quaint building that had once been the farmer’s house who had tended the land for the manor, I surmise. It was really cute.

  

 The front room where we did not have our meeting, but the best picture I took… 

 More to come – we take the road less travelled in the woods and learn some local history.

Painting and preparing

I’m back in the studio/office tonight. I had a lovely visit over a lovely sushi dinner with a lovely friend, which usually ends fairly early because we meet up right after work. So now I’ve finished my chores and I’m reaching for the blue and white paint to work on the painting with the cirrus clouds again. But I thought I’d blurt out a quick blog post first.

My boss and I had a good chat today that actually encouraged me to do more painting. He’s also an artist and he told me the number of paintings he’d made/sold in the past couple of years, and I thought “Jeez, I need to paint more…”

Also, in a few days, I’ll be boarding yet another trans-Atlantic jet to go to a meeting for work. It’s going to be a quick trip, but I’m hoping to post a few pictures and impressions. This time, we’re headed to Denmark. I’ve never been, so that should be fun. I have to pick up some Danish krone tomorrow, and set out my clothes. Luckily, it looks like the temperature there is essentially the same is it is here now – between 8 and 11C – so my current coat setup and shoes should be appropriate.

Okay, just a quick one. I’m going to see how many canvases I can add to tonight. :) And still get a decent amount of sleep. ;)

Snapshot Saturday

Flying in to Anchorage over glacier topped mountains.

Two gigantic bears mounted in my colleague’s hotel lobby. The polar bear was 10 feet tall and 1200 pounds, and the brown bear was slightly shorter (though still close to 10 feet tall) and probably closer to 1500 pounds.

Looking back to Anchorage from the Coastal Trail.

A golden eagle sitting in a tree.

Catching up – Alaska post

I promised a better Alaska post, so I’d best get on that before I forget *everything*.

One of the reasons why I haven’t been doing an Alaska post is that I’m pretty irritated by my photos on the last day. I took a lot of photos, and some that I was quite interested in seeing on my computer. But when I did, I was disappointed. I really should have thoroughly cleaned my camera before I set out on my last day. I have a consistent dust smudge  on the top left quadrant of all my photos. Grrr.

The first few days of my work trip were all work, which is good for a work trip, really. We got to Alaska and I tried the taco restaurant just down the street from my hotel, and then I went for a walk around the dog park and saw some angry beavers. Despite the clear signs saying that people should leash their dogs when going near the beaver lodge because the beavers are protecting their young at that time of year, well, people didn’t. But I didn’t see any beaver-dog fights while I wandered so that was okay. And I got “greeted” by one happy dog who had just been swimming in the beaver pond, but I was on my way back to the hotel, so I didn’t mind the wet face mark on my chest so much…

Anchorage is breathtaking, really. The city is perched on a delta/inlet and is backed by mountains. Yes, you have to worry about interacting with bears in the city, and moose. As I was walking anywhere, people were really friendly and said hi to you on the street. It was very odd, especially since people think you’re creepy, crazy, or trying to pick up if you do that in Ottawa.

We went to Orso for dinner on one night, and to our colleague’s house for dinner on the other night (when I saw the moose – three posts ago). Orso was lovely and the food was really delicious, and my colleague was able to find the red wine he liked, and it was quite good as well.

On the last day, when everyone was flying out, I had to stay because all the flights were full. So I spent the day rambling around Anchorage. I did the Coastal Trail walk from downtown to Earthquake Park, which was quite a hike, and I was in the wrong shoes for it. But it was a great walk, and there were planes everywhere. There were a couple of fighter jets (or more than a couple) doing exercises over the inlet. And there were bush planes taking off from the smaller airport, as well as passenger jets taking off from Anchorage airport.

I was able to see some sandhill cranes, a bald eagle sitting on a treetop, and two golden eagles – one flying and one sitting in a tree as well. That was quite exciting.

The information at Earthquake Park was really good, and definitely put the point across that the earthquake was terrifying. I can only imagine. Major land shifting, widespread destruction, loss of life. And then the aftermath of being without power, entirely cut off from aid and desperately in need.

When I got back to Anchorage from my walk, I went to Glacier Brewhouse, which was alright. It wasn’t exactly what I had wanted for food, but at that point, I was extremely hungry so I was okay with whatever. The beer was good though.

I’d like to go back for a vacation type visit – maybe do an Alaskan cruise and then go up to visit Denali National Park. And wear the right type of shoes for walking so far. My feet were really sore that night. :) Luckily, my hotel had a hot tub. ;)

 

Helpful moose information

A helpful information panel on the Coastal Trail.

Much like cats, moose apparently put their ears back when they are irritated with you. Unlike cats, a case of cat scratch fever is not what awaits you if you further anger them. Do not anger moose. They are flailing hooves of death.

I promise to do a real post soon. I was just looking through my pictures on my iTouch and found this and giggled. It is good info for folks who might be going hiking this weekend in moose country.

Going north, again

In a little less than two days, I will be heading north again. Again for work. This time, to Alaska. And I am planning on bringing my “big camera” despite the fact that in reviewing some of my Iceland photos, I realize with some disappointment that there is a huge dust/fluff mark in the top left hand corner of any “blue sky” shots (basically any shot where that area is light). *SIGH* I need my camera cleaned and fixed up. Or a new camera. One or the other.

I haven’t travelled a whole lot as a person. I mean, there were lots of road trips when I was little, but this year (starting with Ireland last year) seems like it has been jam-packed with travelling – Ireland and London/Stonehenge/Bath/Windsor Castle, Halifax, Quebec City, Iceland 1 (Reykjavik and Hvalfjordur) and then most recently Iceland 2 (Reykjavik and Akureyri). And now Alaska. I’m feeling a little bit travelled out and tired, I have to admit. Now I understand what my boss was saying when he claimed to be “done with travel”.

It’s as my friend R says, before you set out, you look at your comfy pajamas and your butt-groove on the couch and you think “Aww, this is going to upend my whole daily groove.” But once you set out on the road, watching the people around you, smelling and tasting a different environment, you realize that you’re learning, experiencing, exploring.

So that’s why I’m taking my big camera, because I will have a day during which I can explore, mainly because the flight right after our meeting was sold out so I have to fly out a day later than I intended. And I’ll stay away from bears. Hopefully I’ll have time to blog while I’m there, after my meetings.

Iceland, part 2

Another delay in posting – sorry about that!

So, we left off on Route 1 headed north to Akureyri. Now, Akureyri is the second largest city in Iceland after Reykjavik (which has about 60% of Iceland’s population in and around the capital). Akureyri has a population of 17,000 people. Plus tourists.

We had dinner on a rooftop patio overlooking Akureyri that night, which was really lovely.

View of part of downtown Akureyri, looking up at the church. It’s 10:10pm.

The next morning, we set out to see Dettifoss. You may know it as the waterfall at the beginning of the movie Prometheus. But we got to see it in real life, and it is a force of nature. It is a large and powerful waterfall – not poetic, but raw. The churning water flowing over the 40 metre drop looks like cement because it’s so full of sand and dirt from the lava rock desert the upstream river flows through.

This waterfall doesn’t gracefully drape itself over the cliff face. It pounds 40 metres down.

We also hiked up to Selfoss, which is the mere 10 metre high waterfall slightly upstream. We tried to hike down to see the other waterfalls along the river, but the “Challenging” hiking trail, which had us scaling rock falls on cliff faces to reach the dry river bed where the river course used to be, switched to “Difficult” with the addition of a climbing rope hooked “permanently” for hikers over two large boulders, disappearing down amongst some additional rock fall, to make it to the new river course below. Presumably, it would have helped one lower themselves the rest of the way to the chasm floor, the equivalent of the cliff face over which a truly impressive waterfall likely once cascaded. Alas, we felt that this might be a sign that we were underprepared for the rest of that particular loop, so we opted to circle back (hiking back up the other bank/cliff of the dry river bed – this time over a black volcanic sand dune) to Dettifoss. The only place that had significant greenery in the area was the spot that received most of the spray from Dettifoss.

We investigated Krafla, which last erupted sometime in the 1970s. We scaled the caldera of Viti (which happened in the 1700s) and took a look around, got a little wobbly-squirmy about how high up we were and how very far we would roll should we stumble and fall, and then headed back to the car. The car itself almost didn’t make it up the flank of the volcano, it was so steep. They have set up a geothermal power station there to take advantage of the heat, and so we had to drive under a little rectangular “doorway” they made in the tubing feeding the main generating station, which crosses the road.

And we finally stopped at Godafoss for a look. It’s a very lovely waterfall. Also very filled with tourists. That night, we tried take out from the Indian Curry Hut around the corner from our BnB studio apartment. It was really good. We had vegetable korma and prawn masala and naan bread.

Godafoss, the falls of the Gods, so named because an Icelandic chieftain tossed his Norse god idols into the falls when he decided that Iceland should be a Christian country.

We drove north the next day to see how far we could go, and what it looked like up there. The north coast of Iceland is really gorgeous, and smells of ocean and white clovers. We actually made it within about 10 km of the Arctic Circle, within 5 km of the 66th parallel, but our car could have potentially been damaged by the back roads we would have had to drive to close that gap, so we turned at Arctic Henge and headed back to Akureyri.

Just past Husavik, looking back towards the mountains near Akureyri and the fjord we just drove around.

Alas, the next day, we had to drive back to Reykjavik to drop off the rental car and prepare to fly home. We kept to the Route 1 we had travelled on the way to Akureyri, and set out early, before anything was really open except a few gas stations. That was something we weren’t used to – useful things not opening until well after 8:00 or 9:00am. We hit some rough weather passing through the western lands, and used the tunnel to drive under Hvalfjordur.

We had another lovely dinner at K-Bar, and spent the next morning wandering around sunny Reykjavik before going back to the hotel to catch our bus to the airport. We tried to find the CCP offices, the creators of Eve Online, but we didn’t wander quite far enough.

Our flight was at 5:00pm, so we re-lived 5-6pm a few times. We flew over central Greenland on the way back, which was quite striking. We flew over Nuuk, which is a town that I’m now familiar with due to my research at work.

The eastern coast of Greenland.

Close up on a tongue of glacier flowing to the ocean.

Western coast of Greenland, and more tongues of glaciers meeting the ocean.

Iceland was gorgeous, and we want to go back to hike the trail between Skogafoss and Thorsmork, and potentially be better prepared for the Dettifoss hike. Greenland’s landscape was amazing from the air, although I suspect it’s far more difficult to get to those places as a tourist.

And that was our big trip for this year. It was a great adventure!