After Thoughts

An extra day in Toronto gave us a chance to unwind, collect our thoughts and review our experience. But first back to the Hockey Hall of Fame to do it justice, took me 4 hours to drag Janice out of there. Of course the Shoe museum for an hour was a must.....NOT!

We felt strange, and even a bit lonely, to be in the lobby of our hotel and to not be meeting any of our fellow travelers as they had all gone home the day before. No one to stir the pot with, no one to tease, no one to chat with , no one to strategise with. We realized then, it was all over but the crying! I still felt guilty asking the concierge where the nearest Starbucks was. Looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching as I asked my 2nd and 3rd questions.

We will never forget this travel experience, good and bad, and there were both to be sure. We are certainly thankful and appreciate what it takes to put one of these travel adventures together. The details and all the advance planning, along with shooting from the hip as issues arose. For that we want to recognise Bill, Andy and Pam.......................ela for their efforts and diligence.

As for the contest itself.....well everyone is a critic and I only listen to those critics who have been there and done it. Just to remind everyone as one of my good friends will tell you, history has no statues of critics. But all the same, we had 30 separate daily emotions, disappointments, celebrations, despairs, angers, joys, satisfactions and frustrations. As organizers, referees, arbitrators, and judges, it must of felt that you were running an adult day care center!

We want to recognize those travellers who gave it their all and did it honestly, in the spirit of the game. We want to to wag our finger at those who maybe didn't. You all know which category you fit in. Over time we hope that our relationships will develop into long term friendships, as all of you fellow contestants have a special place in our memories and thoughts, never to be forgotten one way or another, for sure!! We look forward to seeing or chatting with all of you again in the future. Thanks for all the memories.

We are now Savvy travelers who got a snapshot of the world. I don't need to visit any more mosque's, temple's or church's. I've had enough of breakfast buffets and late-nite room service. I will never tire of the impromptu meetings over a beer at the nearest bar to discuss the day or the morning as it sometimes happened, or the early morning coffee's to clear cobwebs and figure out the day ahead. The cultural experiences and these meetings were certainly our favorites and we won't forget them soon. Erwin: I apologise if I offended anyone in anyway and want you all to know that I love you guys! Janice: I feel the love :) too

For all our friends and relatives who made the daily visit to our blog, we hope you were informed and entertained. If you managed to live the experience vicariously through our words and descriptions, then we are very pleased we could be of service. Thanks for visiting and caring about our adventure!

We'd also like to put out a challenge to anyone reading this.....limit your use of plastic bags, reduce, reuse & recycle. There's a LOT more pollution than you think on the other side of the world, and it's not going to get better until it gets a whole lot worse!

Some final pot stirring.....

*Still missing those travel guides

*Google... What Google?

*Hired car... No it was a Taxi.. Honest

*No train service there

*Concierge... no he was a luggage attendant..really

*Concierge....it was a really long question

*Blackberry, Blueberry, Raspberry, Who knows

*I didn't hear you say that....honest

*It was closed..... at 5:00 am it would be!!

Until we meet again.......Erwin & Janice

jvd@rooter.ca

Hockey Day in Toronto

With everybody as rested as we were going to be, the scavenges started at 8 in the morning down in the lobby of our hotel. The final scavenge would be scaling the CN Tower to walk on the glass floor, with everyone meeting at the restaurant above no later than 3:10 p.m. With everyone putting in their last effort here in Toronto, we decided to finish strong and do as many scavenges as possible. There was bonus points to go to Niagara Falls, which sounded tempting, but we knew it would take the whole day. As we've seen the Falls already, we opted to explore Toronto.

The Hockey Hall of Fame should have been an all day scavenge (going back today to do it justice). Didn't realize there are 3 Stanley cups, the original (in the vault), the display (touchy,feely) and the travel cup. Gretsky's bar & grill and the set of Hockey Nite in Canada, and a walk by at the old Maple Leaf Gardens are definitely some of Janice's favorite things to do. She dragged me along kicking and screaming.

Things started out great until we were hit with the great monsoon in the late morning. Nothing like wandering around a strange city, getting soaked to the skin! The subway and PATH system were well-used, not only for travel but for keeping dry as well.

Several surprises in Toronto. We found out Canadians really are friendly and were always ready to help us, even offering to help before we could even ask....that was great to see.

We also were reminded of places we had just visited. Over a lunch of dimsum in Chinatown, we felt transported back to Beijing. Along our walks I spyed a hookah in a store window, and was reminded of our Egyptian forays into Cairo's markets to smoke sheeshah. Looking around, we realized Canada really has a diverse culture, and we felt very comfortable with that.

With our final leg ending at the top of the CN Tower, we handed in our final scoresheet and relaxed with a drink and some great company with previous strangers who now seemed to know us a little too well.........how did that happen?!

Back to our Roots

Even though this is land of our forefathers, we still managed to make a mess out of the train schedules! Den Haag was on our list to see the Peace Palace, as well as the Grote Kerk in Haarlem. Great, we'll scoop up Haarlem on the same train line once we're finished in Den Haag. Well, somehow we chugged past Schiphol instead on the fast train and landed back in Centraal Station in Amsterdam. No problem, we headed north to a little place called Zaanze Schans, a quaint little town with 7 working windmills,this time taking the fast train again instead of the stop train. No problem...stop at the next station and back track. We nicely had two short stops to go before getting to our destination, when our tickets were checked and we stupidly found out we had purchased only 1 way tickets instead of return. We barely got out of paying a 30 euro fine if we promised to leave the train at the next station. So we slinked off and got the proper tickets. Now we still hadn't made it to Haarlem, so Erwin pushed and pulled me to get back on the train and complete that leg. You know how sometimes you're in a strange city and you started passing the same scenery time after time after time?.....well in the end we got our scavenges done, but it took forever!

One high point was seeing the tulip fields in bloom from the train - wonderful!

We landed in Amsterdam right in the middle of another holiday season. they are celebrating the Queens birthday, Mayday, Labor day, Freedom day and Accession day, all in the same week. So just like Athens, we had to juggle our scavenges as to what was open or closed. It was a lot of fun to practice our dutch language skills, and have locals try to figure out our accents, We got some wierd looks especially with Janice strapped to my backpack.

The most enjoyable time was renting some bikes and touring thru central Amsterdam. Many sights and experiences, especially in the red light district. Most of our scavenges happened in this central area, and included getting 3 quotes for services that can't be posted here. The cheapest was 47 Euros for half hour, that's like 150.00 bucks an hour.

Even though this was one of our most enjoyable times, we managed to have our backpack stolen at our second last scavenge. Nothing of great value was in it, except our expensive camera, lost all our Amsterdam pictures but all the rest are downloaded to the computer. Our last scavenge was the sex museum so no pictures there, just lasting memories of stuff we never knew existed. Naturally coffee and a smoke came right after....not!

We really enjoyed the food scavenges and even added a few of our own...dutch frites, croquettes, pannekoek, chocolate, cheese, herring, I think this is the first time we stuffed ourselves on mandatory food.

Everyone found their own way back to Schiphol (no problem for us, we'd passed it twice already) to get ready for the flight to Toronto, our FINAL LEG!

See you soon I guess......

Amsterdam!

Just a quick note as we have to meet everyone downstairs to begin our scavenges in Amsterdam. We never thought we'd get here as it wasn't on the list of countries, but as you can imagine, we're pretty happy to be in a place where we feel a little at home. We literally have just 24 hours here, then we're off to Toronto for the final leg of this journey. I'll try to update tonite.

By the way, the streets are a mess of garbage here (very un-Dutch ) There's been a lot of celebrating going on last night in honour of the Queen's birthday. As you share her birthday, Dad, cheers to you and we hope you had a nice day.

Tot siens!