If this doesn’t say New York I don’t know what would.

Summer vacation this year was less of a vacation and more of a really intriguing work trip. As a member of the Creatrix Design Group, my co-worker Bomi, and I drove down to New York City to meet with members of the United Nations. I’d say if the story ended there it would have already been exciting enough for it to have made it onto the blog. But everything we did that week had its own little side story in it of its self; from renting the huge ass car we drove down in, to some of the finest food I’ve had in my life, to making the best of a bad situation in the dirtiest run down hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

Having been there a dozen times before, Bomi new how to get the most out of our trip given the short amount of time we had to explore the city when we weren’t working.I do have good feeling that she enjoyed her self a little more while hanging out in the big city with me than she would have with some of our less exciting and more work oriented colleagues.

The first thing I’ll say about New Yorkers is that every stereo type that you’ve ever head about them is completely true. And I instantly loved that about them. The first guy we met in Manhattan bribed us into paying him for his parking spot. But you know what? It works, it really does work for that city. If having a guy sucker 40bucks out of me for his parking spot meant I don’t have to move my car all week and I won’t have to look for a parking spot anymore for the rest of the night then it was worth it to me and we both walked away happy. That just wouldn’t fly in Ottawa. It’s a New Yorker think, people around here just wouldn’t get it.

On to the most important part of any trip, the food. I tried an authentic New York pizza made by a real Italian and the best filet mignon I’ve had in my life. The great part about the food is that everything is so affordable and since everyone has to walk everywhere in Manhattan nobody gets fat from eating it.

The last night we were there we spent the afternoon looking around for that something awesome to do that would really make the trip worth while. With no idea what there was and time running out we just so happened to turn a corner and walk right into the high point of the trip. A concert being presented by the New York Philharmonic, playing live under the evening sky in Central Park. I guess there’s always a party going on somewhere in the city that never sleeps, you just have to look for it.

Summer vacation is over and I’m on my way back to what they like to call the real world. At least I get to take a couple of memories with me. I managed to cram a little bit of everything into just over a week. It was also nice to get to play with my nephew Alex some more before he starts getting too big.

On a nice summer’s evening when the sun was still high in the sky, the rain clouds were no where to be seen and I wasn’t wiped out asleep from being out in the boat all day, I took the time to go down to the water and practice some sunset photography. I did have a hard time convincing my mom that if I didn’t go down during dinner time the sun was not going to wait for me to arrive before starting the show. It was just like being back at home again.

How ya, and there were turkeys there too.

Some photos you just can’t take in the city.

I haven’t been around the blogosphere for a while. I think I’ll have to stop using twitter as a blog post substitution. So, it looks like it’s time for an update once again and as always a couple of photos to go along with it.

We got home last might from our latest visit to the town of Queensborough. While we were there, we visited ‘Grandma Madoc’ in Madoc and ‘Grandma Farm’ on the farm.

The food on the farm is always delicious. The meats are fresh and for the rest of my life, store bought bacon just wont taste as good farm bacon cooked up in real maple syrup.

All of these photos are from Charlie & Bonnie’s Maple bush at ‘Spring Creek Maple’. They have a very interesting operation running. Charlie manages to encompass both a low-tech life with some very high tech tools. One visit he was showing me his old fashion sugar bush, with Maple trees tapped by hand and a sap boiling stove hand built by the Mennonites. The next visit he spent hours explaining solar battery storage, electrical current conversion and showing off his power generating wind mills and the solar grid that his house is hooked up to.

The Server North team was in Montreal last week adding 3 additional servers to our newest colocation facility. This was the first time I had been to the Canix building and I was very impressed with the professional, top of the line site.

The cascading row of Sun Servers in the Server North rack looks very impressive. We’ve gone quite far since the beginnings in our first rack in the small Toronto facility.

It was nice to be in Montreal during Quebec city’s 400th birthday. Between that and Canada day I was feeling very patriotic that week.

The food in Montreal is just outstanding. I did some shopping on Saint Catherine street. I was disappointed that the H&M store was still under construction. It would have made Danielle so jealous if I came home with a shopping bag from that store. Mike and I next toured harbor front before heading for home.

I’ve wanted to post these photos form my trip to Niagara Falls for a while now. Seeing how it was the first week of summer and today was such a hot day out, I thought reminiscing about a frozen water fall would help cool things down.

I took over 400 pictures while there and then cut that down to 180 during editing.

Winter is without a doubt the best time of year to visit the falls. The Ice flows and frozen lakes make for awesome photography.

These were some of the photos that had turned out best.
Click an image to go to the Niagara Photos Page.

See the rest of our Niagara Photos here.

As you can tell, this one below isn’t actually one of my photos. The red line is the GPS track we took while GeoCashing on the American side of the falls. We crossed over to Buffalo for the day and found this cash on the 3 Sisters Island.

I have to say if these islands were on the Canadian side they certainly would have been closed to the general public to keep people from swimming into the falls, especially in the winter.
But to be honest, the Americans took every safety precaution necessary to make sure nobody uses these islands as a jumping off point to plunge them selves in to the falls.

“DANGER Do not enter water”

It seemed to work. I read the sign and a didn’t jump.