Saturday, August 25, 2007

Better late than never for more pictures and stories ...

These past 3 months have been pretty busy in terms of visit, travel, week-end getaways, open houses, ... So it's never too late to post more stories and pictures.
Last May, before our trip to Mexico/Belize, Cedric's parents visited us, to attend Cedric's (hopefully) last graduation and also to climb Mt Shasta. We prepared a busy schedule full of local californian experiences, to make them discover all the great things about the Bay Area: week-end in the Wine Country (in Healdsburg) with biking among the wineries, Berkeley graduation, Mount Shasta backcountry skiing for Cedric, his dad and Goeric (see Mount Shasta Part Two), San Francisco sightseeing, flying tour of the Bay Area with Cedric the pilot, great food tasting, and whale watching trip. We hope this will give some great ideas of traveling to California to some of you.





The same day Cedric's parents flew back to Belgium, we took our plane to Mexico.
After our trip, we tried to have a few "relaxing" week-ends, going to open-houses, and enjoying the numerous festivals and concerts San Francisco offers during the summer.

We also went rafting with Wei, Mike, Misha and Benjy on a class 4 tour. That was so much fun ! A little bit like the Radja river in Walibi but of course in much better ;-)




For more pictures, check Mike and Misha's pics.

The last 2 weeks of July, I flew to Brussels to attend a conference in Amsterdam (some pics here) and also took advantage of the week-ends to visit family and friends in Belgium. It's always good to be back home (even if this involves catching a cold in the long flights) !! There are so many babies back home now ....


After I came back, our busy week-ends started again: Steve and Marisa's wedding in Olema (close to Point Reyes), a great surprise week-end in Seattle and orcas island, and this week-end, Cedric is running a 200 miles relay in Oregon (Hood to Coast) with other crazy super fast googler runners. For live info, go to http://h2c2k7.blogspot.com/ .
Stay tuned for more adventure-stories from California ! Maureen
PS: pre-race pics from H2C

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Puget Sound



We celebrated our anniversary one month late by going on a mini trip to beautiful Washington state. This was a top secret operation meant to surprise Maureen, carefully planned together with my co-conspirator Vijay "Ron Paul" Boyapati. We left for Seattle on Friday and met up with Vijay at his Manor for a little taste of this beautiful city. After brunch on Saturday we took a small seaplane to Orca's Island, a small island close to the Canadian border. Robert Morgan, a shipbuilder from the turn of the century (not this one, the previous one) built an amazing house there that is now the central piece of the rosario resort. The place is REALLY relaxing. No cell phone coverage, no laptops, great! We spent two days there enjoying the environment. Maureen got one of these fancy spa treatments and I got to run through the woods up a mountain. We barely made it home as the weather was rather crummy on Monday morning (the seaplane flew back to Seattle cruising below 300ft altitude, spicy!). Somehow we still managed to get to SEA-TAC on time and were back at work by 2PM. Here are the pics.