Dispatches From The Field: St. John's, Newfoundland

For our final trip of the year, we spent four days out in St. John's, NL, to attend our friends' wedding, as well as to eat and drink to excess (as per standard operating procedure). Having never been out to Newfoundland before, I can now confirm that the wind is brutal, the people are friendly, their accents do not require subtitles/ closed captioning (except when extraordinarily thick), the food is strange (moose meat in a glass bottle? 10lb tubes of bologna?!), and the traditions are even stranger... Example: we were 'screeched in', whereby first time visitors are made honourary Newfoundlanders by drinking a shot of Screech (rum), saying a bunch of gibberish, and then kissing a frozen cod on the lips. Just another regular weekend on the rock.

Enjoy a handful of photos from our all too brief stay. We'll definitely be back.


Clear and beautiful late afternoon on the way in to Yellow Belly Brewery and Public House.


45 minutes later, we came out to this garbage snow and wind.


Flight of Yellow Belly brews.


Anita at Cape Spear, the eastern most point of North America.


Sunset at Cape Spear Lighthouse.




Blackhead Bay.


Whelk and Copa (pork) on a Labrador Tea Skewer from Raymond's (the #7 rated restaurant in Canada).


A beer from Dildo Brewing Company. I'se da B'y PA.


Macaroons at the wedding.


We drank a shot of this Screech before kissing the frozen cod.


I drank all of the 'brewed for Newfoundland' crap beers. Like playing Pokemon, gotta catch em all.


Bottled Moose and Bottled Rabbit. Newfoundland, you so weird.


Ross Larkin, the winner of last season's Top Chef Canada, and also the Chef de Cuisine at Raymond's.


Petty Cove.




Tea at Mallard Cottage (#22 restaurant in Canada).


$5 for a plate, and then you select as much desserts as you want/ can fit onto the plate.


Our selections. We ended up packing most of them up for later.


Port Rexton Chasing Sun IPA. Delicious.




Jellybean Row Houses in St. John's.










The view from our hotel room.

YYC Night Skyline

Oh, Hello Calgary. I almost didn't recognize you, with all the pretty skyline colours and that interesting looking bridge. These shots were taken a few minutes apart, underneath the pedestrian bridge connecting East Village with St. Patrick's Island. It's the bridge that mysteriously cracked this summer, prompting a closure after only being in use for 4 years. It's also the same bridge we run over during our workday runs. Hmmm... perhaps we should rethink our route.

Anyways, the light of the setting sun quickly faded to twilight blue hour, hence the slight shifts in colour in the sky between the 3 photos.


If one didn't know better, one could be fooled into believing the Bow is a mighty flowing river. Looks can be deceiving.







For those that are actually interested in the photo-nerdery: these were taken with a 12mm f/2.0 Rokinon lens on a Fuji X-T1 body. No HDR processing, just single 30 second long exposures, with a 'Velvia' VSCO preset adjustment slapped on in Lightroom for some added oomph to the colours.

The Beautiful Colours of Rainbow Mountain and Red Valley

Autumn time change: One extra hour of sleep? More like stay up one extra hour eating M&M's while binge watching TV. For those that think Anita and I are succeeding at life with our seemingly endless adventures, this is what happens when we have nothing to do. :(

Anyways, I wanted to share with you photos from our hike last month to 5200m high Rainbow Mountain, or as one friend described it, 'the stripey mountain!' See the photos, and you'll agree how accurate that description is. The vibrant coloured striations are apparently due to different concentrated bands of mineral content.

To get here, we hopped a shuttle from Cusco at 2:15am and made our way along a narrow road so bumpy and winding that I was one turn away from barfing up my breakfast (fortunately when I was about to ralph, we arrived at the trailhead). The crisp dawn air quickly reversed any ill effects, but because we had only arrived a day earlier in Peru without time to acclimatize, altitude sickness quickly felled one in our group who had come from nearly sea level. Fortunately, we were able to call upon the Andes version of Uber (a horse) to take her up, while the rest of us trekked. From Rainbow Mountain, we would also extend our day hiking into beautiful Red Valley for some more gorgeous vistas of mineral rich sedimentary rock.

Okay, now go enjoy your 25 hour Sunday.




Beautiful morning light of the sun slowly rising, around 6:30am.




We were the first group on the trek.




Andean Uber.


At the top, we were greeted by views of this striking stripey mountain.


Our guide showed us photos from a week prior, when it was completely snow covered. So despite the altitude sickness, we really lucked out.




The beautiful landscape we hiked to get to Rainbow Mountain.






Tourist trap photo of 'local person with llamas'. I regret nothing.








A sweeping pano of Red Valley.