CrtnShdofGrn's VirtualTourist Home Page

Send Photo to a Friend

Dave and Gabi on Pont Neuf (Paris)

2005 - A busy and fun year!!

Hello all! I have neglected this site for a long time now. I will be struggling to get some updates on here in the coming weeks (and more likely, months) so drop by from time to time if you are interested. If you're not interested, get the hell out of here! :-) Until I get off my ass (and by ass I mean a 4-legged animal similar to a horse, of course (and no one can talk to a horse, of course) hee hee Mr Ed!), if you have any questions about somewhere I have been, just drop me a line and I can fill you in! Didn't really mean for that to rhyme, but it's pretty cool, huh?

Send Photo to a Friend

Taking a dip in the Arctic Sea (in Norway)...COLD!

Recent travels I need to write about here:

This has been a busy year for me, which I would like to say is the main reason I am so behind on my pages (although the REAL main reason is laziness). I finally returned to the ski slopes after a nine year hiatus, starting with a Christmas trip to Garmisch, Germany. It was there that I got to know my future wife (yep, I am married now). We continued our ski season with trips to Feldberg, Germany (Black Forest) and Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

March: I returned home for a couple of weeks to visit my family and to do some real shopping. :-)

May: My dad and step-mom came to Europe for the first time, so I took them on road trips around Saarland and Rheinland-Pfalz, and to Strasbourg and ***e, France, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam.

June: I finally returned to Finland for midsummer with my Finnish friend, Viktor and my Turkish friend, Akif. I had been planning this trip for over 3 years and it was the best trip of my life. It didn't hurt that two of my best friends were along for the ride and our experience included a 2000+ km road trip through most of Finland all the way into Norway in the Arctic Circle during the longest days of the year.

August: Romanian Wedding!! Gabi (ciuchi) and I got married in her hometown of Constanta, Romania. After many struggles with burocracy and extremely rude people, the "happiest day of our lives" finally played out without incident. The only reason I put "the happiest day of our lives" in quotation marks is that I'm sure we'll have happier days together than this one. It was a good day considering our whole experience in Romania was not pleasant, and the wedding itself was the only good thing that came out of our trip to that %*(&ing country. (Details to follow in a disgruntled travelogue at a later date)

I can see that the name of a small town in the Alsace region of France is not allowed to be displayed on my homepage the way it is spelled because this site associates it with a bad word (curious, since I have a travel page dedicated to it) so if you are wondering where ***e, France is, just drop me a line. Oops! I said "ass" a minute ago, too. I suppose I should have typed "***ociates"! For crying out loud VT, lighten the **** up!

By the way, can someone explain to me why I can't type the name of a town because it has a "bad" word in it, but I can type "ass"? Makes no sense to me. Maybe George Carlin would know...