I read on  Matt’s facebook that he was headed out to Oktoberfest in Munich and it reminded me of our journey there. Two years ago Dee, Karen, Steve and I went to Munich and Oktoberfest. What an amazing time!  We wore out our drinking arms lifting the 1 liter and stared in amazement the beer garden ladies holding 5 in each hand! We had some of the best food there, pulled wild boar on a bun, goose with dumplings and weisswurst. Plus the rollercoaster – 5 loops that happen so fast your stomach doesn’t have time to get rid of all the liquid you just drank. The Germans know how to eat, drink and party!

Luckily Dee told me today that Vancouver actually has it’s own Oktoberfest party. Tickets are $30 held at Deutsches Haus Restaurant.. which sounds like a legit German name. It’s held by the Vancouver Alpen Club and should be a good time. It may not have a parade like New York‘s Oktoberfest, but it sure is closer!

Make sure to check out our post Our dream Oktoberfest experience. It made it onto our top 10 list of most memorable experiences of 2009.

Prost!

Prost!

Are you doing anything for Oktoberfest this year?

Tripbase started a great project a few months back. Or, that is at least when we were nominated by 1000 fights to join in. Maybe it’s been around for longer? None the less, it’s about time we finally took part!

The project is meant to connect travel bloggers together and give them a chance to show off some of the amazing content from their sites by sharing 7 links.

Scott and I have been running Dream a Little Dream since April 2008! That’s 3 years!! We’ve been around off and on for the last year. But still, choosing 7 links in the following catogories have been quite a challenge. We have tons of posts from a long time ago we love and didn’t get much exposure due to being a new site in the travel world. On the flip side however, all of our more recent posts are just at such a higher calibre due to everything we’ve learned in these past 3 years to create better content and get more exposure.

Anyways, after much hard thought here is what we came up with:

OUR MOST BEAUTIFUL POST:
Christmas ornaments from our RTW trip

http://dreamalittledream.ca/christmas-ornaments-from-our-rtw-trip/

We’ve seen some beautiful things across the world but nothing quite compares to grouping all those beautiful memories together on our Christmas Tree to ensure they last a lifetime!

OUR MOST POPULAR POST:
Banksy vs the Bristol museum

http://dreamalittledream.ca/banksy-vs-the-bristol-museum/

If we look at our site stats this one post gets the most hits day in and day out. This paticular exhibit ended a long time ago but still Banksy continues to pull in the numbers for us. It really is quite remarkable how popular street art is.

OUR MOST CONTROVERSIAL POST(s):
1. Cairo from a women’s perspective 2. The Valve Sound System Show Down – Epic Fail 3. Netherlands soft drug policy – is it working? 4. Contemporary Museum in Vienna: Mak

1. http://dreamalittledream.ca/cairo-from-a-womans-perspective/

2. http://dreamalittledream.ca/the-valve-sound-system-show-down-epic-fail/

3. http://dreamalittledream.ca/netherlands-soft-drug-policy-is-it-working/

4. http://dreamalittledream.ca/a-contemporary-art-museum-in-vienna-mak/

Okay, I cheated and listed 4. What are you going to do about it? The reason I listed 4 as we don’t really have any posts that have caused any heated discussions or debates. It was really hard to figure out exactly what of our topics is controversial to people. Thus, I’ve chosen 4 topics which I think can lead to a variety of opinions if people actually commented or is a touchy subject.

OUR MOST HELPFUL POST:
How to care for a second degree muffler burn in Thailand

http://dreamalittledream.ca/how-to-care-for-a-second-degree-muffler-burn-in-thailand/

Step by step instructions on how to care for one of the most popular injuries that can happen on the tropical islands of Thailand.

A POST WITH SUCESS THAT HAS SURPRISED US:
AK-47′s and naughty squirrels

http://dreamalittledream.ca/ak-47s-and-naughty-squirrels/

Just a simple post about our time in Riga, Latvia that continues to soar high in our site stats. Maybe it’s the title that is causing all the attention. Guns and naughty things. Yup. That has to be it!

A POST THAT DIDN’T GET THE ATTENTION IT DESERVED:
Scott the hero

http://dreamalittledream.ca/scott-the-hero/

An epic and heroic tale of how Scott saved the day after crashing our scooter and causing me to get a second degree muffler burn. Complete with crash video!! How can this not be popular??

THE POST WE ARE MOST PROUD OF:
Our Canadian Thanksgiving experience in Germany

http://dreamalittledream.ca/our-canadian-thanksgiving-experience-in-germany/

We are proud of that entire day that ended with the great success of that amazing meal!! May not be as interesting to others but to us this was a very special moment during our travels. In the top 5 for sure.

Okay, we hope you got to read something from our site you might of missed before. Thanks for reading!

Here are our 5 nominations to other travel bloggers to share their 7 links. Be sure to check them out in the following weeks to see what they shared. It was hard to pick as there have already been so many nominated. Check out this list to see the others.

1. iStopOver
2. The Departure Board
3. Lives of Wander
4. Dan’s Adventure
5.  Across and Abroad

During our travels in Europe we specifically changed our plans when we heard about Banksy’s exhibit at the Bristol museum. We made it there on the last day of the show, waited in line for over 3 hours and then experienced the best art exhibit we’ve ever seen. (and we’ve seen a ton!). Much to our surprised our little post: Banksy vs Bristol Musuem has become one of our most popular posts. Our site is also mostly discovered through search engines with the term “banksy” of some form. Banksy is a popular guy!

Now, I’ve learned he is nominated for his work on his feature film documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. This alone makes me want to watch the acadmy awards on the 27th. Don’t think I’ve watched them since I was living at home with my parents with nothing better to do!

It’s really going to be interesting to see if he wins and even moreso what he is going to do to accept the award, that is if he even shows up! Supposedly the Acadamy  has been discussing what to do if he fails to appear or even worse (better??) plans to pull a stunt of some sort. Will we finally get to see his face? Personally, I hope we don’t!

If you like street art, anything sub-culture, or heck if you even just like documentaries and  haven’t seen ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ then go torrent it right now! I’m sure with it being created by an artist that beleives in ‘stealing’ he won’t mind at all. Especially since that is pretty much the theme of said documentary anyways!

Scott and I made a tradition to get something to hang in our Christmas tree from each place we travel too. We started this on our honeymoon 4 years ago and since then we’ve filled the tree pretty quick with all the ornaments we gathered from our recent round the world adventure. It was lots of fun putting up our tree this year and reminiscing about all the places we’ve been.

Check out our ornaments from our RTW travels below:

A pretty little four leaf clover to represent Ireland

A double decker bus is a great symbol for the United Kingdom

In Denmark we visited Christiania Town and this is their emblem

A swedish version of Santa Claus straight from Sweden

A bell we bought at a craft fair during our visit to Jurmala beach, Latvia

Russia’s coat of arms symbol

A little ninja found on the island of Sardinia, Italy

Can’t mistake this one for being from Austria

Peek through and see Prague’s famous bridge in 3D. (Czech Republic)

Gotta love the windmills in the Netherlands!

France of course!

Some tiny Spanish clappers

We visited the wold’s largest cuckoo clock and got this in Germany

An actual Malaysia Christmas ornament as it was around that time of year when we were there

Custom hand blown glass elephant to represent Thailand

We saw lots of dragonflies during our time in Laos

Miniature lantern from Vietnam

Handmade hanging star from Cambodia

And here is some ornaments from our previous travels:

Mamajuana from the Dominican Republic

Reminds us of our little private villa in St. Lucia

Hand-craved Bob Marley from Jamaica

And last but not least here is something we recently got to represent our summertime adventures in Canada:

This little owl makes us think of all the fun we have at the Shambhala Music Festival every year in Salmo BC.

~~~~

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!!!

It was an almost brisk and beautiful autumn day in Baden-Baden, Germany. We were taking a peaceful stroll through the park, admiring the fall colors and crunching the leaves. I remember thinking to myself how I missed our cats and just then we hear a meowing in the distance and turn around. Up the hill was a wee cat running towards us like a scene out of Baywatch, it’s run turning from a gentle pace into a speedy race. He finally reached us and screamed out:

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I found you guys!”

He acted just like we knew him and it’s been years since we seen him. Full of purrs, desperate need of pets, and wanting to play. We didn’t have the heart to tell him we had no idea who he was.

So we gave him pets..

And played some twig games.

As you can see, he was extremely happy for all this love and attention.

And then the next thing we knew… he vanished back into the forest. Never to be seen again.

Wonder what that was about?

Luckily for once we can announce no total failure! Just lots of changes. Read On:

It’s nice to have some down time to plan things out. With such a busy travel schedule all summer there wasn’t a lot of extra time to do planning ahead of where we’re going to next. So now with a nice break in travel and generous relatives letting us stay at their place until we can easily figured out where to go next. With a strong and free Internet connection, access to a fantastic espresso machine and fresh groceries in the fridge, it was the perfect time to sit down and figure things out.

We had a general route figured out earlier to go through Turkey, Egypt, India and then on to Thailand and the rest of Asia. But we didn’t know the costs of travel and accommodation so it took some time to decide what we’d do next. One thing was we spent more money than expected in Europe, with the Euro to Canadian exchange rate being poor and sticker prices being the same or more as back home. Sandwiches in Ireland were €9, beers were often €5-€7 and so on. Basically, we paid the same money as we do back home on things as we did in Europe, which with anyone’s vacation plans that is not what you expect. One tends to travel to places that are cheaper then home. It wasn’t something that we had prepared for, I thought things would just be a bit cheaper. Apparently I was wrong.

We very much wanted to visit Istanbul and see the open-air markets. And go to the Valley of the Kings and view the inscriptions. See the Taj Mahjal and experience the crazy city of Mumbai. But we had to ask ourselves where we really wanted to go, and SE Asia was an area that we just couldn’t miss since it’s an area of the world we have been dreaming about for years. With a clear direction we could start making a plan of where to go and ensure the costs while traveling. With the great exchange rate the Canadian dollar gets in Asia it was looking to be a very easy place to go to on a now very tight budget.

Dee once again used her magic and managed one awesome surprise. While we were looking for the cheapest airline tickets to Bangkok she somehow found some random site we never used before with her amazing Google search skills and low and behold there was an Egypt Air flight out of Frankfurt that had a layover in Cairo that was cheaper then any other flight option on the net. After some investigation we managed to turn that layover into a 6 day stop over in Cairo! The one thing I had really wanted to see this trip was the Pyramids (especially after I saw the movie Zeitgeist), and when it was scratched off our list due to funds I was quietly disappointed. But now after seeing the chance to stay in Cairo and see the Pyramids we booked the flights right away, with the great bonus of it being the cheapest way for us to get to Bangkok!

I really don’t think we would have found this flight unless we had the time to wind down and do some searching while resting. I’m glad that Dee managed to do some good searching on the net and found it! So now our Itinerary looks something like this:

Cairo – 6 nights

Thailand – 60 – 90 days

Cambodia – 15 – 20 days

Vietnam – 20 – 30 days

Laos – 15 – 30 days

Europe has been great, but really it’s similar to life back home. I’m excited to explore something new in Asia, where both language and cultures are extremely different.

And this ends our tales from Europe!! Hope you can enjoyed them and you can look forward to some upcoming exciting posts from our culture shocking time in Cairo, Egypt!!
Off we go to Cairo!! 

Happy New Year everyone! This year has been amazing for both Dee and I. We’ve managed to suspend our jobs (Dee permanently!), got our apartment rented out, possessions all packed and hopped on an airplane to explore the word! We’ve seen and done some pretty frickin awesome things and written about most of it. So here it is, what we think our top 10 things we did this year traveling.

The DVS top 10 of 2009

Fall was apon us in Germany and it was getting so cold to us that Dee bought herself a new toque and just couldn’t pass up this Hot Chocolate!

There are somethings we miss about home. Our friends and family of course, but also the little things you start to miss on the road, soft pillows and beds, unpacked bags and most importantly, home cooking and spending the holidays with family. We’ve just come back from Utrecht and are staying with Dee’s relatives Barbara and Artur in Baden-Baden again. They previously had planned to visit family up in Hamburg and were leaving for a week just as we came in, giving us an apartment to relax in by ourselves. And with Thanksgiving upon us, we decided to make a Thanksgiving Dinner for us to enjoy as just the two of us, helping with the homesickness we were starting to experience.

Beautiful Baden-Baden in the Fall

So we were off with our ingredients list to the large supermarket, after finding there are no turkeys in downtown Baden-Baden. When we got there it was some tough going trying to find everything we needed in a giant supermarket with everything labeled in a foreign language. We mostly had to rely on the images on the packages rather then the words. After grabbing all the small ingredients we needed we arrived to the frozen bird section and our hunt quickly turned to a let down. Nothing looked like a turkey and all the frozen birds had images of ducks and geese on them. However Dee spotted a frozen turkey breast package stating,

“Well we can always get this to fill in the craving gap, not as great as a whole turkey but at least its something!”

I think Dee could spot the disappointment in my face on having to go with a Plan B so she said,

“One moment, let me use my eagle eye super power and see if I can spot any of those frozen birds saying the same German word as on this package. I’m assuming this word means Turkey!”

Magically she saved the day and spotted the only turkey amongst all the other German labeled frozen birds… and what a turkey it was!

We cooked up a roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, dumplings, gravy and lots of fresh buns from the bakery. Sitting down to our self made feast we ate our way through the dinner happy with a bit of Canadian cooking. The turkey turned out fantastic as we had cooked it upside down, and of course all the fixings on the side made it fabulous. After resting and watching a movie, we broke out the apple pie with some ice cream on it. It was a great way to spend Thanksgiving miles away from home!

The perfect results!!! SO GOOD!!

We had heard from friends that Utrecht was a cool place to check out. Lesser known than Amsterdam, Utrecht still has the same liberal attitudes but a less crazy vibe. And being home to a major university was a plus, as they should have some neat shops and some sort of scene. Plus I needed a new day bag, the small attach-on bags that we have for our backpacks have been considered useless. You can fit 1 thing in them, and then it’s full. It makes me look like I stole a kindergarten kids schoolbag when I wear it.

Looking online at hostels, I couldn’t really find anything in a hostel. Either poorly rated or super expensive, there were only 6 available on the hostel websites. Luckily we pulled up HRS.com and searched for any cheap hotels available. We had heard about HRS from Dee’s cousins Andy and Judith, and used it a couple times. It’s like expedia or hotels.com, but the local cheaper version.

Look how fluffy this bed is!!

We managed to find a special rate at a Carleton Hotel, and decided it was time to splurge a bit. We’ve been spending some time in a lot of mediocre beds, some crap beds and a very few good beds and pillows over the last couple months. Checking in I was sure we looked pretty travel weary and out of place as we made our way down the plush carpets and gold trim décor to our room. The sheets were soft, comforter and pillows extremely fluffy and instantly lured us in to flump down onto the bed for a quick nap.

We had to get up again later that night, and it took a while to get out of that bed. But we had a great reason to. Dee had found out about a monthly club night that DJ/Producers Black Sun Empire throw, and to our luck it was happening just as we were in town! It also had Goldie and Noisia on the bill, which helped with making it worth it to get out of bed. The night was great, though we only saw Nosia and Goldie play. Goldie was not playing anything that made our feet groove and then Noisia came on and played same set we heard a couple weeks ago, and a couple weeks before that! We were really only there to see Black Sun Empire who were on last but there was no where to sit and chill to let some time pass. Tired legs and boring music made us feel the need to leave back to our comfy bed. And once we felt the softness of our bed enveloped us again we knew that was the right decision. Guess we will have to see Black Sun Empire again some other day….

Looking like a princess

We knew that a day of travel and a night of partying would make it hard for us to get up on Sunday, and we may have missed the entire day sleeping in. So it was an easy decision to order room service and have it delivered at 10:00am the next morning. This would wake us up, put food in our stomach and caffeine into our system. And the Carleton didn’t disappoint with their spread! They even delivered the second pot of coffee we asked for! This picture may be the happiest I have seen Dee in a while, with her extra pillows and breakfast in bed!
Taking our time eating and waking up, we finally had to go into town on our mission. Being in a University town in Holland I felt we had a pretty good chance of finding myself a cool replacement day bag, especially since we had already seen a bunch of closed shops with bags in the window the night before.

Time for some shopping!

There was a ton of selection, and anyone looking for a bag should go to Utrecht. I finally found the perfect bag by Crumpler. It’s a messenger style bag, waterproof fabric with a lifetime warranty on it. It has great loud Velcro straps so anyone trying to get into my bag would get noticed, and buckles for extra security. I’m pretty happy finding it, as Dee’s Mangler (her small green purse made of hemp) has done too much damage to my precious personal items… I can’t even talk about it…. *hangs head in somberness*

Now that I had a victory bag, we needed to get some dinner and drinks in celebration. We walked around until finding an awesome Rock’n’Roll restaurant. Like a Planet Hollywood except not part of a big chain, cheaper, better value and better artwork on the walls with a good Dutch flair.

Bit blurry but you can see it’s a typical religious heaven scene with all the dead rock stars consider to be going straight to hell because of their life styles

It was a great but way too short couple of days in Utrecht, and a perfect way to start winding down our European vacation. We have some serious planning to do ahead of us on our way to Asia for the next half of a year.

Just the two of us again…

It was sad to wave goodbye to our friends Karen and Steve after spending a fantastic 2 months traveling with them. We had planned the adventure for a year prior and it was awesome to see it come together. But sadly some adventurers take different turns and it was our turn to continue on while they went home to Canada.

The Stay OKay International Youth Hostel

We had 5 days left of travel on our Eurail train passes, we now had time to do some family root searching. I wanted to see the street in Holland where my Dad’s family is from and get a better feel for the Dutch culture by experiencing other cities then just the Red Lights of Amsterdam. We boarded a train from Amsterdam straight to Den Haag and found an International Youth Hostel called StayOkay. I didn’t expect much as the other “International Youth Hostel” we stayed in Belfast wasn’t that great.

So it was a great surprise when we got our private room for a wicked price, and it was a massive sized bedroom with private ensuite and even a balcony! The breakfast the next morning was decent with fresh juices, toast and cereals. The best part was the Dutch addition of three different types of tempting sprinkles to choose from to put on your toast: dark chocolate flakes, milk chocolate sprinkles or strawberry vanilla flakes. I remember receiving these types of sprinkles from my Oma when I was a kid. It was perfect!

We only had plans to see my family’s hometown, Wassenaar, a suburb of Den Haag for just a day. Finding our way to the main bus station with tickets in hand, a photo of the city map on our camera and only a street address from 50 years ago to work on, we hopped onto to the only bus that said Wassenaar. As we left the city into more of the suburbs, we didn’t know exactly where we were going. The address didn’t pull up on Google maps or on my iPhone. We were just talking about how to find this street when I saw a sign blur past. It took me a moment to realize, but I told Dee,

“That’s the street we just passed!”
Dee, with a doubting frown on her face said “No it’s not. I didn’t see anything. You probably got it mixed up”
It’s true, the street we were looking for was called ZIJLLAAN, and we passed other streets like ZIKNMNOP and such.

But no, I was certain I saw it correctly. I jumped up and pressed the stop button for the bus, and a minute later it pulled to the curb. Dee sighed as she got off and it took some convincing to let her let me lead the way, as it’s usually her that is directing the way to go. But I was on a mission, even if my soldiers were looking to frag me I had to go on.

We had been walking for about 10 minutes, when Dee was saying “This isn’t the way, let’s turn back now.” It was at that moment we walked over a bridge and a story I had once heard came back to me. My dad remembers learning to skate on the river in the back yard that would freeze every year. His sister used to bug him that it wasn’t anything more than a small creek. So standing on this nice looking canal, I knew we were close. And walking up to the next street it was ZIJLLAAN!

Walking up to the address we had, I wanted to see if we could go in their back yard or something.. I didn’t know if we would just be viewed as creepy Canadian mass murderers and dispatched with a wooden shoe or invited in for a tea. As we stood in front contemplating one of their neighbors walked out. I quickly explained our story and he reminded us we came 5000 km’s and should just get on with it.

Knocking on the door an elderly lady came into view and eyed us up. Once again I explained that our family was from here and we believe this was the house my grandparents moved from, but doubt was staring me back with her eyes. She asked me “When did they move?”
I was put on the spot, because I wasn’t really sure. “Sometime in the 50’s I believe” and quickly she replied, “I’ve been living here since 44. Sorry, don’t know any Vanderlee’s.”
I quickly said I was sorry to bother her, and said “Thanks for your time”. It didn’t really matter if this was the exact house or not, I could have had the wrong address and she may have thought we were crazy canucks trying to sell beaver coats or something. But the actual house doesn’t matter, it’s more of the area to go and see. So I took photos of the streets, canal and schools and we went a short walk into town to get some food and explore.

The town of Wassenaar is how I imagined a typical little dutch town to be. Two main roads, only for pedestrians, with delicious bakeries, markets and shops. Finding a coffee shop we grabbed some delicious roast beef sandwhiches and coffee while filling out a couple postcards. We then decided it was far too much of a walk to the beach (about 2 KM’s of sand dunes to negotiate with) and went to see the wooden windmill.

It was a great day of visiting the area where the Dutch side of my family comes from! The only thing that was missing was a plate full of Bitter Ballen for lunch. (but we did find some for dinner at a restaurant near our hostel!)

Check out the rest of our pics from Wassenaar and Den Haag, including the MC Escher Museum at our flickr album by clicking here or on a thumbnail below: