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

How could we not include our Tour de France experience in this? While it wasn’t the most enjoyable experience riding 50 km’s, half in the pitch black dark… it was a most memorable experience.


Newgrange was one of the first ancient wonders. that we saw, and they were darn impressive. You could touch the mounds and walk in a wooden henge

Banksy vs Bristol Museum was one of the best museums we’ve been to. Poor Ronald, why are you sitting on the ledge? Feeling guilty of peddling your death fries and enslaving people to crappy food?

AK-47’s and Naughty Squirrels Who doesn’t want to shoot the real thing? The Ak47 we shot was probably held in some scared kids hands during the Cold War.


Thorpe Park This ride is temporarily shut down for an essential clean up.

Oktoberfest The full, Golden liquid cup of beer and friendly Belgium’s.

Guadi and Parc Guelle were amazing. Parc Guelle was probably one of the coolest pieces of art I’ve ever seen.

Roni Size and Get Loaded in the Park. ’nuff said.


Eiffel Tower is on everyone’s list and we drank undercover in front of it. Unfortunately there was one regret.


A week partying on Sardinia with 4 awesome friends and drum’n'bass. What more do you really need in a vacation? Sun and Bass was wicked.

And a special thank you to Dee’s Aunt and Uncle, Barbara and Artur, who live in Baden-Baden  Germany. You welcomed us into your home not once, but twice! Both these times were on short notice and we really appreciate it!

We separated from our friends Steve and Karen for a few days. They went off to Switzerland to visit a family friend and we stayed one extra night in Rome to do our adventurous Macbook power adaptor shopping, and then figured ourselves the cheapest route to get to Barcelona. Our options were the following:

1. Take an overnight ferry – We pretty much crossed this option off right away… thinking we have Eurail passes that we paid good money for and should use them.
2. Take an overnight train to Zurich and then jump on a train to Barcelona – From our past experiences with overnight trains and paying the extra costs for the private sleeper cabins we decided to avoid this.
3. Take a train to Milan and then catch a connection train to Nice. Stay in Nice overnight and then catch a train the next day to Barcelona. With only having to pay reservation fees this is the route we picked. It sound the easiest for travel and providing a small amount of time in Nice with a good nights rest.

So, the next day we made our reservations, we picked the fastest connection in Milan so we could arrive in Nice with some time to actually explore it a bit. Arriving in Milan, I ask Scott how long do we have till we get on our next train? He tells me we have just under 2 hours. We noticed on the board there was a train leaving in 15 mins to Nice but since our stomachs were growling and we have all learned that hunger overrules all, we decided to get some lunch and hop into an Internet café to reserve a room on HRS.com in Nice. We were taught from my German relatives that this site gives cheaper rates and great specials for hotels then what you would be told by just showing up. To our surprise, they were right and hotels sometimes even proved to be cheaper on HRS.com then booking a hostel room!

We choose a hotel room in Nice that was right across the street from the train station to make things super easy for our early morning train to Barcelona the next day. Paid the deposit fee, grabbed ourselves a McDonald’s ice cream cone in celebration, and headed back slowly to the Milan train station to catch our train, taking pictures of the outside fountain on the way. We were actually quite impressed by the train station… and have heard that is pretty much the only impressive thing to see in Milan.

Licking our cones in satisfaction we look at the board to see what track our train is on, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Not one electronic line of information stated our train number let alone anything saying its destination was Nice. Scott pulls out our reservation ticket to double-check the time and with much swearing advises me he was always looking at the date on the ticket rather then the time!! Our train was actually the one we saw on the board when we first arrived here. Now we just wasted money on our reservation fee and are starting to worry if we can even get to Nice tonight for our hotel reservation with an already paid deposit.

Now our ice cream cones were not as satisfying.. so we pulled ourselves over onto a bench to collect our composure and finish off the cones. What are we going to do? I pulled out our Eurail timetable schedule and we flipped back and forth through the pages frantically. From what we could see there was no more options available to us. I feel like I kept my cool in this whole situation quite well, but Scott was dreading the worse. I think more because he did a mistake of reading the ticket incorrectly and that little mistake lead us to arguing on this little bench and loosing money all at the same time. It was getting quite hard to reason with him to the point we had to just not talk to each other for 5 minutes.

During those 5 minutes I thought to myself while looking at this tiny little schedule book that there is no way it lists ALL the trains in Europe. It must just list the most popular routes and leave the rest out. It would be impossible for something so small to have all the listings for such a VAST train network across 21 countries that accept the Eurail. Once the five minutes past and I could see the vein on Scott’s forehead decreased in size, I explained to him my thoughts and suggest we go stand in the long line and tell the lady we need to get to Nice tonight and see if there is anyway it can be done. Scott doubted the idea but after some more discussion I convinced him to get up and come with me.

Low and behold there was a way to get to Nice. It involved us connecting 3 or 4 times in small town France locations that we can’t even remember and landed us in Nice at 9 pm. Our reservation deposit was not a waste and we were ever so thankful to have a room just across the street from the station. Unfortunately we arrived exhausted and never saw Nice, since our train to Barcelona was at 6 am the next day.

What did we learn in this situation?

• Make sure you are reading your ticket correctly especially if you can’t read the language on it! Maybe even have your travel mate to look at the ticket as well.
• Always double check your train numbers and don’t just rely on checking for the destination on the board.
• The Eurail time schedule you are given does NOT list all the trains.
• Keep your cool if you mess up and miss a train, as there is most likely another option for you.
• Give Scott about 5 minutes if he gets really frustrated and upset before speaking to him with good solution making ideas.

Dear Steve Jobs,

I’ve been using computers since the early 90’s, and other than learning to type on a Mac II with B&W screen, I was always a Windows man. When my wife bought her first Apple computer while in school for Graphic Design 5 years ago, the seed was planted in our household. Upgrading from a desktop to a MacBook, she slowly started to convert me with the ease of use. After her second MacBook and showing family how easy it was to make photo albums, more of my family converted. And when I bought a MacBook Aluminum in January of 2009, I went all in. This MacBook is the single best computing machine I have ever used, and I am happy to be part of the Apple family. It’s so well designed, easy to use and just simply always works, much like all Apple products these days.

We love your Apple Store downtown Vancouver, and have been to the stylish store in New York. Conveniently located with the newest products, it’s such a great experience going into the stores to see what’s new. So when I lost my power adapter while traveling and found myself in Rome wanting to write on my blog, I didn’t hesitate to lookup the official Apple Store in the city.

Quickly going to Apple.com and doing a quick search, I was happy to see that there was an official store located in Rome. Called RomaEst, I didn’t recognize the address but luckily there was a Google map. Not knowing the location I plugged the information into Google and saw that I had to take a train and walk a short distance to the mall that it was at. I was so glad that you provided great directions that my wife Deidra and I went out right away to get the missing charger with our train stop in mind.

Taking the subway and then having to transfer to a train, we thought it was a bit odd but hopped on. As the train drove along through many stops, we anticipated the location shortly coming up and a little under an hour our location was called. Stepping off the train onto a platform, it almost felt like we were getting off a train in the old Wild West, with a road leading from the train station and a small store/bar at the station but nothing else around. I walked up to this store and asked them if they knew where the Apple Store was, sure that it must be close and conveniently located.

When the nice lady pointed at Apple Juice, I knew my little grasp of the Italian language wasn’t going to cut it. We’d have to figure it out ourselves, with nothing more than the memory of what the map looked like from your website. It didn’t look too far from what I remember, and we grabbed a couple quick espressos and a bottle of water. Walking out of the store past the five old Italians gambling on a game of poker, I felt confident we’d find the plug and be back downtown Rome in no time. Out on the road we came to a junction with a choice to go either left or right. Left led us into an area with signs of civilization and right led us to the entrance of a busy highway with no sidewalk. So, using our common sense we headed towards civilization with a spring in our step.

Unfortunately the spring in our step only lasted for half an hour due to the extreme heat, and finally came onto some streets with older looking homes and barking dogs. As we continued to walk through this area I couldn’t image an ultra-modern Apple store being located here. But on we went walking until it was obvious the store wouldn’t be this way – we were bound by the far curve of the highway and hills with forest and agriculture on them. We now had no other decision but to turn around and walk back the hour to the train station.

Oh Glorious Commercialized Civilization!

On our way back I decided to climb a hill that was adjacent to the road to get a better idea of where in Rome we even were. From the top of the hill I could see a giant glowing sign in the distance – down the hill I was on, across a farmers field, across what looked like a dirt-bike track, then the highway and finally, the largest building in the entire area, a supersized mall. With doubt in Deidra’s eyes I made the executive decision to cross this expanse so we could savor the sweet juicy power of Apple.

As we made our way across the fields, I wondered how much like the Wild West this area really was. We obviously weren’t anywhere near anything, and would a farmer shoot us out here for trespassing? Our questions were answered as we walked by a shantytown on the edge of the dirt-bike field, complete with burning garbage, stolen shopping carts and some scrap metal makeshift homes. Deciding to avoid this area we quickly made our way across the barbed wire covered ditch after being charged by a Ram protecting 8 other sheep. Never being so happy to set foot on the pavement of a highway before, we used our childhood Froger skills to cross the eight lanes to the urban miracle of a shopping mall. Looking back at our feat of an adventure through the Wild West we noticed the hill we climbed down was now filled with a giant herd of sheep. Wondering to ourselves while we entered the mall doors what would have happen if we were still on that hill as all those sheep arrived with the farmer and his dogs…

Getting our power adapter at your store was uneventful, and with our purchase we then ran into our next problem of this adventure. It seemed that this mall was so far out of town that to get a cab to the train station ended up costing us as much as the power adapter. Not that we were that far away from the train station – probably only 5km’s down the major highway with no sidewalk – but that they had to call the cab in from downtown Rome which took just under an hour. There were no other cabs around, and by this time we were just happy to be done with it all as it was now getting late. As the cab dropped us off at the train station, we were up for our next surprise.

Walking to the entrance there was a Police officer and four armed military personnel with him. It was around 9:00pm and there was a train going to Roma in half an hour. With an odd look and quick nod to the contingent of military at the entrance we sat down to wait for our train. Around us we were gated in with 10-foot high metal bars and the only entrance was where they stood. Looking over at the military and police sizing us up, we started to wonder what was going on. Luckily we didn’t have to wait long as the policeman walked over to us and struck up a conversation. We chatted about where we were from in Canada and he mentioned while he was in the army, positioned in the U.N., he had a commander from Ottawa and liked Canadians. A little bit more small talk and then the question came out;

“Just out of curiosity, what are you two doing here? You don’t look like you belong…”

I’m glad he asked because I was wondering why a platoon of soldiers was guarding a tiny train station, so telling him our story of the afternoons adventures gave me a perfect setting. While he was laughing at what happened, I asked him,

“Why are you and the army here?”

His face got serious and said, “For your protection. This is a very dangerous area.”

Just then a military van drove up and he excused himself, saying he’d be back in a few minutes and that he had to check in. Unfortunately a moment later our train came and I wasn’t able to continue the conversation and find out more about what was going on. Taking his words to heart we hopped on the train and were off back to Rome, feeling lucky and wondering to ourselves the many different ways our day could of ended up.

Steve, as I mentioned earlier, there are a of couple things that I’ve come to expect with Apple products and stores. These things are: Easy to use products, modern stylish stores and safety knowing that things just work. I don’t expect to need to pack for a field expedition to purchase a simple power adapter, or need an army platoon for personal security. To say that your Apple Store is in Rome is akin to saying Cupertino is in San Francisco. It may be in the bay area, but hardly in San Francisco city.

May I suggest you update your website with better directions and a warning of distance and danger? Or better yet use one of the thousands of buildings in the City of Rome and design something that better upholds the Apple style. I’m sure you can do a hell of a lot better than this.

Thank you for your time,

Scott