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!

For awhile now we have been wanting to redesign our site for many reasons. Some of these reasons include:

• Update the look of our comments section to hopefully encourage more comments from our readers
• Have a featured articles section
• Show a magazine style layout with thumbnails and post summaries
• Have a better “share” section at the bottom of each post
• Clean up our sidebar
• Better site navigation throughout
• Ease of use for both us and our readers (old design gave us many errors when trying something new)

Last, but not least…

• Hoping a new look that works without bad coding errors will increase our desire to post more of our adventures on here! Since being back home and being busy with the real world we started to loose the desire, but it’s coming back again. Sometimes you just need a change right? Or maybe it’s the cold weather outside forcing us to stay in and have more time for this…

Anyways, here it is! I’m sure we will still be tweaking and adding a few more things but this is pretty much it! Be sure to take a look around by jumping to the home page.

What do you think?

*Please note it appears our commentluv is not working. Says we need to upgrade our wordpress but it is fully upgraded….

Watch this little mini documentary about it at FutureStates.tv and enjoy your long weekend saturday!

For those of you keeping up on our where-abouts you should fully know it’s been 4 months since we made the last leg of our journey to home. During this time I’m sure you also all noticed our blog entries died down to pretty much a sudden stop. Adjusting back to the real world has been some awesome fun, lots more work then we are used to, busy busy busy, and we can’t forget about the gambit of emotions to go along with all that!

Luckily we did not jump back into the work force right away and planned to have 2 months of seeing friends and family, espcially since we did not have a home yet. Our condo still had renters in it until July 1st. So, we stayed mostly with my parents, with sleep-over extended visits to various friends houses here and there.

The start to life back in Canada was a short visit to Calgary. Our great friends Steve and Karen who traveled with us for 2 months through Europe were great hosts for these couple of days and made us one of the best dinners we had in a long ass time. We love steak, especially Triple A Alberta Beef. You’ve never have beef until you have eaten this. Trust us! We tried steak all over the world and nothing came remotely close to Alberta Beef. Our friends showed up Gordon Ramsay in their own backyard. No fancy gourmet kitchen or posh restaurant with a ridiculous priced menu. Take that Gordon!

We then flew home to Vancouver filled with extremely happy family/friends to see our return. Welcome home BBQ’s, parties, simple get togethers, outings and repeat. We truly felt missed and were quite thankful of my parents letting us live with them until we got our condo back.

However, on top of all this hub-bub, we really had a hard time getting out of bed and doing anything during the day. We were still quite used to sleeping in and then relaxing all day on a beach or in a pool. Plus, I’m sure we had a large dose of jet lag in our systems as well.

May long weekend we drove out to Salmo B.C to help PK Sound with the Village stage tear down at Shambhala. Demolish parts of the stage and clean up the forest during the day and drink with friends around the giant bon fire at night.

After May long we drove back to Calgary for a couple weeks to do some much needed renovations on our loft in order to get a new renter for July 1st. New paint, new carpet, replace some light fixtures, replace the bathroom door, hang up curtains, clean it up, list it, and interview possible renters. When I look back at the work we did it doesn’t sound like much. But, like most renovations things never go as planned and ended up being quite the headache. It sure felt good once it was completed! I wanted to move back in after pouring my heart and soul into it. It looks SO good and in result rented quite easily. Unfortunately we were so down to the last minute we completely forgot to take after photos!! =(

Another highlight for us was participating in our first scavenger hunt with Alex and Heather. We named our team Gang Green, wore all green clothing, and decorated my car for some extra bonus point team flair and scavenged the city for items and photos. It was a blast and we won second place!! Can not wait to do it again next year. Much thanks to Mike Awesome for hosting this!!

Suddenly July long weekend approached us and that meant three things. First, Scott would be going back to work at his old job. The second was one more weekend spent at The Village helping now with the beginnings of the new stage construction. Third, we got to move back into our home! It was a busy week of driving, constructing a stage, moving, unpacking, and Scott adjusting back to the work life.

As great as it actually was to live with my parents for the past two months. We truly have an amazing relationship with them. Which was only made stronger when they both traveled all the way out to Thailand for a month with us. It’s now amazingly great to truly and finally be home.

We still have a ton more stories to share from our travels. Vietnam, Cambodia, and one last week in Thailand are still to come, even some tales from on the road in Canada. Also, coming up are more things to share about our adjustment back home and stories about the music events we have attended. I’m sure Furry Friday will also make a big come back appearance soon enough!

Sorry to have been on such a hiatus. But really… we are not sorry! We’ve been really enjoying life and every moment of being home. Hope your summer was as awesome as ours.

I know, I know. The title says “save” the world and the sign says “take over” the world. But really, when I take over the world it will be saving it. Have you ever watched your Members of Parliament, Senators or whatever your elected figures are on TV? It’s seriously like watching a bunch of children debate. “He said this” “She said that” – stand up and booing. Repeat. I wonder when they get to the job of serious issues like helping the homeless, stopping war, reducing the deficits and increasing our qualities of life?… hmm.. right.

But before I can “save” the world I have to do some training. And this is where you come in. Everyone knows that training takes money. And not well wishing money but hard currency. In this case US dollars. Luckily Canadian dollars are just as good these days as the old green back. Who knew a loonie would ever beat the greenback? And while I would take happy wishes, they need cold currency. I know, I know. It’s not fair. I can try sending them an email saying I’ll review their shooting range for some free explosives, but I don’t think it’ll work. And our beer habit blew through our budget 2 months ago and we’re running on vaporous. Its your help or nothing.

You may be asking yourself what kind of training is involved? Very simply, shooting very big effin guns (BFGS). In Cambodia I can shoot RPG’s, M60′s and Ak47. But at a cost of $200 for the RPG and $1 a bullet for the rest. The M60 shoots something like 20 rounds a second, so it can be pricey.

I promise to video the whole event, and be extremely happy about it. So what do you say, got a couple bucks to spare? $5, $10, $20 – it’ll all help. A $50 or $100 will get you something special in the mail. If your in Canada, email money transfers work great, otherwise Paypal is also perfect.

I’ve included a F.A.Q. with this post to answer any more of your questions!

Q: How do I know you just won’t spend the money on hookers and blow?
A: Great question. First of all, Dee’s with me so that kills half of it. Secondly, shooting BFG’s is a bit more exciting. And after that Bangkok incident, well.. ’nuff said. Plus I promise videos in full HD quality.

Q: I really don’t think learning to shoot some guns is going to help you take over the world. Won’t I be wasting my money?
A: Not at all. If I do manage to take over the world one day, wouldn’t you rather be with me than against me? Us Dutch are known to have big noses and long memories. Secondly, what if Zombies attack? You need someone in the know to help you out.

Q: Zombies? Really?
A: Of course. Who knows, chemical neurological weapons are made daily. Think the US, Russian and Iranian governments aren’t researching this? Just look back at the LSD experiments in the 60′s when they dosed soldiers so they can’t fight. Who said those experiments stopped? What about crazy asteroids? H1Q1? Nihilist Virus? Crack heads? Shit can happen my friend. Best be prepared.

Q: That’s why we have soldiers. Police. First line responders.
A: That’s exactly right. First line responders. And when they get overrun, who’s left? Have you ever fired an M60? Thrown a grenade? Launched an RPG? Oh no? Wouldn’t you rather have someone on your side who has? Who can help defend you? Or do you think twitter can save you from a blood thirsty monster? Tweet tweet. Crunch.

Q: I know you. You’ve played a ridiculous amount of video games. Isn’t that training enough?
A: It’s a good step 1 of training. And I’ve put thousands of hours into it virtually. Both strategy and twitching. Now it’s time for the real thing.

Q: So your saying you won’t save me in-case something bad happens? When I come knocking on your door, you just gonna pass over all the good times we’ve had?
A: Well, let’s be serious for a moment. The worlds ending, of course I’m going to help you. But it’s going to take some begging and pleading. And I’ll never let you forget that you never helped me out with the training. I’m kind of an ass that way. I’m sure there will be something you can do while I’m blowing the shit out of things and saving our asses. Underwear to clean and such.

Q: Well yeah, that’s only if “Zombies” attack.
A: Think it’ll be any better if I do manage to take over the world?

Q: $50 US is a bit expensive…
A: For Canadians, not really. Have you noticed how the dollar has dived lately? Much like the US Olympic Hockey team, it’s gone waaaay down. It’s almost like $49 Canadian dollars, a deal for you! So just go ahead and send me $50 Canadian and we’ll call it even. And to my American friends, donate sooner and it’ll be cheaper for you!

Q: How do I know your going to do what you say you’ll do?
A: This is it in writing I suppose. I’ll even mention you here on this blog for special accolade to let everyone know the names of the people who helped me. And who’ll be protected in the future…

Q: What if I want to be a cabinet minister?
A: The more money you send, the higher your position will be in my government/post apocalypse organization. Pure and simple, dollars talk today.

Q: I don’t have any money to spare. Times are tough. Will you still help me?
A: Pretty much.. no. Read above. If that appeals to you, well sure. But I only have so much underwear. Times are tough for me as well! That’s why I have my hand out to you asking for money, which I never do. But remember, this is a trade for your future. For less than a Starbucks chai tea latte, you can help. And if your willing to give up a whole week of coffee, your pretty much set.

Q: OK, you’ve convinced me. Training you to fire big weapons benefits me. How do I donate?
A: Paypal works great. Canadians can send me an email money transfer to scott at dreamalittledream.ca Remember, even $5 buys you protection.

Q: I heard that you were going to shoot cows and chickens? What’s up with this?
A: Well, my initial excitement for bloodlust and realism was a bit much. I had a meeting with KFETOCCOA (Karen For The Ethical Treatment Of Chickens, Cows and Other Animals) who persuaded me that static targets and perhaps cars would be a better substitute. So don’t fear, no living being will be harmed by this. For now.

EMAIL MONEY TRANSFER: (for Canadians only)
Send to: scott at dreamalittledream.ca
Password: zombies 

PAYPAL: (for everyone)
just click on the handy thumbnail below!

I want to do this in 3 days, so don’t delay! Send money now!

You don’t want me or yourself to become a Zombie! Send money now! 

We’ve been without internet the last 3 days and have come to find our site is down. All of our posts, pages and comments had vanished. It seems our web host, hostpapa severs went down and around the same time we lost everything and our database shrunk to 0mb. Sent an email to hostpapa support and got a response saying “We don’t backup customer files, it’s up to you. case closed”

I have to say it’s pretty shitty customer service from hostpapa.ca No apology, no explanation why the servers crashed, no nothing. The only way I knew their servers went down (which they didn’t admit) is because I have a third party reporting service for outages. Also a friend of ours uses hostpapa and she actually got an email.. where the hell was ours?

Anyways, so we drank our troubles away through many pitchers of BeerLao, pool with the A-Team and many whisky cokes. This morning instead of tubing we nursed our hangovers and got ready to get our dream back up and running again. Lo and behold, I do an upgrade to the newest version of WordPress and it magically all reappeared like nothing happened.

My guess is that hostpapa realized that killing baby kittens is wrong and decided to make it up with this magic. But really, did wordpress magically have a backup we didn’t know about somewhere in cyberland?

None the less, sorry for the hiccup, we’re now back to our regularly scheduled program starting Monday.

We know, we know! Your all begging for more!

Hello from Thailand! It’s been awhile since we have shared any of our travel stories; it’s been a great and busy start to the new decade. First we had our friends Alex and Heather come out over New Years to spend a week with us, which much like Europe lead to many full days and nights of partying and no time to write on our blog. Then on the same day we hugged goodbye to our friends we meet up with parents who will now be enjoying Thailand with us until the 28th. So once again we’ve been busy spending time with them. We have now landed to Koh Lanta with plans to stick here and enjoy the beach for the next week. Which hopefully means we once again find ourselves some time to continue sharing our stories with you.
Let’s just cross all of our fingers we have some good wifi connections to do so!

Anyways, so we last left you off with the end of our European adventures and planning our next leg in Baden Baden. (This was back in October) So stay tuned for our upcoming posts about our time in Cairo to explore the pyramids! We are currently sitting by the beach and writing them now!

And yes, this still means we are 2 months behind in sharing our tales… Bah!!