Back to life. Back to reality.

The thing that is a real downer about going on vacation is coming back from it. The weeks and days preceding it are filled with anticipation, and a eagerness to step away from the ordinary everyday. And then you come back and before you know it, you're back at work, picking up where you left off; and it might as well be that you never went. The vacation was a but pleasant dream - an interruption of your waking hours.

On that somber note, I had a great time out in the eastern-most tip of La Belle Province. Unlike my previous whirlwind trips (case in point, my last trip to London and Rome back in May), this was a change of pace. We hung out. We chilled. We ate...a lot. We walked on pebble beaches by the ocean and looked for whales. We cruised around the town of Gaspe, looking for a USB cable.

What?you say. It's true. Apparently 1 GB CF cards for my shutter-happy boyfriend and budding photog/paparazzo friend Kev and was not nearly enough space. See, they both recently bought DSLR's (digital versions of those big-lensed cameras that make the REAL clicking shutter noise when it take pictures). So to deny them the freedom to snap away to their hearts' desires would be like denying a birthday child a whack at the pinata...it would be downright cruel. And I had assumed that Tim would bring a cable (he didn't), and he assumed my newly purchased laptop had a built-in CF card reader (it doesn't - it only reads Memory Stick), so it was nearly an utter tragedy. So on our first full day in the town of Perce, we searched every store we thought might sell a card-reader - to no avail. (Of course we were looking in all the touristy gift shops, but still!) The next day we made our way to (the slightly larger) town of Gaspe and 4 stores and 2 strip malls later, we managed to find an
electronics store. What a relief. We started to download the pictures mere minutes after the purchase was sealed and completed in the parking lot.

Other highlights from the trip included:

- Breaking back into our own rented chalet through a window shortly after discovering that no one remembered to take the key on our way out.

- Elatedly enjoying a choppy but exciting ride on a boat out in the ocean and then being pelted unexpectedly and repeatedly with cold salty seawater while tossed violently about the deck. Kev lost his footing at one point and managed to put a crack in the window of the captain's compartment when he slammed into it. We screamed and crawled our way back to the safety of the covered lower deck. It was rather embarrassing. (Of course, the fact that the seats were wet on the upper deck should have given it away.)

- Discovering the Gaspe night life. All one and a half blocks of it.

- Waiting more than an hour at a pebble beach for low tide so we could cross over to the Perce Rock only to realize we had been given wrong information about the time - it was not for an additional TWO hours. We didn't stick around.

- Realizing that burning a treated 2X4 plank of wood probably wasn't such a great idea.

I've put up quite a few pretty scenic photos on my smugmug website: http://angemala.smugmug.com. Check them out (you'll find the picture of us breaking into the chalet too).