120 Saturdays

Yesterday was my farewell party: it was great to see most of you before I leave, and I am glad so many people came to the party! With altogether about 50-60 people over the course of the evening the atmosphere was good and the Sambuca shots were even better (an old Buisman-party tradition ). My last 7 days in the US will be filled with final arrangements, packing and of course hoping that the Icelandic ash-cloud clears up soon enough for me to get my plane!

I’ve uploaded a few pictures from the party which I made with my new camera (the Canon S90 – so far I am really happy with the quality):

Click to view album

My first real trip as part of my vacation As I mentioned in my previous post we had planned to go the Channel Islands to do some diving and hiking. The trip really worked out very well, as the weather was good (not too warm, but no rain) and the Channel Islands (Santa Cruz Island specifically) turned out to be very nice!

Diving on Saturday was great! I can really recommend diving with the Peace Dive Boat; the trip started at 6:30am (we could have slept on the boat the night before, which would have been even better but we did not realize this). Altogether we did 4 (!) dives, at 4 different locations and between each dives a hot meal awaited us (we had sausage and eggs, chicken and rice, and fresh brownies with ice cream!) The dives were nice as we saw a lot of wildlife such as Garibaldi fish, Horn Sharks, Spiny Lobsters and best of all: a seal! It was really nice to see a seal coming so close and experiencing it in its natural environment: on land they always seem kind of awkward but underwater we were definitely the awkward ones

The hike on Sunday was very nice as well: the island was very peaceful and mainly consisted of sloping hills with beautiful flowers and high grass waving in the wind. If you happen to be in the area its definitely worth a visit.

I posted my pictures to Flickr (which I will be doing for all of my pictures). Pictures of the dive boat are still missing at time of writing, but I will add them as soon as I have them.

Click to view album

Welcome to my new travel-blog ’120 Saturdays’. If you’ve reached this blog you probably know who I am, and that after close to 3 great years in the Bay Area I will be returning to Europe. Before I start my new job at Google though, I will have 4 months of vacation! Having experienced my first week of my temporary retirement I have found that it’s quite easy to get used to: every day I wake up and decide what I want to do that day, knowing that if things don’t work out today there’s always another free day tomorrow. So it seems I’m in for an exciting ride through 120 “Saturdays” which will bring me from the Bay Area to Zurich, via The Netherlands, Indonesia and Thailand and who knows where else!

On this blog I will be leaving notes as I go, to keep everyone posted. You’ll notice that the map at the top of this page will show you the places where I’ve written my posts. If you look at a subset of the posts – say by clicking on a category to the right  or by looking at an individual post – it will show only those posts on the map. If you’d like to know what I did in a certain location, just click on the marker on the map and it will show you the post I wrote there.

I’ll probably be posting something soon already as I will be heading to the Channel Islands this weekend (with Borja, Gemma, Amir, Daniel and Nadine) to do some diving and hiking.