I arrived in Venice safe and sound yesterday and hopped on a boat into town. There's a bus you can take if you want and I think it's quite cheap... like 3 euro or something. But I decided to opt for the 15 euro boat trip in, about 75 minutes and well worth it.

I'd not pre-booked any accommodation for this trip, which is a first for me and admittedly I was a bit (irrationally?) stressed out about it :). When I got to my hotel the price per night was significantly higher than was listed on a few travel sites but I decided to stay anyway, mostly since the room seemed ok and I was tired of looking for a place. Everywhere else I saw was somewhat more expensive anyway. After checking in I ended up founding a place that was a bit nicer and the same price so I'll be staying there tonight.

It seems like ages ago when I was first planning this trip, yet between then and now I've completed only a fraction of the things I had hoped to. I'm currently in Paris awaiting a connecting flight to Venice... I'll be in Venice for two days and then from there I'll head to Ljubljana for Rok and Tamara's wedding!! :)

Two weeks ago I'd never even sat on a motorbike. As of yesterday, I officially have my class 6 license! This means I can now legally ride a motorcycle without any restrictions (besides those pesky road laws).

Leslie and I were in a time crunch as I'm leaving the country next week, and wedding season is starting for her. Most motorcycle schools are closed from the middle of October through the middle of February and since I was only in Vancouver this time around from the middle of October through the middle or March, this made things a bit tricky :). We ended up finding a great school which I'll blog about in a later post. They started courses on the 7th of Feb and had an option for a 7-day course which we took advantage of.

The reason Les and I decided to get our motorcycle license comes back to a (I think) half-joking half-serious comment about riding up the coast of Vietnam (á la Top Gear). Leslie has spent a couple of years in Asia before, but I've only spent a few weeks there, and the idea of traveling around Vietnam by motorcycle was just too awesome to pass up! We initially talked about doing it at the end of this March but it seemed a bit too intense to go so quickly (since at the time neither of us had any motorcycle experience), and we were both a bit broke.

We're going to aim for March 2012 now. In the meantime though, I plan to buy a bike in South Africa (probably something like a 250cc) and just use it to ride around Cape Town while we're there. Sam has a little mini, so we can easily fit it into the same parking stall.

I loved riding the bike WAY more than I'd expected to so I'm super glad I got it together and did the training and the exams before heading out of the country again. I'm really looking forward to some future motorcycle trips around various parts of the world :-).

One thing for anyone else in BC who thinks they may want to get their license... try and do it this year. Apparently the government is adding a graduated licensing type program for new motorcyclists in 2012 and it could be a much bigger pain if you wait. There's also apparently up to a 6 week waiting list to do the road test in the summer and most schools get fully booked up, so start trying to figure out timing of all that and book a school now. It's better to learn in the rain anyway :)

It originally started out as mostly a joke, but eventually the joke turned into what seemed like a good idea. For several reasons, Sam and I decided to get hitched in vegas this weekend!! We had a few of our best friends there, my parents, Sam's mom (which was kept as a complete surprise to Sam), and Elvis! The ceremony was quick and fun and we'll have plenty of pictures and hopefully some video up in the next week or so.

Author: Sakura Photography
Las Vegas Wedding

We still plan to have a "proper" wedding and reception with everyone, and the date for that will probably be December 14, 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa. We're hoping a lot of friends and family from Canada will be coming too, but realize that it's going to be quite a difficult trip to plan and budget for. We'll be organizing a number of events following the wedding including a trip up to Kruger park for a few days.

As might be expected we'll have a website for our wedding which we'll be spamming everyone about shortly :)

Leslie has already posted a bunch of amazing photos from vegas on her blog. Thanks so much Leslie and Mark for photo-ing us!! :)

So right now I /should/ be in Las Vegas with Sam at a five star hotel... but instead I'm still in Vancouver and Sam's in Vegas by herself. We're going to Vegas with a few friends this weekend and me and Sam wanted to go down a bit early to have a night to ourselves. We drove down to Bellingham last night to stay in a hotel so we didn't have to stress about the flight the next morning (way cheaper to fly out of Bellingham). While we made it out of bellingham, we didn't both make it out as planned :)...