I am writing this while looking out over the Arabian Sea. Our hotel, The Leela, Kovalum. The theme of this area is “Welcome to God’s Country”. It is worthy of the name. It is beautiful here. Our room overlooks the sea and we shall be lulled to sleep tonight by the sound of waves.

We left London Heathrow airport at 9:30 am and boarded our plane at 1:30. We arrived in Dubai airport @ 1:00 am Dubai time ( the clock moved 12 hours but our flit was only 8 hours long. We left 3.5 hours later and arrived in Trivandrum 4 hours later or 9:30 local time. We spent time today figuring out when we were. I will post pictures of where we are too.

We also had our 1st snack. What do you think about our choices. We don’t know what we are eating, but it was good

We are in the last two weeks of preparation for our trip to India. We had a big change to our plans when our guides and friends, Meenal and Sanjiv, decided not to go with us after all. Their dog is very ill and they couldn’t face leaving him when he is so sick. Therefore we are going to traverse the subcontinent on our own. We will be fine, I hope :). The adventure quotient on this trip has just gone up!

We visited the Art Gallery of Alberta on August 21, 2012 with our niece Nicole K. It was her first visit to an art gallery and it was fun exploring the AGA from her perspective. The feature exhibit was from the National Gallery of Canada collection. They had a full room of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois. The next week I was in Ottawa and had a chance to visit the NGC. As we walked up to the Gallery we were met by Bourgeois’ statue Maman, a huge statue of a pregnant spider. http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=101000. It was fun to see work by the same artist in two different spaces.

My goal with this blog is to create a forum to share my travel adventures with my family and friends. I will be travelling a great deal in the next year. India, Africa, Europe and shorter jaunts through North America. It is my hope that people will share their reactions and ideas about my adventures.