Ryan James O'Sullivan

On Friday afternoon I arrived at work and had a strong urge to A) find a way to watch the England Game (I will not weep, I will not weep, I will not weep) B) Get out of the city ASAP.  The only problem was I was at my office with a full work day ahead of me.  So I decided noon was high time to get the hell out.  Confirmed it with the Boss and I was outtie.

We hit the road super quick and managed to get up north before the England game was too far in (20 minutes in if I remember right).  My Grandparents and my sister Amanda were already up there and we got right down to having a blast.  The Saturday forecast was calling for rain (of the thunderstorm variety) so we decided that Friday should be beach day.  We spent a few hours down there and had a blast.  Paige isn’t big on the water (we are working on it) but I managed to get quite a bit of swimming in since Tammy wanted nothing to do with a cold lake (silly Arizonian).

For dinner we BBQ’d some Sliders which were surprisingly fantastic and had some french fries (which I thought were terrible, but everyone else insisted they are fine… so clearly they are crazy…).  Parents arrived up, we went to sleep.  Profit.

Saturday did not bring the rain that was threatened (until later, but we’ll get there) and we ended up having another great day at the beach.  This time my dad, my sister Jess and my sister’s boyfriend joined in on the beach fun.  I even laid out and tanned for a bit and needless to say I’m pulling off the Irish-Red-tan quite well right now… Last season I think I made it down to the beach 2 times all season and here I was pulling that off in one weekend, it was awesome.

After we finished at the beach we decided to head to the Kawartha Dairy to grab some shakes and ice cream.

It was then time for dinner… after dinner Jessica and I decided we would go ATVing.  The plan was to take a fairly short ride out to the main highway and come back.  We got about 75% of the way there and we arrived at a small intersection and Jess asked “what’s that way”.  Of course this type of question between siblings can only lead to crazy exploration and down the street we went towards Murphy’s Corners and Ridge Road.

We arrived at the Ridge Road church and I pulled over knowing that there was a geocache I had failed to find there last year.  We spent some time looking (and I knew where it was this time having asked someone…) and we came away empty handed.  Just as we were giving up the hunt for the cache thunder started to roar in the distance.  Looked up at the sky and holy crap it was black to the south-west.  ”Let’s get out of here dude…”.

We made it almost back home and ran across a deer.  We stopped to watch him eat grass and check us out.  Then it came.  BOOM.  HAIL.  ”Shit Jess, book it, book it”.  The deer was off in to the trees and we were doing the speed limit busting our asses to get home.  Hail and rain falling hard.

We quickly outran the storm (yes that is actually possible) and made it home unscathed.

Sunday we had father’s day pancake breakfast and we were on our way home.  Father’s day dinner was our usual trip to Swiss Chalet.

The above is around 600 words to say this:  This weekend fucking rocked.  I haven’t had that much fun or felt so fulfilled up north in a real.long.time.

Summer feels long gone now (we’ve had far too many days near 0 degrees here in T.O) but I’m just getting around to getting my Summer Vacation ATV pictures up. These are pictures from my annual vacation with my dad that we take around Labour Day.

I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go this year with my knee (we cancelled several other trips earlier in the summer because of the knee) but I’m glad we did. We hit up our old stomping grounds in the Haliburton area and it was nice to see everything from the trail perspective.

Some highlights from the pictures:

Munitions Factory from WW1 in Haliburton

Beautiful Scenery

S T U CK - This became the story of Day 1. Happened three times!

Beautiful Trail

Crossing the River

To see all the files – check it out here.

So I decided I’d do some playing in Flickr today and man, it really is a sweet little tool for photos.

Firstly I’ve uploaded all my recent FFXI and Everquest 2 screenshots. In the EQ2 set I’ve added some cool shots from recent raiding in Deathtoll. In FFXI you will find a bunch of shots from my recent return to FFXI.

The coolest waste of my time spent on Flickr today was without question playing with geotagging. Geotagging photos basically means adding some meta data that gives the Long/Lat location on the planet where the picture was taken. I went and added locations for all the photos I’ve taken since the spring. It was actually really dang cool going through everything and googling locations, etc where the photos were taken. I highly recommend anyone who has some recent vacation photos to go back and do some geotagging on them. Was a great trip down memory lane!!!

Check out my geo photo map here.

This post is a little late but I had a busy back-to-work week… my apologies on the delay.

For most people who go out of town on the weekends in North America the labour day weekend is seen as a bit of depressing weekend. Despite the weekend being a long weekend its met with regret as it marks the beginning of a very quick end to the cottage season.

The weather is quickly cooling down (night times are often dropping near frost levels now) and its quite easy to tell that fall is just around the corner.

I find it hard to complain that the season is essentially over after having such a killer summer. This was our second season with the ATVs and put on probably around 1500 kilometers taking in all kinds of trails. My dad and I have now traveled all of the major trails within the Eastern Ontario Trail Alliance trail system and we had a blast doing it this year.

Outside of ATVing we had a blast hanging out around the fire and spending time together with the family.

Last year you will remember my father and I went out for a week long ATV trip at the end of September. To deal with some work scheduling issues this year my Dad and I planned on going earlier and we decided to use the week following the labour day long weekend as our go date this year.

This year we spent three solid days on our ATVs. We were worried that we would not be able to cover the 500 kilometers we were planning on riding with just four days for the ride. We were also worried we would be fatigued beyond usefulness by the last days. Well we headed out of Coe Hill on Tuesday morning and headed east to Ompah (~150 Kilometers). Wednesday we headed north out of Ompah towards Barysvale. From Barysvale we headed south along the K&P trail to Sharbot Lake. From Sharbot Lake it was 2 hours west to Tweed under cloudy skies. We decided to stay at the Tweed Motel like we did last year and that brought Wednesday to a close (~300 kilometers). We got up on Thursday morning and headed west and then north along the 212 trail in to Madoc where we stopped for some breakfast. From Madoc it was a few hours north back home to Coe Hill bringing Thursday’s riding time to around 80 kilometers.

Some of the highlights of the trip: Seeing the $700,000 worth of fence around the dam in Barysvale (put up resulting from a tragic incident at the Barrett Chute Dam (read more), finally reaching the extreme east of the EOTA trail system, seeing the beautiful county maintained camp sites in North Frontenac, the trails north of Ompah which in many instances were just breath taking, getting a true appreciation for the men who in many cases gave their lives to build the Ontario rail system (which now makes up most of the trail networks in the province) and just coming closer to terms with the fact that I live in the most beautiful province in the most beautiful country in the entire world.

I will have pictures, etc to follow… It’s sad to see summer go but I have so much to look forward to with Paige coming this winter it is easy to move forward…