Rita's Day at the Beach

Our friends Stephen and Tara have a dreadfully smelly Basset Hound named Rita. When Stephen invited Kindra and I to a day at the beach what he meant was "will you drive us to a Basset hound convention cause I don't have a driver's license?"

Here's the video...

Mike, Ryan and Norway

Been a busy month already. It started with the arrival of our good friend Mike Kleps. Mike had been in Thailand for a few months before sailing toward the EU. After getting stuck behind some US warships in the Suez Canal and getting sick in Egypt he decided to jump ship and fly to Amsterdam to spend a few days with us.

While in Amsterdam he prepared for a bike trip, borrowed my bike and left for three weeks. More to come on that trip after he gets back in late May.

Days later saw the arrival of my good friend and college roommate, Ryan Keith. Ryan did a tour of France and a brief stop in Brussels before coming to see us in Amsterdam. Ryan has lived in Napa for the last few years and has turned into a bit of a wine connoisseur. In addition to drinking a lot of our wine we ran around Amsterdam and took in a glorious windmill...


After Ryan's departure we made ready for a quick trip of to Norway. We traveled at the crack of dawn on Thursday May 17th and arrived in Oslo around 10am on Norway's National Constitution Day. The streets were packed and we had to cross a massive parade to get to our hotel. The rest of the day we walked all over the city which was crowded with people in traditional Norwegian clothes. Apparently you dress in the clothing that is specific to the city or area you were born in. You are only allowed to wear these outfits if you are less than one generation removed. IE. your grandparents have to have physically lived in the area in question for you to wear the outfit. I'm not sure how they prove this but I bet it results in a lot of arm wrestling.


The following day Kindra and I left on the Royal Fjord tour. The trip takes a day and goes from Oslo to Myrdal by train, from Myrdal to Flam on the Flam Railway, from Flam to Bergen by boat and then from Bergen to Norway by train again. It's a crazy long day and if we'd had more time we would have stayed in one of the smaller cities along the way. The route is outlined on the map below and passes through snow, mountains and the longest Fjord in Norway, the Sognefjord...


Our train returned to Oslo at about 6.30am and after trucking to our hotel we were lucky to get an early check-in and take a nap. The rest of the weekend was spent tooling around Oslo, taking ferries to islands and finding places to spend millions of dollars eating. Oslo is so expensive it is insane.

We checked out the Akershus Fortress, the Vigeland Sculpture Park and the Fram museum which houses the Fram and the Gjoa. Learning about these things was very special for me as I'm pretty sure I'm related to everyone in Norway.


All in all a great longerude weekend and it sucks being back at work. We have friends visiting in early June and are headed to Greece for vacation on June 7th. We are happy to have more lazing about to look forward to.

More Flickr action...LINK TO SWEET NORWAY PHOTOS

PHBLOG - Norway

Norway
Originally uploaded by jessegordonlong.

We have returned to the Mother land (assuming that great grand parents being born here makes me Norweigen).



This is Kindra gazing from the train on our way to Oslo.

Queen's Day...THE MOVIE!!!

You've seen the photos, now see the excitement.

Trips, Tavel, Queen's Day and Baby News...

Again, it has been a long time since our last post. Things have been really crazy and we have been traveling a fair bit in Europe and in the US. We've also done some local trips around Holland as well but the big news is we are pregnant.


We are a little over four months along and have an expected due date of late September although we have been told that your first is generally a bit late. However, we have really been told just about everything on the topic of babies in addition to hours online and about thirty books and counting. So far the one truth we have found is that none of it is consistent. Regardless, we are very excited. We will be staying in Amsterdam for the birth, so the baby will have dual nationality which is pretty cool. Although we have the option of finding out the gender in a couple of weeks, we have decided to refrain, and instead, to keep this a surprise until the big day. True to form, I will keep you posted with pics as Kindra gets bigger and we get closer to the due date.

In other news, back in March our friends Stephen and Tara invited us to the coast for the day. What was going to be a day at the beach turned out being Basset Madness, a Basset gathering of about 50 Dutch Basset Hounds. This was actually a pretty funny/smelly site. I'm working on the video...

Kindra and I have both been traveling a crazy amount. I ended up in Vancouver, Canada, Geneva, the UK, LA and Portland in the span of about 3 weeks and Kindra went to Tucson to visit her mom.

A few of these were boring work trips but LA was a mix as I flew there for a commercial shoot but was able to visit our good friends Chris and Jean. They are currently living in Venice not too far from the beach and craziness of the Venice pier. We cruised around Venice and up the coast to Santa Monica on their beach cruiser bikes. It was a great couple days and I'm completely jealous of their set up. After a couple days in Venice I went over to Hollywood for work. It's not that far from Venice but with traffic you might as well be in a different state. The shoot was for the latest Harry Potter video game and went very well. I'll share the spots when they get online.


After LA I flew up to Portland to see some friends and family. I was surprised in the airport baggage claim by Ben who had flown up for the weekend. Deb picked us up and after driving to Lake Oswego for Matt's track meet we drove over to Sister's, Oregon to spend a couple days at the Lazy Z ranch. Pretty relaxed couple of days with the a trip to Bend and somewhere else to see a soccer game of Matt's.

We also played with the dogs a fair bit. I love this shot of Kate and Tess because Tess is completely off the ground...


After the ranch Matt and I took Ben to the airport so he could fly back to SF and then headed back to Salem. The rest of the week was spent catching up with buddies, heading down to Eugene to see my sister and Nate and Kate Snow and getting by butt kicked by my dad and his buddies at racket-ball. My welts have healed by now...

On Saturday I headed back to Amsterdam which Kindra had done the day before. It was a great two weeks but felt really good to get back to the Nederlands and finally see Kindra again.

Kindra's Tucson trip was great as well. Jan moved to Arizona going on a year and half ago (a few months before we moved to Amsterdam), so this was Kindra's first opportunity to see her mom's house, meet all of her Arizona buddies and see the sights around town. Jan and her hiked through the canyons in Arizona, went to a wildlife refuge, lounged in the sun and had some great meals in and out (Kindra is now homesick for US cuisine) Kindra also used the trip to see some US doctors about the pregnancy which all went very well. She also took advantage of the time in the US to get some maternity clothes as she is rapidly growing out of her wardrobe.


Holland has a great medical system but it can be a bit daunting when you speak a different language. I also think they practice a bit of a Darwinian form of medical care in that if your leg isn't falling off you shouldn't be waisting their time. Whatever the case it seems to be working as Holland is the only nationality that continues to get taller per capita.

Since being back it has been work as usual with a couple of highlights. We rented a car with Loz, Jen and their baby Sam and headed about an hour southwest of Amsterdam to see the Keukenhof Gardens. This is the Disneyland of tulips and all though it was a bit tourist it was fun and pretty amazing.

We've also recently had the 25th anniversary party for Wieden+Kennedy which was a two day long party that has left half of the agency sick with "flu like symptoms." I also played in a basketball game that was arranged between my agency (WK) and Kindra's agency (180). There is a rivalry here that has a long history that I won't get into but they handle Adidas and we handle Nike. It was a fun match up and didn't get too out of control...except for some prison ball moves by our team that were more a lack of experience than anything malicious. It was also made more pleasant by the fact that WK kicked the crap out of 180 3 games to 1. Kindra has not heard the end of my bragging about the game and complaining about how sore I am. There will be a movie coming soon but until then you can check out the WK Blog posting here.

Monday was Queen's Day so the city fell into complete insanity and closed down for the day. We took it fairly easy and just walked around the city with friends. There are some good photos on the Flickr link below and one here.


In other news I set up a map at work using Google Maps. On this map people in the Amsterdam office can login and post where they are from. Pretty cool and gives a good visual of how diverse the office is. You can take a look here if you want.

Lastly, we switched up our photo sharing as we are now using a Flickr account. Should be pretty easy to figure out and it is a lot easier to upload to so hope you like it...LINK TO SWEET PHOTOS