Our Excellent Sri Lankan Adventure – Part 1

15 Years of Adventure

A few months ago I realized that 2019 celebrates the 15th year that I’ve been writing my ExcellentAdventure.ca travel blog.

My first reference to Excellent Adventure was during our trip to New Zealand and the Cook Islands in 1999, several years before I even thought about creating a blog. Way back then, I remember writing my notes on paper then and then every few days going to Internet cafes where I would sit there typing long emails about what we had done over the past few days, sending in emails to friends and family. I remember in those days it was common to have the computer freeze up before I was able to send the email, often losing hours of work in the process.

But it was in 2004, before our first trip to France that I built the very first version of my ExcellentAdventure.ca blog. It was in those early days that I started my routine of writing about travel on a daily basis, usually writing a little bit every day. More importantly for me, I ended up having a written history in one place of all of the trips that we’ve taken for almost 20 years. 

It seems like such a long time ago that this all started but the love of travel has remained.

Long Time Planning

It was only a matter of time. Sooner or later, Barb and I were going to be here. 

I feel that my entire life has led up to coming to Sri Lanka. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard stories from my parents about the country that they came from, leaving it a long time ago to start a new life in Canada. We started making real plans for this trip around the beginning of this year, working with the family in Australia and fairly soon after that we had flights booked.

In full disclosure, there’s never been a trip that has had too many airline-related problems. A few months ago our airline cancelled the flights on one leg of our trip into Sri Lanka and yesterday on the flight over here we missed a connection in Hong Kong and had to deal with another long delay.

But we’ve arrived in Sri Lanka now and all of the travel challenges of getting here have faded into the background. 

Arrived

The five of us arrived in Sri Lanka yesterday morning after a long day of travel. We were originally supposed to arrive at the hotel last night but with our flight delays, we arrived around noon the following day. The first thing that all of us had to deal with was the wall of humidity that hit us as soon as we exited the airport. It was overcast but it was still very hot later in the day the clouds would clear and we would have sun for the rest of our first day here.

We made our first priority a dip in the hotel swimming pool followed by some local cold beers and some appetizers. We were all still jet-lagged but it was a great way to unwind from the long day’s travel and begin our first day in Sri Lanka. 

I had originally planned to get a bit of sleep and then go around and take some photos but my short nap lasted much longer with Barb ending up waking me up to meet in the lobby to get some dinner. A full night’s sleep would have to wait until later as we were all hungry and wanted to get some local seafood.

There were many restaurants within walking distance of our hotel here in Negombo. We walked to the street and literally next door to our hotel was a nice outdoor place called the SeaView Restaurant. This is the type of charming, family-run restaurant that you’re always looking for when you’re travelling.

We all had our fill of delicious Sri Lankan curry, mine being a fish curry accompanied by some ginger beer. We all agreed that we would be coming back to this restaurant again while we stayed in Negombo. 

This morning we’ll be meeting up with our cousins from Australia who would have arrived at the hotel late last night. We’re all looking forward to catching up and the seven of us continuing our Excellent Sri Lankan Adventure.

As always, I’ll be posting the photos from this trip onto my travel blog here: https://www.photos.excellentadventure.ca/Sri-Lanka-2019

 I’ll check in again in a few days.

Baden