This is Rob, Ruth and Taisa Ballantyne's trip to Ukraine and northern Europe in July - August 2004. Taisa is a Ukrainian dancer with the Trembita Dance group which is supported by the Association of United Ukrainian of Canada and located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This trip to Urkraine was joined by the Nadiya Dance Ensemble, also of Edmonton and with the same Directors - Bohgdan and Svitlana Tkachishyn. Since Ruthie's ethnic background is 100% Ukrainian and Taisa will soon be 18 and neither Rob or Ruth could read a Ukrainian road sign (the alphabet uses cyrillic characters), we thought we should grab the opportunity to watch her dance in a tour organized by an enthusiastic promoter of the Ukrainian culture. So we did.

The last week of the tour was optional - a week at a beach resort near Odessa. Weather is fickle, the distance is great and baking one's brains on a beach is not my idea of heaven and can easily be done in sunny Edmonton. Since the money is always hard to come by, we decided to spend that week doing some touring. As it happened, our lives are exceptionally busy eg: Taisa was trying out for the Provincial Rugby team just before we left and we prayed she didn't injure herself and take herself out of the dances she had prepared for. She impressed all, she stayed healthy and since neither her nor her mother had any burning desire for any tourist destinations other than Paris, Rob was left with developing the tour plan for the last week. Both Ruth and Rob have done some travelling in their time and realize that most touristy things can be seen in a book. Ergo, the museums, galleries, churches and castles have no appeal (unless they are haunted!). We also recognized that what really makes a tour memorable is the friendships you make on these trips. The net result of all of this is that we went to Rheine (Germany), Kirke Hyllinge (Denmark) and Verlose (Denmark) to meet some very special internet friends that Rob had met on a papillon discussion group.

These people were more than gracious and hospitable - they are Dog People who raise world class papillon dogs - dogs that get Best in Show over thousands of dogs or Best of Breed at the Worlds. For them to spend time with relative strangers and accept us into their homes sight unseen was really appreciated by all of us. For that we thank them profusely. They made the trip and that week as memorable as the previous two in Ukraine and that is meant to be a big compliment. I can only hope that we can, in some small way, return their favours.

This set of galleries is dedicated to them, to Svitlana and Boghdan, to the dancers and to all we met and made this trip both memorable and the trip of a lifetime.

Pictures are dated and numbered. Each picture displayed has its lable in the grey area above the larger picture. As an example: 40723_85.jpg was taken on 2004 July 23 and is number 85 for this date. All photos above 80 were taken by others - some of which are postcards or magazine scannings.

Since most of the internet viewers of these photos will not be operating at cable speeds, loading the movies I took (usually panoramas eg BudaPest, Hutzland resort, Eiffel Tower, Uzhorod, Odessa) wasn't seen to be too useful. Most places have a vista movie from the hotel or where ever - so if it has any interest, just contact me.