Wordpress app for the iPhone is now available. Wish I knew about this when we were on holiday
07
Aug
Testing new iphone app
03
May
We’re Back! Safe & Sound
Spent the last day in LA at Disney AdventureLand Park to tire us out for the long flight home. Went to the airport super early and hung out at the gate until boarding. Nearly 14hours in the air from LA to Brisbane where we got off the plane and got thermal imaged for SwineFlu, picked up our luggage, put through Customs and Quarantine, rechecked our luggage and then shuttled over to the Domestic Terminal to walk straight onto the plane. Our 2 hour layover had no time to spare. Another 5 or so hours in the air and we’re back in Perth completely missing the 2nd of May (left May 1 @ 11:20pm and arrived May 3 in Brisbane). Checked the AFL site whilst the plane was boarding - Yay the Dockers won the Derby!
Just picked Jeebes, the mail and some groceries up and unloaded the car. The shower and shave after 2 days straight running around between long flights was lovely.
30
Apr
Los Angeles - Disney Land
Disney have a free entry on your birthday policy. Rebecca and I got badges to indicate we were celebrating my birthday and I got free entry. As you make your way around the park all the staff (and several strangers) wish you happy birthday. There were lots of other people celebrating their birthdays as well.
Our top priority today was to get to all the attractions that were too busy to see in Orlando with Space Mountain at the top of the list. The line was marked over 90 minutes at Orlando but we made a beeline for the ride this morning and were on it in about 15 mins. The Splash Mountain ride in LA is quite different to Orlando - for a start the watercraft is single seat wide instead of two across. We also got a bit wetter on this version. Tomorrow we are going to spend the day at Disney’s AdventureLand and try to tire ourselves out before we fly out about 11pm tomorrow night.
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Traffic was a lot easier this morning on the way to Warner Bros. We got there early and was able to get onto the earlier tour. We travelled around the Warner Bros backlot and soundstages which included sets and facades from some of our favourite TV shows including Friends and Two and Half Men. We had our photos taken on the set of Central Perk from Friends (has been reassembled for tours as they show finished a few years back) and we also got to visit the set of Two and Half Men. The cast & crew are on hiatus right now having finished for the season so a lot of the props were covered with sheets but the set was still very cool.
We drove through the WB workshops where they have carpentry, metal work, plastics, plumbing and more all under the one roof and then headed over to the WB Museum and checked out some of the costumes and props including an entire floor of Harry Potter gear from the films. You can even be sorted by one of the sorting hats from the film. The tour only takes a couple of hours so we had the whole afternoon. We drove back down to Santa Monica and walked through the stalls at Venice Beach and the pier at Santa Monica.
It was still early so we plugged in the coordinates for the Nike Factory and drove out to Ontario (60miles). Traffic was shocking - bumper to bumper for 2.5hrs. The malls at Ontario are huge. We passed a Barnes & Noble and a Borders each of which would have been about the size of K-Mart. There were 2 cinemas at the mall we went to with a total of 52 theatres between them and they were not even large buildings next to the mall.
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The 40 mile trip across town was pretty much all freeway but took us nearly 2 hours despite starting well after rush hour. We got to Universal Studios at 11am and got straight in line for the backlot tour. The tram you ride around in takes you through some stunt sets including Jaws, a bridge that breaks apart while you are driving on it and a subway station that suffers from an earthquake (a train derails, the roof drops and a fuel tanker drops through and catches fire and then the other side of the subway floods - all while you are in the middle of the action).
My favourite part of the day was the Simpsons ride. It is a video simulator - you sit in a car and it rocks around on hydraulics to make you feel like you what you see on screen is happening to you. It is very cool. The Simpsons are 3D rendered and you fly around a ride at KrustyLand with them with a few suprises in store. We also saw a special effects show that included live blue screen and robotic puppets. Tomorrow we’re off to see Warners Bros.
The tour we selected was a 6 hour tour of Los Angeles and was covered quite a lot of ground. We started in Venice Beach and then down the road to Santa Monica, over to Downtown LA, China Town and the Hollywood Hills and then continued on through Bel Air and Westwood. We had stops at Venice Beach, Union Station, Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood Bowl Observation Point, Bel Air and Rodeo Drive which broke up the bus tour nicely.
Our tourguide was good. He took us places not normally on the tours like the canals in Venice Beach (hard to get into) as well as a few places in the Hollywood Hills and Bel Air they don’t normally allow Tour Buses including the Spelling Estate in Bel Air which just went on the market for US$150million making it the most expensive house in the country at the moment.
We saw the houses of several stars including Jack Nicholson, Meg Ryan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt & Jenniffer Anniston (when they were married), Jennifer Lopez & Marc Anthonys, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Shaquille O’Neal. We also saw the Location House for the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.
Our tour bus only had 16 people on it and 6 were from Australia (2 couples and a Mum & daughter). After touring around all day Rebecca and I had dinner at Souplantation - it is like Sizzler except you don’t order a main meal - just lots of soup, salad, bakery and desert. I enjoyed it despite no mains as my throat is still a bit swollen and I am having trouble chewing breads and the like.
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26
Apr
Welcome to La La Land
We’ve arrived safely in Los Angeles. The journey from the airport to the hotel was pretty straight foward but that didn’t stop us getting lost more than twice. Check the satellite image below to see how close our hotel is to Disney Land (our hotel is the red marker). First order of business is to sort out what we are going to do for the rest of the week.
25
Apr
Last Day in Vegas
Bec and I have both been a bit under the weather so our last day in Vegas we had nothing planned. After returning the rental we just wandered around checking out a few shops and later a movie (new Fast & Furious). The medium soft drink and popcorn is equivalent to a jumbo at home and the large popcorn comes in a bucket similar to the ones you get at KFC. The large soft drink appears to be about 2 litres. You can also get hotdogs and nachos at the cinemas.
We took a few photos during the day and at night (I will upload them when we get to LA as I am writing this at the airport). After dinner (buffet @ the Luxor) we played the slot machines for a while. They have some cool new video poker and video slot machines. One of the blackjack and poker tables is a real table with a life size full motion video image serving video cards across the table. There are also some weird video slot machines - the Monopoly game and the eBay game. Bec and I played the Monopoly slots the most and put everything we won back into the machines. We won about US$300-400 between us over the course of the evening and the $100 it costs us for the approx 3-4 hrs which wasn’t too bad.
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We wanted to start early as the Grand Canyon is a 600 mile roundtrip by car. Apparently opening times and attitudes are fairly flexible during the early daylight hours in Las Vegas. The car rental place is supposed to open at 8am. In Australia the staff would arrive early and prepare for the days operations. In Las Vegas the staff show up at 8:12am to three groups of customers waiting at the door. Needless to say it took a while to get our car and get on the road.
The actual trip to the Grand Canyon South Rim via Hoover Dam is actually pretty straightfoward with few turns to negotiate, it is just a really long drive. Only 30 miles to Hoover Dam where we took some photos and had a bit of a look around - the facility looks a lot smaller in person (still very tall). They are building another bridge over Hoover Dam for a road to run along the top of the hill rather than cutting through. I took some photos of the precarious construction of the arch bridge supports suspended by steel cables.
After Hoover Dam it was a 100 or so miles of not much followed by a turn and another 100 or so miles of not much. The area after Hoover Dam appeared very harsh - there was no vegetation just some powerlines and hard rocky ground. As we progressed further we saw more vegetation gradually. The drive was mostly uphill (although you couldn’t really tell as the gradient was very slight) but we went from 2000ft above sea level to 6000ft above sea level. It was funny to see a sign warning of ice on the road in the desert but as we got closer to the Grand Canyon we could see mountains with snow on them still (coming into summer over here).
We didn’t do the skywalk over the canyon as this is located at the west rim and the access to the west rim is via dirt road (forbidden in the rental car). We drove to the south rim which was recommended as being the more scenic location (just a very long drive). We took some pics and wandered around the trails for a bit. A lot of the tourist section is unfenced and people were standing right on the edge or climbing out to rocky outcroppings for photos - crazy!
After about 45mins - 1hr we headed back onto the road again for the long trip back to Las Vegas. Half the return trip was in darkness and this made a lot of the communities we drove through seem larger the second time as we could see light stretching further than before.
The rental car was a Porsche Boxster. While we did the drive to Orlando in a left hand drive car it was an automatic transmission. The Porsche was a manual transmission and several times I wanted to shift gears using the door handle. By the time we returned the car the next day though it was fine and I had no problems pulling out into the busy traffic or switching lanes (visibility is excellent with the top down). The max speed limit we have seen on the trip is 75 miles/hour (approx 120km/h) which allowed for some comfortable cruising speeds. I used cruise control a lot set to the speed limit but would often get overtaken at speed by all sorts of vehicles. The highway patrol are kept busy (driving from Orlando to Miami I saw the same car get pulled over for speeding twice) and it is not unusual to see three patrol cars with their lights on booking three lots of people at once.
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We were scheduled for a bus tour of Miami followed by a Boat tour of the harbour this morning. The tours combined were going to run longer than we had planned so we left after the bus tour. Our bus tour took us through downtown Miami, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Little Havana and South Beach (this is where we left the tour). Spanish is more common than you would think over here. All the signs have both English and Spanish and in Little Havana most have only Spanish. They have all Spanish radio broadcasts which are interesting to listen to because you can still tell what they are advertising.
Our flight to Las Vegas should have us returning the rental car no later than 5 so we headed out to the Dolphin Mall near the airport. The mall was huge! Hundreds of stores including a Sports store about the size of K-Mart with a wall of sneakers running down one side. They had sneakers for all sports including American Football. They look like basketball sneakers with cleats on the sole - like the ones Sandilands wears.
Flying into Las Vegas at nightime was fairly impressive. It is surrounded by mountains with not many lights outside the mountains so when you fly over the hill the valley appears to be filled with lights of outlying Vegas with the hotels on the Strip becoming clearer as you fly into the airport. We are staying at the Luxor and booked a room in the Pyramid but none were available when we checked in so we stayed in the Tower and switched rooms in the morning.
A quick stroll through the Strip this morning allowed us to book a car for tomorrow to drive to the Grand Canyon. We’ve booked a Porsche for a bit of fun. It is a long drive (600 miles roundtrip) so we will be getting away early tomorrow. A lot of the hotels are joined together by walkways above the street that removes the need to exit your hotel and go onto the street. There are people everywhere trying to offer your cheap or free show tickets if you go to their resort presentation.
Becca is a bit under the weather with swollen throat and some high temperatures. She is feeling better today but after two nights of poor sleep in Miami (there was a floodlight right outside our window and no blockout drapes) she is catching up on her sleep. I might head down stairs and play some slot machines.
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