Our tour took us all the way out to Key West today. It was a 3.5 - 4 hours each way. The history in Key West is interesting (500 years worth). We caught a small train around town for the tour with commentary and did a bit of shopping after that. The town itself is picturesque and there was plenty of interesting sites around. A walk through the harbour saw a labrador swimming around his owners boat - the owner was playing with him using a water hose. The dog would chase the water and try and eat the stream. We also saw 3 pelicans trying to catch some sizeable fish right next to the jetty. The school of big fish was in turn trying to catch the school of smaller fish.
We have a tour of Miami area tomorrow and then off to Vegas tomorrow afternoon.
Posted in Miami
Drove back to Miami today - the multitude of lanes and flyovers is still confusing. They have 8 lanes running in the same direction and the split into three directions and share exits. You take the right exit but have to stay in the left lane because you’ll be driving back over the road you were just on. TomTom isn’t 100% helpful and the roads have numbers not names (including multiple numbers for the same road).
Booked our tours once we were checked in and jumped straight on the Duck Tour of Biscayne Bay. The amphibious tour bus took us for a cruise of the bay and then a quick tour of South Beach. The Duck Tour requires you to quack at passerbys on command. We also counted off chin-ups for a woman who was exercising in the park next to the road. 25 People quacking and counting out your exercise routine in front of about 300 beach front diners must be pretty intimidating but everyone was a good sport. We ended up going back to an Irish Pub / Sports Bar on South Beach for dinner that we saw on the tour.
Posted in Miami
Visited Sea World today. The killer whale show and the dolphin shows were excellent. I also enjoyed the seal show despite the human actors mucking up their lines and gags. Rebecca went on the Krakken rollercoaster - it had loops and was very high so I stayed on the ground (chicken). We both went on the Atlantis which wasn’t nearly as high but you did get a bit wet - again couldn’t muster an appropriate expression for the photo.
We visited the dolphins and seals during feeding times. At the dolphin enclosure we were underwater prior to feeding time and the dolphins were blowing bubbles / air rings (like smoke rings but underwater). The rings started out small and grew larger in diameter and the dolphins pushed them around with their noses (see pics). We are driving back to Miami tomorrow and will stay there a few days before heading out to Vegas. Sites on our list for Miami include Biscayne Bay, the Everglades, Key West and South Beach (where we will be staying).
Posted in Orlando
The plan for today was similar to yesterdays - spend a few hours in the morning at a water park and then finish off the day at a theme park. Todays parks were Disneys Blizzard Beach water park and Disneys Hollywood Studios.
They have a speed slide at Blizzard beach that is 120ft near vertical drop and the record for a slide rider is 90MPH. We were too chicken to go on that slide but the rest of the slides were fun. They have both tube & mat slides - although their mats are toboggan shaped with handles in the front. There is an 8 lane slide where you can race the toboggan mats. One of the tubes slides in enclosed with only pinholes of light at certain places which makes sudden drops in the slide even more unexpected as you have no idea when they are coming up.
The afternoon was spent at Disneys Hollywood Studios. The two feature rides had 90 minute waits and no FastPass tickets left so we gave the Hollywood Hotel Tower of Terror and the Rock-n-Roll Rollercoaster a miss. We did go on the Backstage tour, see the Stunt Drivers and Indiana Jones show and meet a few characters. I felt one of the better attractions was the Canyon effects on the backstage tour. Becca likened the Stunt Driving show to ballet, she was very impressed with how close the cars came to each other and how well they stayed in sync. I should install some video software so I can upload come clips of both
Tomorrow we are off to SeaWorld.
Posted in Orlando
This morning we kicked off proceedings with a visit to the Disney Typhoon Lagoon water park. The park has a storm wrecked nautical theme and there are stranded and overturned boats spread about the place. Our first ride was called the Crush-N-Gusher - a tube ride with long uphill portions in which high pressure water propels your tube up the slide.
We tried all the rides and slides at Typhoon Lagoon including the wavepool. My calf muscles cramped in both legs and are still sore a day and half later. We only stayed at the water park a few hours in the morning - we got in before the crowds, doing the popular rides first and taking our time on the others. It is Spring Break over here and there are young hooligans everywhere. We will be in Miami on the beach for the last week of Spring Break - should be interesting.
The afternoon was spent at Disneys Animal Kingdom. It has a real wildlife reserve on site with a very fake “safari”. You get to see all the animals but there is an adventurous storyline and several of the props were a little dodgy - what appeared to be muddy tire tracks were actually concrete impressions of tyre tracks (ditto for elephant tusk scrapings in the mud). They do have rides including a roller coaster expedition to Evereset featuring the Yeti. You go up through the mountain until you reach a section of broken track, at which point the train stops and then goes backwards only not entirely the way you came. You go backwards into and down through the mountain in pitch black. Occaisionally there is crack of lightning and something Yeti-like jumps out at you and they take your photo.
Everyone of the rides we went on that they take a photo of you on I had an inappropriate expression. On a journey back in time to the dinosaurs, a T-Rex swoops down over the carriage in the dark and roars at you as you get your photo taken. The entire carriage is shrieking and shying away whilst I am sitting up and smiling. On the Splash Mountain ride same thing except I am holding my breath. The Yeti ride I was looking the other way - at what I am not sure but I seemed to be thinking what I would like for dinner. If I didn’t already suspect there was something wrong with me I know now. It’s not that the rides aren’t scary - I don’t like heights much at all, apparently my poker face (whilst useless during poker) works great at high speed.
We finally had our photos taken with a few of the characters from Winnie the Pooh & Friends. Disney offer a service called PhotoPass with professional photographers stationed all over the parks to take your pictures for you. They give you a card where you can view the photos online and then charge an arm and a leg to do something with them - to purchase a digital copy of a photo is US$14.95. You can view our PhotoPass Pics here.
Posted in Orlando
After yesterdays long and tiring day I unfortunately slept in. So after a very late breakfast (even by brunch standards) we set off to explore Disney’s Epcot Center. Half the park is based around technology and the other half is called the international lagoon with a dozen countries represented in the form of food courts and themed boat rides. We went on the Norwegian boat ride - I hope it is a skewed representation of Norway as we went in a Viking styled boat and journeyed through a tunnel with trolls, a norse god of some description, polar bears and an oil rig. There didn’t appear to be a clear storyline at all.
We also went in a flight simulator for a Mars exploration where every person on the ride had to perform a function - Bec was the Flight Commander, I was the Pilot. The Navigator and Engineer were performed by strangers. There were 2 variations on this ride and we opted for the extreme edition with spinning and high G-Forces. Our space shuttle blasted off with us facing the sky and the Gs the ride pulled felt like we were really taking off.
There were a lot of “sit on this boat / capsule / theatre seat” and be transported through a scene type rides. One of the interesting ones was in the environmental section and took you through a real terrarium where they were growing hyrdoponic plant and recycling nutrients from their aquaculture fish tanks. The method in which they were growing plants was very interesting - someone had fun melting the PVC pipes into odd shapes!
We took a tour of the “home of tomorrow” and had a little giggle to ourselves because about a third of their “advanced technology” on display is already in use at home. We also took a segway for a spin - I just about fell over getting onto it. It is an odd sensation to operate a segway - the man training you says “now imagine yourself moving foward” and off you go! The segway is propelled by weight distribution and subtle changes in your stance propel it foward and backward at a varying rate. If you want to creep foward you sort of clench your toes and relax when you want to slow down. If will upload some pics and maybe some video tomorrow.
Posted in Orlando
We bought our tickets for Disney & Seaworld and given that it was only 4pm we headed over to the Magical Kingdom to have a look around. The system for queueing for rides is strange - you can wait in line for X amount of time or take a fast pass and return at a specific time to stand in the fast pass queue which is supposed to be quicker.
We found the best time to go on the rides was during the parade and the fireworks. We walked up to Thunder Railroad and Splash Mountatin which had earlier been 90 minute waits and walked straight onto the ride. We also went on the Orbiter, Buzz Lightyears Galaxy something-or-other, Pirates of the Carribean, the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, the Carousel of Progress, the RiverCruise (Tom Sawyer country) and generally wandered about. Ended up getting back to the hotel around midnight.
Posted in Orlando
Had an early flight this morning so it was up and about at 2:30am to checkout, get a towncar to the airport and check in for our flight to Miami. 2.5hr flight was very basic - we didn’t get any food until well after we landed as everything at JFK was closed before 5am and they don’t serve food on this flight - doh!
After we arrived in Miami we caught a shuttle bus to the Car Rental lot. We picked up our black Dodge Charger (I didn’t pick the colour!) and set off. Ofcourse as soon as we left the lot we were on the wrong side of the road for a few seconds but as there were no islands or other cars so it was okay. The tricky part was then deciding which of the 3 on ramps you were supposed to take 30m after turning a blind right corner at traffic lights. We got it wrong and drove around until we got it right (TomTom was only partially helpful as the multiple flyovers and simultaneous on ramps were difficult for him to describe). After which we used a combination of directions on map, computer and TomTom to help us navigate.
The drive to Orlando from Miami is approximately 4 hours and there are semi-regular “service plazas” in the middle of the freeway. These “service plazas” comprise of a fuel station, somewhere to park your car or truck and what appears to be a small mall which when you enter has food shops and rest rooms. We stopped twice on the way and took the wrong exit about 3 times. After checking in it is time to recharge the batteries - ours as well as the laptop, gps, iphone and cameras whilst we decide what to do first.
Posted in Miami, Orlando
Visited World Trade Center site this morning. Construction on the new site has made it’s way above ground and there are a few pics of what it will look like but not a lot of information onsite. Check wtcprogress.com for updates. Then we wandered down to Wall Street before catching the subway to Times Square for another walkathon.
We intended to head out to the Convention center near the Circle Line Tours Pier but started walking in the wrong direction (sun in the southern sky has been throwing my sense of direction the whole trip). We ended up at the United Nations, a nice little piece of serendipity as we hadn’t planned on visiting them. After lunch at a fancy deli we headed back across town to the Convention center to visit the International Auto Show.
The Auto Show was very cool. There was the usual array of exotics to drool on and I must say security is fairly lax as people regularly climb in the cars even the ones cordoned off and no one seems to mind. A focal point across most of the manufacturers was hybrid or all electric vehicles. GM had a number of cool hybrids - most oddly enough are SUVs. My favourite electric car was the Cadillac Converj concept car. It runs on regular, bio fuel and electric and looks awesome. Appeared to share a lot of engineering with the Chevy Volt car but looks heaps better. Speaking of electric cars I saw a Tesla Roadster parked on the street while we were walking around in Times Square.
The Chevy Camaro was available for close inspection with heaps of people climbing in for a test sit. They had people there to customise and price for you the different types. They also had Bumblebee from the Transformer movie - 18ft high Robot car. I will upload some pics when we get to Miami (typing this at Airport).
On the way back from the car show we realised we hadn’t visited either of the big department stores (Macys and Bloomingdales) whilst in New York. We stopped at Macys because it was on the way back to 33rd Street station. It is 8 stories high with each floor the approx size of Bunnings (excluding Trade section). There was a wide range in price with designer and regular apparel mixed together.
Posted in New York
We must have walked 20km or more today. We started at 33rd street station and walked to 60th and back to 51st to kill time before our Bus Tour. After the bus tour we walked to Central Park from 51st street (approx 9 blocks). We then walked across central park twice (1.4km each way) and the walked the length on Central Park twice (6km each way). We then walked back to 33rd street to get our train back to New Jersey.
Todays bus tour was of TV & Movie sites around New York. We got to see buildings from Law & Order, Hitch, Ghostbusters, Seinfeld, Men in Black, I Am Legend, Spiderman, the Cosby Show, Ugly Betty, Sex & the City and heaps more including our favourite - Friends (see pic of Bec & I outside Friends Apartment building).
One of the interesting things I found out on the tour was that the Soup Nazi is not a made up character. He looks and acts just like on Seinfeld - considering he was one of the more bizarre characters on that show I found it incredible that he was surprisingly accurately portayed on the show.
After our bus tour we went for a stroll in Central Park - a long one. We walked the length of Central Park and back. Central Park was pleasant. There were people playing baseball, basketball, tennis, riding, jogging, flying kites (several got stuck in trees), sailing model boats and rowing hire boats. We even saw a couple getting their wedding photos done. We saw some people playing soccer and some football - no aussie rules though and I was looking as the AFL website displayed guernseys from around the world and there is an amateur New York team.
When we finished in the park we started to make our way back to the train via the Apple store again (I am considering getting one which cuts me up as I have been a PC my whole life) and then to Barnes & Noble bookstore. Becca bought a half dozen more books and I bought one too (Computer Book).
Tomorrow is our last full day in New York but we haven’t decided what to do yet. We finished off the day with dinner at Subway - they make personal pizzas at Subway over here. Can’t seem to stay up late and we get up earlier than at home. Hopefully we can get over that in Florida.
Posted in New York
Comments