We've just had a lovely day at 'California's Great America' in San Jose. Lots of roller coasters, a magic show and fun in the pool.
Then we set off for the hotel we'd booked this morning in San Jose.
There are lots of San Joses the whole Spanish speaking world over, I assume. We forgot to check which one we had booked into. We just blithely assumed it was the one we were in, here in sunny California.
I began to question that assumption as we spent 2 hours looking for it only to discover no-one had heard of the street it was on. Eventually got some help from a lovely chap who ran a Hawaiian drive through and the sweet manageress at a Best Westin who fed us cookies as we stood in stark disbelief.
We were due that evening at the Hotel Petit at 24th St and Paseo Colon...
San Jose...
Costa Rica.
D'Oh!!!
Still, all's well that ends well and we're now tucked into a WiFi'd up motel in the San Jose we wanted and ready to get a much needed good night's rest. Tomorrow we plan to see the Winchester Mystery house. Wikipedia that for the full scoop, but it was built by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune who felt massive guilt for all the killing done by her father's guns. A phony medium (are there any other kind) convinced her that the ghosts would be assuaged as long as she kept building her house, so she kept building and building random additions and alterations for donkeys years. There are stairs that go nowhere, pointless corridors, random extra chimneys etc etc. Should be interesting.
Getting back from Hawaii was hard. On the last day, our 4th Anniversary, we were up bright and early and by 6 AM we were catching waves outside the break at 'Canoes' on Waikiki Beach, standing up and riding sweet. A good day!
The day before we'd been 30m under the sea on a ship wreck hanging out with a pair of 6 foot long Hawaiian Green Turtles. Awesome! After that we rented 50cc moped and biked over to Diamond Head for a hike to the top.My beautiful wife looked oh so sexy tooling around on her moped.
Hawaii was good for us, and I hope we get to go back some time. Aloha everyone.
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Saturday, 19 July 2008
And another thing,
Tropical horrors!!
Being here in Hawaii has brought back memories of Rwanda I had completely blocked out.
The ants get every where. Only the fridge is safe, so my beer is relieved. this means everything we want kept ant free is in the fridge, even the chips (SORRY!) crisps .
You'll have to all be kind to us when we get back while we make the lingual shift back to proper English (or as close as we get in Leeds.) I promise I still say Herbs, but mt OrEGGano annoys even me.
Being here in Hawaii has brought back memories of Rwanda I had completely blocked out.
The ants get every where. Only the fridge is safe, so my beer is relieved. this means everything we want kept ant free is in the fridge, even the chips (SORRY!) crisps .
You'll have to all be kind to us when we get back while we make the lingual shift back to proper English (or as close as we get in Leeds.) I promise I still say Herbs, but mt OrEGGano annoys even me.
Aloha!
The sun is setting on me in our third floor guest house, dipping below the pacific and bringing some welcome coolth to the end of another warm day here on the North Shore of Oahu, most populous of the Hawaiian islands. Today we dove (yep, that's what they say over here) with Hawaiian Green Turtles at a a point called 'Turtle Car Wash' where these graceful ocean dwellers come in to get cleaned up. They hang around in the shallow water while little hungry reef fish nibble the algae off their shells that accumulates at sea. One large lady (you can tell by the small tail) looked me right in the eyes from a foot away. You could see the age in them; being a reasonable size she was probably thirty or forty years old. Turtles never stop growing their whole lives, so the bigger they are, the longer it took them to get that way. Whether that look held any kind of wisdom I couldn't say, but it was certainly a deeper look than you normally get from the local critters when you're under water.
We saw more turtles yesterday before we went surfing. Two of them were just basking on the beach, getting warm and letting the sun's heat help them digest their diet of seaweed. Surfing was hard. It felt like I'd mastered the basics in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were comfortably standing up and riding waves 'inside' the break on our first day so getting on the bigger blue waves outside should only be a simple step, right? Not so much, it seems. So far surfing has been both exhilarating and frustrating, but we'll keep trying.
Tomorrow we've got to be up at 5 to get a ride down to Waikiki on the South Shore to go wreck diving, something I've always wanted to try. While we're down there we hope to tour Pearl Harbour and get another surf lesson. Then in three days we're travelling back to the mainland on our anniversary. 4 years is apparently silk or linen. That reminds me, I must get a card...
Since last I blogged the highlights have included tasting some lovely 'Champagne' in Napa, Alcatraz (you HAVE to see it if you can) and driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. The experience that wowed me the most was definitely walking though the massive Coast Redwood sof Humboldt-Redwood Park in the North of California. Walking though these mighty giants, many of whom are one or two thousand years old, is a humbling and eerie thing to do; just imagine the world events that have passed them by while they grew, relentless and unknowing. You can see their tall straight trunks scarred by fire, some hollowed out into 'Goose Pens', so called because early settlers really did keep keep their geese in them. These colossal Sequoias, the world's tallest tree, shoot straight up out of the ground, their massive cylindrical trunks uninterrupted by branches often for over 150 feet. It leaves you walking through a forest that doesn't resemble any other, unless perhaps you work in a telephone pole storage facility. We missed church that weekend, but somehow just sitting under those impressive trees reading my bible was like being in a much older church, one whose architect was as alive and present in the towering life around me as he was in the book I read.
The world's biggest tree is another Sequoia, the Giant Redwood we hope to see further inland at Yosemite.
Well, bedtime now. Being close to the equator the sun goes down a lot sooner here. It'll be dark by half past seven and we've got a lot of sleeping to do before tomorrow's dive.
We saw more turtles yesterday before we went surfing. Two of them were just basking on the beach, getting warm and letting the sun's heat help them digest their diet of seaweed. Surfing was hard. It felt like I'd mastered the basics in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were comfortably standing up and riding waves 'inside' the break on our first day so getting on the bigger blue waves outside should only be a simple step, right? Not so much, it seems. So far surfing has been both exhilarating and frustrating, but we'll keep trying.
Tomorrow we've got to be up at 5 to get a ride down to Waikiki on the South Shore to go wreck diving, something I've always wanted to try. While we're down there we hope to tour Pearl Harbour and get another surf lesson. Then in three days we're travelling back to the mainland on our anniversary. 4 years is apparently silk or linen. That reminds me, I must get a card...
Since last I blogged the highlights have included tasting some lovely 'Champagne' in Napa, Alcatraz (you HAVE to see it if you can) and driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. The experience that wowed me the most was definitely walking though the massive Coast Redwood sof Humboldt-Redwood Park in the North of California. Walking though these mighty giants, many of whom are one or two thousand years old, is a humbling and eerie thing to do; just imagine the world events that have passed them by while they grew, relentless and unknowing. You can see their tall straight trunks scarred by fire, some hollowed out into 'Goose Pens', so called because early settlers really did keep keep their geese in them. These colossal Sequoias, the world's tallest tree, shoot straight up out of the ground, their massive cylindrical trunks uninterrupted by branches often for over 150 feet. It leaves you walking through a forest that doesn't resemble any other, unless perhaps you work in a telephone pole storage facility. We missed church that weekend, but somehow just sitting under those impressive trees reading my bible was like being in a much older church, one whose architect was as alive and present in the towering life around me as he was in the book I read.
The world's biggest tree is another Sequoia, the Giant Redwood we hope to see further inland at Yosemite.
Well, bedtime now. Being close to the equator the sun goes down a lot sooner here. It'll be dark by half past seven and we've got a lot of sleeping to do before tomorrow's dive.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
...
...also, in Seattle, I tried on a kilt.
Check out http://www.utilikilts.com/
I thought I looked amazingly cool! Vicky thought all my friends would take the piss relentlessly and refused to stand by and watch my dignity go down the pan.
I thought that you would, eventually, relent.
Whaddaya think?
Check out http://www.utilikilts.com/
I thought I looked amazingly cool! Vicky thought all my friends would take the piss relentlessly and refused to stand by and watch my dignity go down the pan.
I thought that you would, eventually, relent.
Whaddaya think?
Friday, 11 July 2008
A hurried "catch you up"
"Paper or plastic?"
Checkout boy at our first Stateside supermarket, Seattle, WA
Wowzer! We're already two weeks into our grand adventure and I haven't once set finger to keyboard to keep you all (or should that be 'both') up to speed. Sorry about that, but we have been just terrifically busy. I'll start with a run down of some of the adventures we've had and try for some added colour later.
As you see at the top of the page, the good old US of A announced itself to us in a small but distinctive way. I had wondered how different it would be here South of the 49th parallel; was all of North America the same bland TV world we had come to know? No. In both countries it is not the done thing to pack your own shopping at the supermarket; either the checkout person does it for you and hold up the entire line while she packs and scans at the same time (a level of multi-tasking at which I have noticed women checkout assistants are vastly superior to their male counterparts) or there is an assigned packer per till. Still, in Canada I was never offered a choice, just a barely adequate plastic bag. Down here in the land of the free, choice is king. Paper or plastic? We chose paper as it would double up as kindling for our many expected campfires.
Portland wowed us. There are more brew-pubs per-capita than anywhere else in North America, hundreds of drinking fountains, free and fast public transport within the city centre, the world's largest independent new/used book store, a retired submarine which we toured and it's pretty to boot; lots of parks, trees and bridges. It had a very liberal bohemian feel, much like I had always imagined San Francisco would feel (we'll see...) but was smallish too. We also discovered there the supermarket chain whole foods; fabulous in every way! If there was one place in America we would move to it would absolutely be Portland. (Top event; free pizza from a place called Pizza-Schmizza that also sold local micro-brew beer! I'd live there)
We've decided in recent days that we're ready for a dog when we get home as the first new addition to family Denton. I was dead set on a retired racing greyhound but having swotted up from my find in Portland "Retired Racing Greyhounds For Dummies" (this series knows no bounds, and hurrah for that!) we've decided that might be too much work for a first dog and not ideal when little ones turn up, hopefully soon. So we'll get feelers out for an older mutt looking to slot into a loving home.
We've been up the space needle in Seattle and I had another Manhattan, a new tradition for the top of any major tower. We were also on the beach in Seattle for the 4th of July fireworks. I think the show was marginally better than the Canada day display we saw in Kelowna on the 1st July a few days before, what with Seattle being huge and Kelowna tiny, but few events will ever touch the memory we made watching the Kelowna show on a speed boat in the middle of Lake Okanagon with such good friends as Donna, Bernie and Jake, Blossom and David. We plated the phantom of the opera music through the boat's speakers as the skies erupted above us in what felt like a private show. Magic!
In Kelowna we also spent time Tubing (lying on a rubber ring behind a speed boat while the driver tries to throw you off. Enormous fun!), wake-boarding (Hard) and sea-dooing (brilliant, but I did scare the wife a bit).
We met a princess of Norway at last night's campground and spent 3 evening hanging out around the campfire with hr very ordinary family. Apart from the throne and tiara you would never have known! That's a story we'll tell you in person!
Surfing for two days in Cannon Beach was great, we were both getting up and riding well on day one when we were 'inside' the break surfing white water, but on day two we couldn't quite get in any unbroken waves 'outside.' Progress still to make when we get to Hawaii.
There has been kite-flying, beer drinking, book reading, beach walking, fruit eating, wood chopping, Volcano viewing (mt St Helens), island hopping, sea kayaking, church going, pool and cribbage and crazy-golf playing (Vic's kicking my bum), Oyster sampling, fire lighting, bike-riding and mucho mucho driving.
Please comment and let us know what you're ll (...both...) up to!
R n V
Checkout boy at our first Stateside supermarket, Seattle, WA
Wowzer! We're already two weeks into our grand adventure and I haven't once set finger to keyboard to keep you all (or should that be 'both') up to speed. Sorry about that, but we have been just terrifically busy. I'll start with a run down of some of the adventures we've had and try for some added colour later.
As you see at the top of the page, the good old US of A announced itself to us in a small but distinctive way. I had wondered how different it would be here South of the 49th parallel; was all of North America the same bland TV world we had come to know? No. In both countries it is not the done thing to pack your own shopping at the supermarket; either the checkout person does it for you and hold up the entire line while she packs and scans at the same time (a level of multi-tasking at which I have noticed women checkout assistants are vastly superior to their male counterparts) or there is an assigned packer per till. Still, in Canada I was never offered a choice, just a barely adequate plastic bag. Down here in the land of the free, choice is king. Paper or plastic? We chose paper as it would double up as kindling for our many expected campfires.
Portland wowed us. There are more brew-pubs per-capita than anywhere else in North America, hundreds of drinking fountains, free and fast public transport within the city centre, the world's largest independent new/used book store, a retired submarine which we toured and it's pretty to boot; lots of parks, trees and bridges. It had a very liberal bohemian feel, much like I had always imagined San Francisco would feel (we'll see...) but was smallish too. We also discovered there the supermarket chain whole foods; fabulous in every way! If there was one place in America we would move to it would absolutely be Portland. (Top event; free pizza from a place called Pizza-Schmizza that also sold local micro-brew beer! I'd live there)
We've decided in recent days that we're ready for a dog when we get home as the first new addition to family Denton. I was dead set on a retired racing greyhound but having swotted up from my find in Portland "Retired Racing Greyhounds For Dummies" (this series knows no bounds, and hurrah for that!) we've decided that might be too much work for a first dog and not ideal when little ones turn up, hopefully soon. So we'll get feelers out for an older mutt looking to slot into a loving home.
We've been up the space needle in Seattle and I had another Manhattan, a new tradition for the top of any major tower. We were also on the beach in Seattle for the 4th of July fireworks. I think the show was marginally better than the Canada day display we saw in Kelowna on the 1st July a few days before, what with Seattle being huge and Kelowna tiny, but few events will ever touch the memory we made watching the Kelowna show on a speed boat in the middle of Lake Okanagon with such good friends as Donna, Bernie and Jake, Blossom and David. We plated the phantom of the opera music through the boat's speakers as the skies erupted above us in what felt like a private show. Magic!
In Kelowna we also spent time Tubing (lying on a rubber ring behind a speed boat while the driver tries to throw you off. Enormous fun!), wake-boarding (Hard) and sea-dooing (brilliant, but I did scare the wife a bit).
We met a princess of Norway at last night's campground and spent 3 evening hanging out around the campfire with hr very ordinary family. Apart from the throne and tiara you would never have known! That's a story we'll tell you in person!
Surfing for two days in Cannon Beach was great, we were both getting up and riding well on day one when we were 'inside' the break surfing white water, but on day two we couldn't quite get in any unbroken waves 'outside.' Progress still to make when we get to Hawaii.
There has been kite-flying, beer drinking, book reading, beach walking, fruit eating, wood chopping, Volcano viewing (mt St Helens), island hopping, sea kayaking, church going, pool and cribbage and crazy-golf playing (Vic's kicking my bum), Oyster sampling, fire lighting, bike-riding and mucho mucho driving.
Please comment and let us know what you're ll (...both...) up to!
R n V
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