The Chambers

What we get up to….

Photo taken while staying at the wonderful Sausage Tree Camp, Zambia. Here we are fishing on the banks of the Zambezi, one eye on the River on the lookout for Alligators, another on the lookout for Hippos, another on the lookout for Lions, another on the lookout for Elephants :)

Monthly Archives: December 2007

’tis the season

This posting was started early Saturday morning…. I am a tad weary and hoping that the headache I feel starting in the back of my head goes away. Last night Kylie and I had Christmas parties and Jackson stayed with my mum and dad (thanks!!).

First thing’s first. Photos from our LA stay are up and live on the information superhighway. You can find them by clicking on this hyperlink, right here: LA photos. Remember – click on the big arrows at he bottom of the screen to move through the pics, there are about 60 pics of LA there.

The highlights of the LA pics…

Santa Monica is beautiful! The Halloween spider. The Roto Rooter van (childishly amusing). Pumpkin head shots. Jacko meets dora, spongebob, jaws and the simpsons.

Remember, please post comments on the pics here. We’re getting lonely!

Yesterday was a big day for me (chris), I had a flight up to Hervey Bay for a work meeting with Whale Watching operators about their campaign site. It was a flying visit as I left Brisbane at 8 and got in at 9′ish and left the meeting at 11 for a 12 flight and back in Brisbane by 1. I didn’t get to see anything much, but Hervey Bay has changed a lot since I was last there and I think we’ll head up to Fraser Island / see the whales next season. The meeting went well and then I was back to Brissie for the TQ Christmas party last night.

Kylie had a big day too. Two Christmas parties in one day. ;)

The TQ party was good. I don’t have any stories from Kylie’s party, so if the Energex folk could kindly post all the great stories about Kylie’s behaviour here, I would well and truly appreciate it. I was a saint, of course. I would like to thank Tige for encouraging the crazy woman from the party next door to talk to us all night and be very persistent in trying to get one of the drinks “vouchers” we had to get our free TQ drinks…. Well done Michael S, TQ’s new CEO (Chief Environmental Officer) for being the one who sat between me and her and took the brunt of the nagging. Marcus T for suggesting the Jager bombs, looking forward to some more of those this week as we farewell him and he goes to the minister’s office. There was a big crowd for the night, which was great and very little shop was spoken.

This weekend is a big one, we’re off to an exhibition of Charles Blackman art this morning at a gallery in Paddington. This is their website, though it has nothing of the exhibition, it was in the Courier Mail a couple of weeks ago: www.joelfineart.com. I’ll post a bit of an update on this afterwards.

Kylie, Jacko and I are going cruising to look at the christmas lights tonight and tomorrow we’re off to the Cox’s for a bbq lunch and sometime this week we really must put up our christmas tree!

I also wanted to put a link to the Warhol Exhibition in here. Warhol on Queensland Holidays The Warhol exhibition is in town and showing at the GOMA, which is a fantastic setting for an awesome show. I was fortunate enough to hon knob with dignitaries at the opening a couple of weeks ago and the exhibition is great. I will definitely be going back as I didnt get to see all of it and I need to pick up some of the great merchandise they have. You should go and the only place to see this in Oz is Brisbane…

enjoy the photo’s! next up New York, so when they get posted ne sure to have a cuppa nice warm coffee with you, as there is about 300 NYC photos…. (I PROMISE not to post them all)

Bring in the photos….

We’ve been back a week now and after a technology scare, during which I thought we had lost ALL our photos, we are happy to say that the photo’s are starting to make their way on line!

Forget the old link in the blog navigation, I’m setting up pictures in a much better way and will be posting links here as the photos come on line.

The new photo albums allow you to view the pictures in a whole stack of different ways. When the photos are online, I will post a link here on the blog and you can then click that link and go to the photos. Once the page loads, you can view the photo’s as a slide show or a couple of different ways. I recommend clicking into “Grid” style (which will be bottom left of the screen) and then clicking the first photo which will enlarge the first photo and then navigate the album by clicking the left and right arrows.

Any comments on th pictures should be posted here on the blog. Please do register and leave your comments – remember everyone who visits the blog can read your comments – but we want people to talk back to us too, not just us post our stuff here and have no-one talk back to us!

As a teaser to the rest of the photos, here are some snaps of us in Brisbane, before we left

We will post photos in the flow of our trip, so next up are LA, then New York, etc etc.

Chris, Kylie and Jackson

more on the usa….

Well…. We’re back in oz, Kylie and I are back at work and Jackson is back to spending time with his grandma’s and grandpa’s… The holiday is over, but the memories will not die!!

We haven’t written much of our time in San Francisco and Hawaii – which I will do. We’ve started to sort through all the photos and there are some great ones there. I promise to start posting some over the coming weekend!

San Francisco was lovely – we had a great time there! It is a beautiful city, but it is bloody hilly!

Some of my memories from there are:

hills! hills like this =

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that might be a little bit of exaggeration – but the hills were pretty steep!

The cable cars were great to ride to get over the hills and we had a couple rides on the cable car, but the cars do not hold a large number of people and they were very popular, which meant that the wait would sometimes be up to half an hour or so for a cable car you could get on. The cable cars definitely are not a mass transit method and are most suited to the terry-tourists. I had a turn at holding on to the railing and hanging off the side of the car, which was cold!

Another memory of SF is “black Friday”. Black Friday is what they call the “sale season” which kicks off on the day after Thanksgiving Day. Most of the stores go on sale and offer major discounts to entice you to spend your hard earned cash in the lead up to Christmas. Think the boxing day sales on steroids. There were people – many, many people out and about looking for bargains. The shops opened up early, with some stores staying open from the day before, others opening at early morning hours and Macy’s (a big US dept store) opened up at 6am. We shopped for a while, until there were too many people. We spent more time in Macy’s and in the SF Westfield shopping ctr. Macy’s had big discounts on basically everything in the shop – we bought some more luggage and Kylie got some new diamonds – at 71% off the ticket price! Macy’s had their Christmas window displays set up and theirs included live & adoptable kittens from the RSPCA.

We did a couple of tours in San Francisco.

One was a city tour was in a bus built to look like a cable car, which stopped in at some of the main sights and included a double crossing of the Golden Gate Bridge. They sold this as a major benefit of the tour, but I did wonder how they expected us to get back to the tour starting point if we didnt re-cross the bridge?? This tour also included an unexpected stop at a World War II memorial, when the bus we were riding broke down! We were there for nearly an hour, Jackson spent the hour running around in the park and rolling down the hill… he loved it!

Another tour we did was a similar tour of San Francisco in a 1950′s Mack Fire Engine. This one and a half hour tour was a highlight of the whole trip to the USA! The tour kicked off in the area near Fisherman’s Wharf and crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge and through a couple of scenic areas nearby. The tour hosts were a married couple & the fire engine was the pride and joy of the guy and the tour hostess who did most of the narration was an ex-tap dancer (she told us this quite a few times). The narration was entertaining and took the form of tunes being sung about the sites we were taking in by our hostess Mary-anne (i think that was her name). To check out the fire engine, have a look at their web site: http://www.fireenginetours.com. We got some great photos of this tour, including some of us in our fire man jackets!

The dining in San Fran was great. I have already spoke of our Thanksgiving dinner, which was great – but we also had dinner in China Town twice at a couple of good Chinese restaurants. Jackson loved his green tea!

We also had lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf. Lunch was fish & chips for Jackson and Kylie and I had a Seafood platter of fried goodies, which was very nice. The table we were seated at had a lovely view out over the pier which unfortunately housed the near to whole San Francisco fishing fleet which had been forced to stay docked while the San Francisco bay was being cleaned up after the oil spill which had happened the week before. I saw a sea lion swimming past and am sure I said something about it out aloud – but Kylie & Jackson claim to not have heard me and they didnt see it… but I did!

There were lots of seagulls hanging around outside. They reminded Jackson of the seagulls in “finding nemo” and started to eat his chips and say “mine, mine, mine!” just like the seagulls in finding nemo. very funny!

San Francisco was great – we really enjoyed it, but by the end of our time there we were very definitely ready for a rest on the beaches of Hawaii….

cc, kc and jacko