Turtle Talk with Crush (aka Proud Parenting Moment)

At Disney World there are four different theme parks. Each have a different theme and unique attractions and shows. Today we visited EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, or something like that). The park has two parts, the first has quite a few rides and is like a traditional theme park, whilst the second part is like a World Expo. Today we only did the first part, tomorrow we’re going back to do the World Expo part.

My take from EPCOT is that it is supposed to include some representation of what communities in the future will be like. If that’s the case, get ready for bunches of merchandise places, weird costumed characters and “scooter hogs” (more on that in a future post) to be everywhere.

At EPCOT there is a show called “Turtle Talk with Crush”. In this show the kids sit down the front of a small theatre on the floor and the parents / adults sit up the back. The show is pretty clever in that the kids are able to interact in real time with Crush the Turtle from the Nemo movie, who appears on a movie screen. As questions are asked the turtle responds to the specific questions and also makes comments about people in the crowd, like what shirt someone is wearing.

Jackson was sitting down the front with all the other kids and I thought I’d start video’ing Crush, because it’s just pretty nifty that they can do this. And then, Jackson asked a question….

Pretty funny stuff, hard to script this type of stuff I’d reckon!

Caribbean Cruisin Man!

Cruise Update

Our 7 night Caribbean cruise which visited the US Virgin Islands ports of St Thomas and St Marteen and Disney’s own island of Castaway Cay was incredibly relaxing. It was a great change of pace from the previous couple of weeks.

Jackson loved the kids club and would have spent the whole cruise in there if wed let him. I’m sure some kids do spend nearly the whole cruise there, but we wanted to make sure he got to do some cool non-kids-club things with us too. Though there were a few times when we were tempted to just let the kids club crew know that we’d pick Jackson up on the Saturday morning after we’d had our breakfast and before we left the boat.

On board we enjoyed the new Disney movie “Bolt” in 3D twice (obviously not our choice). The first time we saw it Jackson asked the Assistant Cruise Director, who was dressed in his whites and looked like the captain, “How the ship was driving?” The guys (an Aussie) joked back that it was driving well thanks. He then asked Jackson if he’d like a special job, Jackson said yes and he got to be projected onto the cinema screen before the film started and was introduced as a specialist flown in from Australia who would start the movie. Jacko then got to press the button which started the film! He thought he was very special!

I finished off the first and second books in a trilogy I bought to read.

Kylie and I played Bingo and won nothing! Their Bingo boards are electronic, when the numbers are called out the digital board you have crosses off the numbers on each of the cards you have and even has red lights which light up when you have a winner. There’s not much to do except sit back, drink Mojito’s and hope your card tells you you’ve won!

St Marteen was our first port of call, after two days at sea. We’d done some research on the web before we left home and decided not to book one of the Disney shore excursions, but instead get a taxi up to the North East of the island and go over to Pinel Island.

Pinel Island is a great spot only a short distance off the main island. You get there by a 25 minute taxi, then a 5 minute water taxi ride. We got there early & before the first scheduled service and got to ride over with restaurant staff. The boats were like Thursday Island Taxi’s (short wooden boats, rather than tinnies) and after the last fishing trip with Pa I was sure Jackson wasn’t going to appreciate the ride. He was fine, providing commentary along the way and even offering suggestions on how the restaurant stock could have been better packed onto the boat. There are two restaurants on Pinel Island, the main one shut down for the day and they told us the forecast was for bad weather…. Gah! So, we hung out on the beach for a couple of hours and then jumped back onto one of the water taxis and headed back to the island, called the taxi to come and get us and went back to the ship ALL before the island had pretty much anyone else on it.

Jackson then went into the kids club and we went into St Thomas for a walk around. We caught the water taxi from the ship’s pier over to the shopping part of town. The scene probably would have been more appreciable had there not been a dredging operation underway on the main beach. Our last visit to this part of the world we visited Nassau and were underwhelmed by our visit, but St Marteen was a lot nicer and we enjoyed our walk up and down the street poking in for a look at a few of the shops.

Initially I was a little disappointed that we had to leave Pinel Island early because of the weather, but after getting into St Marteen for a look around and spending the day lazing on St Thomas, I’m glad of how it worked out.

St Thomas was our second port of call. I had booked one of the Disney Excursions – a round of golf at Mahogony Run, but unfortunately they did not get the minimum numbers for the tour to run, so I booked onto the same tour as Kylie and Jackson. We were headed to Magens Bay for a day of restful relaxation at a beautiful beach. It sure turned out to be just that, with a 20 – 30 minute bus ride over to the Magens Bay and to our deck chairs. The “taxi” we caught over to the beach was a converted Ford F450, the back tray converted into rows of covered seats and open sides. We spent the day lounging under some palm trees with the Caribbean waves dumping only a few metres away. There were signs up “Do not feed the Iguanas”, unfortunately we didn’t see any Iguanas.

After the day on the beach we were all a little worn out – all this relaxing by the seaside is tough going! We returned to the ship, freshened up and spent some time relaxing in the cabin. Our cabin was on the side of the pier, so we got to watch all the cruisers running late running to re-board the ship. There were some funny sights as people come running back, including a mum and dad who sent their young daughter running ahead to tell the re-boarding party not to leave without them, a rather large grandmother (we think) and her granddaughter who had to be picked up by a golf cart about 2/3rds the way down the pier, a group of drunk bikini clad girls who were that happy to get back and see the boat hadn’t left that they ran (in not straight lines) to the boarding crew to hug & kiss them and a family who were sure they were running late and bolted all the way down the pier having an argument about whether they were late or not and apparently the mum won a $20 bet from the dad because they were late.

With the last group on board, the ship blew its horn (which is to the tune of when you wish upon a star), the last of the ropes tieing us to the pier were thrown off and we were on our way.

We then had a day at sea and afterwards stopped in at Castaway Cay, which is Disney’s own island. The weather was hardly Caribbean, rather overcast and more like a NSW beach (tongue in check there) and we hung out on the beach until just after lunch and then went back to the boat for some rest.

On top of the kids club, we had Rafael, Valentin and Terri helping us out. Rafael and Valentin were our servers in the restaurants, they moved around to each of the restaurants with us and helped keep Jackson entertained, even cutting up some of his food into bite-sized chunks for him to eat more easily (the servers do this for most of the younger kids). Terri was our cabin host, he made the beds and tidied up after us and best of all, each night he made different animals from towels and left them on the bed. Sometimes they were even wearing Jackson’s sunglasses.

The cruise was VERY relaxing and just the tonic after NYC and before Disney World.

Over and out!

cc, Kylie and Jacko

New York Catch up (aka – catch up time!)

Hi ya! Please excuse some of the mixed-tense you will find in this post, it was written over a week and a bit, so is a little mixed up!

I’ve got some of Jacko’s video updates to come too and will post them to the blog soon. We’ve got some great can-can action to show you all

This post started on the “verandah” (or whatever they call them on ships) of cabin 7122 of the Disney Magic. We’re now finished our cruise and are at Disney World….. This update was written with three days remaining on our cruise of the East Caribbean, which has been tremendously relaxing and a nice change of pace from the rather frenetic first fortnight of our holiday. Kylie commented at dinner the night before this post started that this would be our first morning to sleep in and wake naturally, without any alarms being set. She’s probably right too. It was about 545 am (a sleep-in for me) when I woke up and started writing this update, Jackson and Kylie woke at about 630am (not a sleep-in).

I need to catch you all up on a fair bit of our holiday, including finishing off with an update on New York, our time at Port and Cape Canaveral and our cruise. I’ll give you an update on the rest of New York in this post and follow up on the cruise and Canaveral later.

New York is really an amazing city. Everyone should visit New York at least once. Kylie has been here five times, I’ve visited four times and this is Jackson’s second visit. Even with a few visits we were still doing things we hadn’t done before and wondered afterwards why it wasn’t something we’d done on our first visit AND we haven’t got to any of the other four boroughs of New York City yet. We had so much fun here.

I don’t think a day–by-day or blow-by-blow description is the way to wrap up the New York part of our holiday, so I’ll give you some highlights.

The 30th of November (Sunday) was the first bad weather day of the trip. It was cold, very, very cold and raining, raining cold, very cold rain. Kylie, Mum and Jackson headed off to do the Statten Island Ferry for views of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, the views of the Statue were not good (damn rain). After riding the ferry, they did a few things but the most noteworthy (if you ask Jackson) was getting back to Toy r Us and riding the four floor high ferris wheel inside the store. I went off to check out a large electronics store called J&R, which was very cool and then off to catch up with a friend at an American Football (NFL) game. Great thing to do on a day when it is cold, freezing cold rain. Thank god our seats were under cover! The rain was coming down four different ways and the people on the top tiers (not under cover) must have nearly froze. The game was ok. It was nice to get out to a game and hang out with Robert and his mate for a while, but next time the game better be great if the weather is that bad!

We shopped. We shopped a fair bit and had fun doing it. There is a lot more variety here in the USA over Australia in the types of products available and things are still pretty cheap, despite whatever the AUD / USD is at the moment. We went into some great stores including clothes and electronics stores. I loved visiting the electronics stores and checking out all the different products they had for sale.

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was a very interesting way to spend a few hours. They had large Picasso and Joan Miro exhibitions on. The Picasso exhibition was very interesting and enjoyable. Contributing to the understanding and enjoyment of the exhibition, MOMA have a wireless network within the exhibition and you can use your own wireless devices (phones) to basically tune into and listen to information on each piece of art as you stood in front of it. It was very interesting to be able to absorb what state of mind the artist was in (drunk? crazy?) when the piece was being done and learn a whole lot more about the actual piece hanging on the wall in front of you. Some of the works on display take weeks and months to complete, despite them looking like they could be whipped up in a couple of minutes (more on Jackson Pollock later). I went through the Joan Miro exhibition and wasn’t really taken by any of the work. We strolled through the rest of the exhibits and took in works by many famous artists and pieces, including the famously large Water Lillies, which stretched out at least 5 metres wide and was the highlight for Kylie. There were many Jackson Pollock’s on display and Mum mentioned the national “interest” in Australia when Gough Whitlam bought Blue Poles for the National Gallery in Australia. It got me interested in that and when I get back home I am going to keep an eye out for books written on that topic. Surely there’s one. The MOMA do a great job of an exhibition, but I still reckon our very own GOMA is something we should be incredibly proud of.

On one day we caught a cab down to the financial district, to right near the site of the World Trade Centre to start a day of walking. From here we had a look through Century 21, which is a department store worth a look and then walked up to SoHo. In SoHo there are lots of great stores, including Ben Sherman, Ted Baker and Ed Hardy as well as a bunch of stores like the GAP and Old Navy etc which are fun to spend money in. I got my snow boots finally, they were marked down a fair bit on their original price and then when I got to the check-out they were marked down even further! Bargain. SoHo is also where we had lunch at Balthazar.

Rockerfeller Centre is a collection of buildings in mid-town. They were at one stage all owned by a very rich dude and were once home to the Tourism Queensland’s New York office (who do I talk to about re-opening that puppy?!). Rockerfeller is also home to “Top of the Rock”, which is a skyline viewing area similar to the Empire State Building which is about 70 stories up and also includes an outdoors area. The ride up to the viewing platform is an a lift (duh) but the roof of the lift is transparent so you can see through the roof and see the workings of the lift taking you up to the viewing area, this is pretty cool. Once up on the 70th’ish floor you can get a great 360 degree view of Manhattan. I prefer this view than the Empire State Building, there are shorter lines to get up to the viewing platforms and you are closer to Central Park. The outside areas have glass “walls”, but it was so windy that when out there I was clinging tightly to the camera and walking as “low” as I could. We got some great photos from up here.

We went along to the Radio City Christmas Show, with the Rockettes. Apart from being dazzled by the heights of the dancers kicks we also thought the show pretty cool as they combined dancing and singing with a story about believing in Santa and a 3D film which tied in nicely (and not so subtly) advertising messages from the shows sponsors. This was a good night out which also featured a 5 block dash to the gents room at the restaurant we were having dinner at for Jackson who pronounced that he was busting to do a pee just after leaving the theatre and we were sure we wouldn’t make it, but he did! Phew…

Dining wise we had some great meals in New York, probably the highlights over the last few days in New York would have been.

Balthazar is a beautiful French Bistro in SoHo. A friend had dined there in the past and recommended it to me, we were looking forward to eating there and we were not let down. We’d made a reservation for 12 and when we were going back to the restaurant I noticed a big black SUV pulling up in front of the restaurant. Given my earlier induction to the Posh-Pap-Scrum and that my paparazzi sixth sense is now nicely developed and I commented to Kylie that someone famous was in that car. Turns out it was Kate Moss who was having lunch at Balthazar, “with us”. Kylie wanted me to let everyone know that she did eat something and definitely drunk her share of red wine (Kate Moss, not Kylie). We had a great lunch and the highlight for Jackson was when he was presented with a box of crayons and told to draw all over the paper tablecloths. He didn’t believe me and I had to get the waiter to come over and be the first to draw on the tablecloth for Jackson to believe it, but after that first drawing he couldn’t be stopped and he made his way around each of the four settings at the table doing his own special drawing for each setting.

We also ate at Daisy May’s. This was one of Kylie’s finds, which came from Oprah Winfrey (!). It is over on 11th Street and it served BBQ’d ribs. We ordered our dinner and went into the dining room, which was a few rows of tables and benches and sat down to one of the most delicious meals we have enjoyed so far. We both had Kansas City style sticky sweet ribs, Jackson had a chocolate ice cream. Kylie and my ribs were served with our selection of two side dishes. We got the Brown Sugared Sweet Potato Mash (which I’d had a version of once before when we had a Thanksgiving Lunch in the Digital Team with Caroline Lalla, a Yankee member of the team) and the Red Eye Sauce Mash Potato and the Corn Bread. My mouth is watering just remembering that dinner… If you are in New York, get yourself here for a meal. Fantastic food, go Oprah!

Mum headed back to Brisbane on the Tuesday, from New York, to Los Angeles, to Sydney, to Brisbane. Blech! She did have a row of three seats all to herself from Los Angeles to Sydney, which is very fortunate! With her she took a medium and a small sized suitcase loaded up with goodies we’d bought in San Francisco and New York. Kylie has bought eight pairs of shoes (compared to 11 the last trip) and I’ve bought a few new business shirts.

Sadly, I’ve now realised that we go back to work next month

Day 8 – Update from New York

New York.

We’ve managed to cram a lot in during our stay in New York. Since the last update we have done so much more and the days tend to slip into one another. I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone four days ago, so I’m going to drop down here a few notes on the main things we’ve been up to.

First and foremost, Kylie has done a lot of shopping while we’ve been here. My mum heads back from to Brisbane today, taking with her quite a bit of our shopping (thanks mum!) which includes an unknown (to me) number of pairs of Kylies shoes and quite a few new business shirts that I have bought and a whole bunch of other stuff. We’ve certainly done our bit to try and kick start the US economy. I might try and get Kylie to do a summary of her purchases when we’re back in Brisbane. No point in doing it on the road, the “kill” count rises too quickly….

Saturday 29 November

Saturday we all went our seperate ways for the day. Mum did the hop-on-hop-off bus tour of the Uptown areas, Kylie went and did some shopping and Jackson and I went to the Intrepid Air & Space Museum.

The Air & Space Museum only recently re-opened after being shut for renovations for a while. The Museum sits on board a retired US Air Craft Carrier which is moored in the River just at the end of the street we’re staying in! (One heck of a yard ornament to have in your street!) What a great facility and museum this is. Jackson and I were both enthralled for the three and a bit hours we walked the decks of this massive ship. We got some photos, but I’ve been having trouble uploading them through this internet connection, hopefully the next place is kinder to me, because we’ve got some great shots to share.

A visit to the museum starts off with a movie about the career of the ship. It’s mainly focused, of course, on the tragic aspect of the lose of life which happens during war. Halfway through I thought I’d made a “dad” mistake taking Jackson in, but he hasnt had any nightmares since and though he asked once after the movie about why’d those people get killed, he was fine with the movie. We were sitting next to a (I presumed from the way he was talking to Jackson before the movie) retired British Naval guy and during the movie he started crying through the movie – the emotions which come back visiting a place like that must be a terrible thing to manage.

The main “exhibits” of the museum are the planes which sit on the deck of the carrier. There must have been 20 different planes and choppers from different Navy’s / Army’s around the world. Jackson loved it and would run from plane to plane and then ask me to read the words on the sign for each plane (some of those Russian designers have VERY difficult names).

You also get to walk through the hanger of the carrier and in the hanger is a kids museum area where they can get their hands on all sorts of cool stuff, including sitting in the cockpit of a M*A*S*H style chopper, a plane simulator where you try to land a plane on the deck of a carrier, there’s a scoreboard which counts the number of “Jap” planes and ships the carrier took down and some models which show the carrier in its different incarnations.

Another exhibit is the Concord, which sits on the pier next to the Intreipd. The Concord is dwarfed by the Intrepid. I was looking forward to looking inside the Concorde, which you could do, but they had all the seats enclosed in a plastic bubble and the cockpit was blocked off, so all you got to do was walk down the aisle. Which was pretty boooring, even to me.

By the time we got back from there we met up with Kylie and went down to the Union Square area for a look around. We had lunch at a burger joint and walked around and looked through the stores. Paragon Sports was the main shop we visited and we got some stuff for the ski part of our trip – cool new goggles!

That night Jackson and I went to a cirque de soleil show and Kylie and Mum went to see the Musical Wicked. They liked Wicked better than Mumma Mia. Jackson thoroughly enjoyed the Cirque show, particularly the acrobatics of the show including a great trampoline act and during the finale huge fans sent a deluge of paper snowflakes out over the audience. This was pretty cool.

Jackson’s video:

This started out as a short note, ended up being longer than I thought, so I’ll wrap it up there. more to come.

over and out

Day 6 – Turkey Day (aka Stuffed Full Day!)

New York City, New York.

Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US of A, so we had a couple of special activities planned. The first special activity was a sleep in! After not getting much sleep the night Wednesday night we slept in until about 7am.

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was on Thursday. The plan was to get a cab up past where the parade started and then find a spot along Central Park West to watch the parade. Unfortunately we couldn’t find a spot along Central Park West but we did find a spot in the park close to the street from where we could see the balloons from up pretty close and also hear the marching bands. There were some people in the park who had bought their own ladders, which helped them get up nice and high to see the parade. We could see just fine without a ladder…. The balloons moved a lot smoother than I expected and it was interesting to see people hanging out of windows of the second, third and fourth floors of buildings to see the balloons and for those people to be BELOW the tops of the balloons. The more memorable balloons were Buzz Lightyear, Horton and Kermit the Frog. We’ve since heard that Rick Astley performed a song or two and the Energizer rabbit didn’t follow the true course of the parade, turning left when it should have turned right as part of some PR for Energizer… clever.

The parade finished somewhere between 1030 and 11 and we then went for a walk in Central Park. It was very cold in the park, probably because it is a little more exposed than in amongst the buildings. We saw a LOT of squirrels this visit, which Jackson thoroughly enjoyed.

We had lunch booked at the Boat House for 12. The Boat House is a restaurant on the lake in Central Park. We booked a table for their Traditional Thanksgiving dinner and they had us sign a contract, (A CONTRACT!) for the reservation. I could get use to the turkey lunch, it was beautiful, we all had the Traditional Turkey Dinner, except for Jackson who had about 6 pieces of Penne pasta, told us he was full and then ate a whole chocolate brownie…

We spent the afternoon stuffed full from lunch and hung around the apartment. Kylie did some clothes washing (one of her favourite leisure past times), Nanny had a snooze and I sorted some photos. Later in the afternoon we went for a walk to see what was happening, walking to Bryant Park and through Times Square.

Here’s Jackson’s video update. It’s stretched a touch over the 60 seconds, but still worth the watch (in this directors humble opinion anyway)

That was about Thursday….

Over and out!

back to the us of a

The Chambers clan are heading back to the US of A at the end of this year for another family “vacation”. We’re heading back to some of our favourite cities to enjoy some new experiences and repeat some of the ones we really enjoy.

Our itinerary is like this:

22 Nov – leave Brisbane for San Francisco. We’re in town for three nights and will be doing a Napa Valley tour and heading to Yosemite
25 Nov – head to New York City, staying at “our” Manhattan apartment and doing Thanksgiving and the parade, another NFL game for Chris, shopping for Kylie (and Chris), a tour of a Navy Destroyer for Jackson (and Chris) and a bunch of other stuff
4 Dec – head to Port Canaveral for a space shuttle launch (no kidding!)
6 Dec – head off on a cruise of the Caribbean
13 Dec – back to Walt Disney World
20 Dec – Telluride in Colorado to meet up with Kim and Ian, for Ian & Chris’ birthday, a white christmas and some skiing!
27 Dec – head to Hawaii to thaw out…..

I’ve spent some time on flickr collecting images of the some of the nifty things we’re going to be up too whilst we’re on vacation and they’re in this slideshow

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10061441@N03/favorites/show/

morning officer

the subject of this post bears no resemblance what-so-ever to to the topic at hand… however! it does sound better than general weekend update.

not much going down this weekend.

Kylie went into town with Mum yesterday to buy some comfortable walking shoes for the 5th ave assault.

Jacko and I hung out at home and did a lot of nothing. When I say a lot of nothing, I mean we did a lot – but not a lot of anything in particular. playing outside, playing inside, you know… kid’s stuff

Some exciting news is that Kylie and I are parents again! sort of…. My Scarlett Chested Parrots have babies, four of them to be exact. Jackson and I spent some time yesterday cleaning out the bottom of the cage and shoo’ing away ants – there’s lots of ants around at the moment. Lots of ants all around in the yard. not sure why, but there is – out the front, out the side and out the back. anyway, the reason for mentioning the ants is that two of the baby birds had left the breeding box – which I think would have involved a fall of about a meter and a half and were on the bottom of the cage and the ants were giving them grief, biting them and such. So, we pfaffed around and got them back into the box and then they fell out again. I’ll do another check on them and try and get photo’s later. v exciting!

We went out for dinner with Colin and Ju last night. To Thai Mali – it would HAVE to be Brisbane’s best Thai restaurant. I don’t know why we bothered with the menus, we ordered pretty much the same thing we always order! It was nice to catch up with Col and Ju, thanks for dinner! Col and Ju and the boys will be looking after the house and vegas when we’re on our holiday.

The US holiday itinerary is all but done! I’m so close now – i did a fair bit on it yesterday and we just need to tidy up Honolulu – which is our last stop – and we’re done. Only 13 sleeps to go!

This week looms as a busy one at work – with a trip down to Sydney Thursday afternoon for the Australian Marketing Institute Awards. TQ is a finalist in three categories – two finalists awards for the Where Else campaign (brand revitalisation and also for the digital campaign) and a finalist for the Whitsundays campaign. It should be a good night out hopefully. Back on Friday.

I bought Jacko a great little gift this morning – a raiders jersey! he’ll look v cool in that.

anyways, that’ll do it. aveagoodweekend

slight change of plan

Later this year Kylie, Jackson and I will be heading off to the states (only 114 days to go…..)

We’ve made a slight change to our itinerary recently, to have an extra day in new york, the itinerary now is:

27th Oct Leave Brisbane
27th Oct to the 31st Oct LA (santa monica)
31st Oct to the 8th Nov New York
8th Nov t0 the 15th Oct- Disneyland Florida
15th Nov to the 18th Nov- Cruise the Bahamas
18th Nov to the 22nd Nov – Las Vegas
22nd Nov to 25th Nov – San Francisco
25th Nov to the 30th Nov – Hawaii
2nd December – back in Brisbane

Change of address

After only a short stint at “travelpod” I (chris) have made the executive decision to move from there to this blog. Apologies for the inconvenience…. The travelpod blog was good – but I didn’t want “just a travel blog”. These pages will be able to capture all the fun and games of our holiday to the states later in the year, but also all of the other stuff we get up to.

The Chambers

What we get up to….

Category Archives: holidays