The Chambers

For some reason, in spite of me knowing full well Yogi was from JellyStone National Park, whenever I think of Yosemite National Park, I think of that great Yogi Bear line “Smarter than the average bear booboo….”

I can’t explain how beautiful the Yosemite National Park is. This pictures do go part the way to showing you and I’m glad we did get a couple of great shots to share.

The tour to the Yosemite NP was a long day, we were up and getting ready at about 5am and we didnt get home until about 15 hours later. But, it was worth it.

We saw waterfalls – BIG waterfalls, beautiful granite cliff faces, dense forest, hiked to huge sequioa trees, stopped at magnificent look outs and had a lovely pickernick lunch by a creek.

A top day – worth the 6 hours travel on a bud for sure!

Click this link for the big slideshow with the cqptions and descriptions:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckjchambers/sets/72157612236645596/show/

Watch this for no captions / descriptions

So, I’ve got onto a bit of a roll with the uploading and organising of our photos and managed to get our photos from in the city of San Francisco sorted. We didn’t take many in town. We were there three nights, which was two full days and one day we went to the Napa Valley and the next we went to Yosemite. So, we didn’t spend much time in town itself. Anyways, we got a few good shots in!

Same deal as the other set. Click the first link to go through to a slideshow (recommended), or if you’re lazy (or not really that interested in captions and the like) watch the slideshow below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckjchambers/sets/72157612182587203/show/

Chris

One of my 2009 goals is to make sure that I do get the photos from our 2008 visit to the USA up onto the information super-highway and share them with family, friends and anyone else who wants to take a look-and-see.

We took 2,183 photos while we were away. Not anywhere near all of them are good, but there are some great ones. The plan is to get them all tagged in an orderly manner and sorted into sets on flickr and then post slideshows here on the blog. I’m then going to pick 42 photos (1 for each day we were away) and put them into a slideshow.

After that’s all done, I can start on 07′s trip…..

Without further delay, here’s some happy snaps from the Napa Valley!

You will get a better view and captions / descriptions if you click this link

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ckjchambers/sets/72157612167795221/show/

I have also set these up like a slideshow, press play to activate and then the left and right keys to scroll through the photos. But, it would be better if you clicked the link above as the slideshow below does not have captions or descriptions…..

We had a great day out there. Thanks Rick from Blue Heron Tours for his hospitality on the day.

cc

Day three was a great day. It was a long day, but a great day. We’d booked onto a tour to the Yosemite National Park with a company called Extranomical, who were recommended on tripadvisor. The day was to start about 620 am and we’d be on the tour for about 14 hours, which included 3 and a half hours travel in each direction plus a half hour stop in each direction at a large grocery store for lunch and dinner breaks. So, with the PSP and the iPod’s all charged up we were down waiting outside the lobby at 620… it was cold!

I can recommend the tour highly, it was a long day and we didn’t get to spend a lot of time at each stop but it was a great day out. The scenery was spectacular and hopefully the photos do them justice.

The drive out was for the most part uneventful, but once near the park the road turned very windy and interesting. The turns and twists reminded me of the drive up to Lamington National Park and at one point you could see where more than one panel of a guard rail had had to be replaced because a car had gone through it. It was interesting for the road to then curve back on itself and be able to see the hillside below that part of the guardrail and be able to see the path the car which had gone over had cleared through the trees and shrubs for about 200 metres down the hill. Yuck….

We stopped at a few spots in the National Park and each of them was beautiful in their own way.

The first stop was at a lookout (or vista as they are called here) which looked right down the barrel of the valley. From here you could take in the valley floor, which was covered in what seemed like small, but I’m sure they weren’t, pine trees and you could also see nice and high up to the tops of the granite cliff faces and one long waterfall.

The second stop was a short ride away at the base of one of the waterfalls named Bridal Falls. It was a short hike (I’ll use that word to impress the guys in my team) from the car park to the waterfall base. You could actually walk in from the end of the well trodden path to be nearly underneath the waterfall, but with a little one in tow and the feeling of a disaster movie in the making, we elected to view from a safer distance. I love a good water fountain, but this took it to another level. I’m going to guess the waterfall was at least 400 metres, but will check this later and bet it’s further. We got some great photos here on the “hike” and at the waterfall.

From here we went to the Yosemite Lodge, which is a hotel in the middle of the park. The hotel reminded me a little of O’Reilly’s in its look and feel and it was quite busy coming into the Thanksgiving holidays. We had a lovely picnic lunch by a babbling brook, the only detraction was the low whining sound of a little boy who didn’t want to eat his sandwich (for the record Kylie didn’t make it – we bought it from a local store). From our lunch spot we could see a couple of huge waterfalls, the granite face cliffs the park is famous for, a babbling brook and some other lovely sights. A very, very nice lunch spot indeed and well worth the three and a half hours of bus travel to get there.

After lunch it was back onto the bus and onto the final stop. Kylie really wanted to see the large tall trees which are famous here. We got to see a couple of them and these things are massive! I’m sure they are taller than 30 Makerston Street. The hike (and the word is deservedly used this time) was 1.5 km’s in each direction, downhill to get there and unfortunately uphill to get back at 6000 feet. The area is dense forest; the smell of pine was nice and refreshing for the walk. At the bottom of the walk is a few live Sequoias, which were amazing, as well as an old (now dead unfortunately) tree that some bright spark had cut a tunnel large enough to drive cars through into the trunk and an old dead trunk of a tree which you were able to climb on and INTO! I tried convincing Jackson Winnie the Pooh hid his honey inside, but that didn’t convince him to go in looking. A lovely Park Ranger came along and coerced Jackson into walking into the hollowed out trunk a little, I got a photo and he told the ranger “this is cool, no kid from my kindy has done this before!”. Then we had to tackle the walk back UP to the bus, it was a heck of a walk and I thought we were the last ones of the group so we were walking very hard. Jackson did VERY well, though he did say a few times along the way he wanted to have a long rest and that his legs and even his arms were tired from walking and even suggested at one stage that one of us go and get the bus and bring it to meet him. It was a heck of a way to finish of a visit to a beautiful part of the world.

From here it was back on the bus and a three and a half hour drive back to the hotel to pack up our stuff to be ready to leave.

Day three in the eyes of Jackson:

Over and out, Chris, Kylie and Jacko.

Hi all,

We had a great day on our tour to San Francisco’s wine country, which included stops in the Napa and Sonoma Valley’s.

Saturday night we went out for dinner at a little Italian joint around the corner from the hotel. Jackson fell asleep at the table and I think if we’d have stayed much longer Kylie and I might have fallen asleep at the table too! We were all asleep by about 730pm and Jackson WAS NOT the last to drop off. We all had a great night sleep with the alarm waking us up at 6:30am, so even I had a sleep in which was nice.

After a VERY restful night of sleep we were off to “Wine Country” today! Our day was spent with Rick from Blue Heron Tours. Rick does a great day out and if you are in San Francisco, be sure to get in touch with him to organise your day out and about. Apologies to Rick, Jackson just could not remember his name.

9:00am kick off and at the first winery by 10:00am….. This would’ve been a fun day to spend with Kezza and Jane!

Over the day Rick took us to wineries which produce good sparkles and pinot. We went to 5 wineries, including Mumm and Tattinger’s for bubbles and Nicholson’s Ranch for Pinot and a stop at a very nice winery called Trefethan. We went to one other, but the name of it escapes me for the moment – their Global CEO is an Aussie and they have a winery in Vic somewhere.

The weather was great, the wine was very nice and I could very easily have settled in for a Sunday session at either the Mumm or Trefethan winery, which were my pick of the tasting room’s / locations.

Lunch was at a lovely Italian restaurant, we’ve got a great photo of Jackson showing his “best” table manners…. Our mains were fantastic! Kylie had what she claims was the best Ravioli she’s had and the Porcini & Sausage Fettuccine was pretty bloody good too. The highlight was Kylie’s Maple Syrup Creme Brulee… wow!

We got back into town early evening and headed off to ChinaTown for dinner. Jackson decided he didn’t want Chinese for dinner, so chucked a tanty in the restaurant and didnt eat anything. Quite funny…. (he didn’t think so)

This YouTube video is an update on the days activities from Jacko: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R-MfRCiCHA

This YouTube video is Jackson’s best of / worst of video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkCJjX3_YgE

Fun day! Day 3 update is written and ready to come soon.

Chris, Kylie and Jacko..

ps – we’re in New York now, Nanny arrived safe and sound.

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

A bit of a wrap up of Vegas first….

We did a walk up and down the strip on the Wednesday. There are a lot of interesting things to take in on a walk up and down the strip and we went into quite a lot of casino’s and walked through them to have a look at the slot machines and gaming tables and we went into their stores (some have malls!) and the special attractions they have. Yes – we took Jackson through the casino’s, but I only let him play the one cent machines – I JOKE!! But we did walk him through the casinos, we had to so that we could get to the shops and attractions. Jackson, for some reason, thinks the poker machines are coke machines. I can’t remember why – so as we’d walk through and past the machines, Jackson would ask me if I was going to get a can of coke? Some of the special attractions we saw were real live Lions at the MGM, M&M World and real live M&M characters for Jackson to get his photo with, we went to see the dolphins at one, but the line was long and the admission charge high, we saw large aquariums, we saw dozens of people on street corners handing out “business cards” for *ahem* ladies of the “night”, or day apparently, coke (as in the beverage) world, we also saw the eiffel tower, lots on construction being done on new casino’s, robotic statues fighting over atlantis, a pirate ship being renovated, rode a tram, a monorail and a gondola down a venetian canal and saw bits of Paris, New York, Monte Carlo, Italy and ancient Rome. It was a long day and our feet were tired from the walk – we’d set off at 730am or so and got back to the hotel about 11 or 12 hours later…. room service dinner at our table with a view of the strip and an early night…. a very interesting day

Our stay in Las Vegas ended on Thursday, as we checked out to head to San Francisco. We did a bunch of amazing stuff in Las Vegas and I didn’t really get warmed up on the gambling front. During our walk around on the day before, I had spent some time in a few of the casino’s on reconnaissance missions to find just the right poker machine for a last minute raid on the floors before we checked out of Vegas. So, while Kylie and Jackson were sleeping I headed off to my meeting with the multi-hand blackjack machine – what a lovely little poker machine it was. I played it for about an hour or so with reasonable success, except for the one game when I pressed bet maximum instead of deal and bet $70 on one hand and lost it all… grrrrr. Kylie wants to get the casino video of the second I realised I’d pressed the wrong button, I just want to forget it and move on. dumb machines. I also found a star wars poker machine, which game me back some of my losses from my wrong button pressing mistake.

Back to the hotel and we checked out and headed to the airport. The guy who picked us up from the hotel for our transfer told us that we probably wouldnt get around the excess luggage charges on our bags unless we looked after the guy at curbside check-in. That sounded like a challenge to me. So, when we got to the airport and all our luggage was on the curbside, I got in line to see what we could do about this excess luggage problem and considering I hadnt made our fortunes on the casino floor we needed to minimise the excess luggage charges. The charges by the way are $100 for each bag of the size and weight we are travelling with, so we’d have been looking at $300 in excess luggage charges. Anyways… after some discussions about how nice a place Australia is, and the guy seeing my poor helpless son and the bag he’d have to carry to the check in counter if we couldnt do curbside and me letting him now we’d look after him, we were able to check in curbside and avoid the excess luggage costs! yippee! it did cost us $2 per bag and a $60 tip – but it still saved us a couple of hundred dollars, which I was happy about.

We passed through the security checks in a breeze and our flight was uneventful and we were in San Francisco by mid afternoon.

This was Thanksgiving Day and I had arranged for us to go to a nice restaurant for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Jackson was very well behaved and we were able to enjoy a lovely traditional US Thanksgiving dinner of Turkey and deserts were ice cream for Jackson, Pumpkin Pie for Kylie and I had warm bread and butter pudding – all of this washed down with a lovely pinot from carlton, oregon!

The hotel we are staying at in San Fran is perched on top of the main hill – Nob Hill – and has excellent views towards the bay and of San Francisco. We can see a slither of Alcatraz from our room. The hotel is well positioned, but next time I think we’ll stay down in Union Square – it’s where most of the action is, shops, cable cars start there and restaurants too.

The hill we had to walk up after dinner would have burned off some of the bread and butter pudding….