This photo was taken at Los Angeles International Airport, at the end of 30 days vacationing in the United States, whilst waiting for our V Australia flight back to Brisbane.
This photo is funny to us as Jackson and our friend Ian, who we holidayed with in Telluride, had been singing a Miley Cyrus song. Jackson was very keen to get his photo taken with the sign and have us show Kim and Ian.
I’m going to post pictures from our travels regularly here. Don’t expect any brilliant pieces of photography, just good old fashioned memories.
Hooray, finally the big day was here… After ages counting down to it, there were no more sleeps! Jackson was very excited to have had Santa come visit & Kylie and I were excited that we were on holidays!
The plan for the day was to travel from Brisbane to Los Angeles (depart 12pm) and then have a short stop in Los Angeles before flying to Las Vegas. Once in Las Vegas we’d transfer to the hotel and kick off the holidays. I’m glad to report things went pretty much to plan…..
Best change of the day was the upgrade V Australia (web www.vaustralia.com twitter @vaustralia) gave us for the flight from Brisbane to Los Angeles. We were booked in Premium Economy, but to get upgraded to Business Class was aewsome. The seats lay all the way down to beds….. freaking awesome!
This is the view of the roof, when you’ve got the bed kicked right out and you’re stretched out… ah, nice! (Is that the Southern Cross?)
Our transfer through Los Angeles was fairly uneventful, the flight was delayed about an hour and we ended up sitting around in LAX for about 4 hours…. seriously, could they make that airport any more boring? People were pretty stressed about being at the airport, one lady who was in front of us was evidently going to miss her flight home on Christmas Day and was pretty upset. The whole check-in, then clear security thing in the states is pretty stressful, you have to unpack electronics from your carry-on, undress yourself (of belts, shoes, jackets, hats and anything else metallic), clear security and then grap all your crap on the secured side and get out of the way of everyone going through security as quickly as possible… Even with all the security you hear stories about Nigerians trying to blow up planes on the day you’re travelling… -> link to the story. The TSA do a great job, I’m sure but it’s still disconcerting to see those type of stories.
Probably the most interesting stat / piece of info about our stay in Los Angeles was that we had to line up for nearly as long to clear security as our flight was from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Seriously….. this photo doesnt do it justice, but the line up to clear security goes for a long way outside the terminal. This isnt the line to check in, this is the line AFTER checking in, to clear security…
So, we’re now in Las Vegas and we’re staying at the Palazzo (www.palazzolasvegas.com & @PALAZZOLASVEGAS. This is a very nice hotel, good choice – thanks tripadvisor! We stay here until the 30th of December and then switch over to the Signature MGM. We arrived at the hotel but our room wasnt quite ready when we arrived, but we were told we had a great room with a great view of the strip, up nice and high (41st floor) and was just what we’d requested. So, we said we’d wait and went for a bit of a walk and had lunch. Around 3pm we checked back at reception if our room was ready and we’d been swapped to a different room on a lower floor, but after some “discussion” we were moved up to a great room on the 31st floor… It’s great!
We didnt do too much after lunch and checking in….. unpacked and rested. Fell asleep pretty early, though I woke up after a couple of hours sleep thinking it was morning, so have uploaded some piccies and types up this quick update. It’s now approaching 1am on the 26th, so I am going back to bed now & that ends the 29 hour Christmas day, which included travelling nearly 12,000 kilometre’s, a lot of time spent in planes / airports and two christmas breakfasts & lunches….
This weekend I’ve worked my way through another big chunk of the 2,600 or whatever photos we took and have now picked out my favs from the Disney Cruise.
Click this link to see a nice big slideshow (you know you want too!)
Some of my favs from this lot: Photographic evidence of Jackson having a doughnut for breakfast The shots of Kylie and I’s toes with the Caribbean waters in the background The price of water vs beer in the Caribbean
Telluride has got to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. It just has to be! Set in a box canyon at the bottom of two rather large mountains this small town is a beautiful place to stop and spend time. In fact, by the end of the week we were wishing we could stay longer (though the warmth of Hawaii did beckon loudly)!
We had such a great time in Telluride. We were joined by friends, Kim and Ian from Boston, for a week which included my birthday and Christmas. A white Christmas! We enjoyed our week there so much and thank Kimmy and Ian for coming over to spend the week with us. Jackson loves hanging out with them and likes to joke with Ian about how silly he is.
What did we get up too? Well, the pace was not equal to the frenetic pace of our time in New York nor was it as relaxing as our time on the cruise. It was a week of fun in the snow, with a dose of good company, food and skiing thrown in.
To get there we had to get up and leave Disney World nice and early (5am) and fly from Orlando to Denver before transferring to a smaller flight into Montrose and then taking an hour and a half car ride to Telluride. It ended up being a day of about 14 hours of travelling…. Unfortunately it was dark by the time we got into the car, so we missed out on the “spectacularness” of the scenery on the drive, though this meant we woke up the next morning having never seen the beautiful views and surrounding area of Telluride and we got a lovely surprise of magnificent scenery from the place we were staying when we woke up the next morning.
We hired a “condo” for the week, which had three bedrooms set over a couple of “floors”. Jackson was very proud to have the best room in the house, which was a loft like room. The condo was in a great location, right near the “Galloping Goose” bus stop (PUBLIC TRANSPORT!) which is a free bus which does loops of the town area. The condo was also in very easy striking distance of the main street, restaurants, the grocery store and the gondola / ski lifts.
Skiing-wise, Kylie and I had bought a cross trainer a couple of months ago to help us get into shape. The thing is hated by us both and received little use in the development of the athletic specimens we are . Though I am sure both Kylie and I have every intention of using it through 2009 to get fit and ready for the next time we go skiing and the spiders who’ve made their home webs there will be very mad to get kicked off.
We didn’t let our poor fitness levels get in the way of some good skiing. The skiing was great, with Telluride offering a good range of runs for the varied skiing capability we have. Ian looked resplendent in his 1980’s Navy Blue one-piece ski suit and took a couple runs down black rated (harder) slopes, which he managed spectacularly, even managing to put a call in to us from his mobile phone in the condo as he started the run and half way down the slope so we could sit in the condo and watch him. True story! Kimmy mastered the beginners run, while I (Chris) got reasonably comfortable on the easier runs and even managed to work up to a few runs down the blue (intermediate) slopes, while Kylie managed a view runs down the beginner run.
Jackson didn’t enjoy the kids ski school too much unfortunately. We’d heard really great things about the ski school, but it seemed as though they were still working their way through some early in the season bugs and were a little disorganised. We had organised a lesson for us and left Jackson at the kids ski school, I think next time we’ll bring him along to the lesson and Kylie and he can learn and then we’ll meet up after the lesson and ski together.
Christmas day was a real hoot! Even though we have grown up with hot Christmas days, there was something very natural about being in a cold environment for Christmas.
We’d had organised for a Christmas tree to be in the condo and convinced Jackson that Santa would leave him a present or two under the tree for when he woke up Christmas Day. We convinced him by telling Jackson that Santa has a really big Google map with the Christmas Eve location of every kid in the world on it. The kids location is even marked with an information box for each kid with vital information about that child, including age, favourite toys, Christmas gift requests and of course the information box is coloured green or red to let Santa know if that child has been naughty or nice. Classic.
Jackson woke at a reasonable hour and came to tell us it was time to get up and open presents. We went downstairs and sure enough Santa had found Jackson in Telluride and left a bounty of good presents for him.
After the present session we made a snowman, complete with chocolate eyes and a carrot nose! A pretty good snowman apparently as the next day we saw a family stop to get their photo taken with him. Christmas lunch was a traditional Americano affair (burgers and chips) and then we had a rest in the condo before dinner.
Kylie managed to sneak in some shopping (of course).
Kim and Ian shouted me to a beautiful birthday dinner (thanks again team). I had a shrimp and calamari appetizer which had a few slices of deep fried lemon and lime – delicious! My desert even got served up with a candle…. Cosmopolitan is a nice restaurant if you’re ever in Telluride.
There was a lot of snow while we were there. The previous December snowfall record was 93 inches of snow, which was last year. This December they’ve already had 100 inches by the 26th! There was lots of lovely powdery snow for us to enjoy skiing on. Just in the week we were there they had a lot of snow, including a pretty bad blizzard.
On our last morning it was minus 9 degrees fahrenheit, which is about minus 20 degrees celsius! Yep, minus 20 celsius….
I hope the photos we have do the beauty of this place justice. Lots more photos to come
We’re now in Hawaii and have met up up with Kylie’s mum and dad for a week before flying home. It’s nice to thaw out and see more white powder (on a beach this time!).
Disney do a great job of theming up their parks. The attention to detail is marvellous and I guess that’s how they make their money, by putting people in a different place and making them think – even if only for a second – that they have been moved to another time or place.
Now, I wasnt around in the 1950’s, but last night we got a taste of it! We had dinner at a place called the Prime Time Cafe in one of the Disney parks. It’s themed like a 1950’s home! Even better your waiter is in character as a Mom from the 1950’s and she goes around the restaurant telling everyone to get their elbows off the table! Some of her other favourite lines were “No whinging and no complaining” (Jacko didnt like that one) and she even rolled out the “If you don’t eat your greens, no pudding!” (see photo of Kylie, muhahahahaha!)
The desert menu is on ViewMasters and the food is all very “homely”. Kylie had meatloaf and I had steak and vegetables, with the steak cooked medium / well and it came out cooked very well!
Jackson and I both got a “Clean Plate Award” sticker from “Mom” for eating all our dinner, while Kylie left beans behind, so got no sticker.
I havent quite worked out how to embed pictures from flickr into a post here, so click this link for photos.
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.
the year has started off with a real bang…. Lots going on in the Chambers household!
A few of the things which have been happening;
* Jackson started pre-prep. Pre-prep is like kindy. He’s going to a community kindy which is close to Kylie’s mum and dad’s house and near to the school we will book him into. He’s loving it – he’s really enjoying getting to play with kids all his own age and interacting with kids again, after not going to child care for about 10 weeks while we had our holiday and pre-prep was closed. He has a new mate, Jack, they play in the home corner and “fix” things.
* We’ve decided to go on another trip back to the USA. We’ve been bitten by the bug and have planned out our trip, which will be at the end of the year. We’re going to San Francisco, New York, Orlando, cruising the Caribbean, Telluride for skiing and Christmas and Hawaii to thaw out. We’re looking forward to it already…. (only 273 days to go!)
* We bought a cross trainer, which is in the living room. It’s to help us get fit, but also to get ready for skiing! We’re getting into the swing of using it and I don’t hate it as much as I did after the first couple of days…. It’s definitely helping.
* I “mc’d” the recent TQ Awards for Excellence, at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Ctr. I shared the duties with Dallas Free, which was fun. The awards were held at a breakfast ceremony and it was a good morning. Some of my great mates won awards, including Sarah from my team for Most Outstanding Staff Member (the award I won last year) – way to go Sarah!!, Steve McRoberts (my boss) for Excellence in Leadership, Al Bendall won the award which receives nominations from industry, Megan Thompson for excellence in International and Monica Groenert for Excellence in Management. All very worthy winners! Obviously professionally the last year has not been all that crash hot for me – I went from most outstanding staff member to not even getting a nomination .
* We bought ourselves a new David Bromley, which hangs nicely in the “compound”. I’ll get some pictures and post them. It’s a great pic and I’m sure we’ll be collecting a few more along the way.
* We only got one number in each of our systems eights we put in for last nights mega lotto…. back to work Monday & the art business has to wait – again….
That’s the big things…. of course, it’s 645am Sunday morning and I haven’t had my cuppa coffee yet. I’ll post more as it comes to me!
hello and happy new year. Hopefully your new years resolutions are still intact and you’re invigorated for a fantastic 2008. It’s been pretty quite on the blog’s western front, life goes on and things happen… like Christmas and work.
I hope you had a great Christmas. We did. We had family come visit at our house, we had Nicole and Harrison come stay with us and about a dozen or so people here on Christmas day. We had a nice “buffet” lunch of roast turkey, “big al’s” ham and roast pork and salads and we spent the day relaxing, playing with new toys and swimming some too. After telling the people we met in the USA how hot it was going to be here in Brisbane at Christmas…. it was very nice to have to “endure” temperatures in the mid 20’s! Harrison and Jackson cleaned up on the present front, with Jackson also sharing a Nintendo Wii with me as a present. Jackson likes the Wii nearly as much as I do and we play tennis and guitar hero mostly. Kylie and I didnt do present for each other, we were well and truly spoilt on our holiday, we figured we didnt need presents…. though I did buy Kylie a nice pair of (wait for it) powerboards, with individual on / off switches which should help reduce our electricity bill…
As a birthday present for me…. I got spoilt. We bought ourselves a new painting – which hangs in the “compound” room at the front of the house. The artist is David Bromley and it is in his female portrait style. It’s pretty big, taking up most of one wall. We bought it from a gallery at Highfields, just outside of Toowoomba. David and Fay run the gallery and were nice enough to deliver the painting and help hang it! It looks beautiful and it should also turn into a nice investment piece, with his works doing well. Have a look at it: in our picture gallery
We got all our pictures from our holiday sorted. FINALLY! There was a lot and it took much longer than I thought it would. We also put “some” in to get printed. 650 odd photos… heavens only knows what we’ll do with them – but! they’re printed….
Jackson is doing great in his swimming. He doesnt mind, in fact he loves, putting his head under the water now and looks forward to Friday’s for swimming with Nannie and he loves swimming with us on the weekend. He’s off to his new child card centre on the 29th of January, which he is looking forward to and he talks about the “new kids” quite a bit.
All’s well here and we’re looking forward to 2008 and the adventures it brings us.
Please drop us a line and make sure to catch up. I plan on posting her regularly and send out an email towards the end / start of the month to say hi and with some links to the postings we make here, or bookmark the site / subscribe to the RSS feed and drop in regularly.
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)
. Though I am sure both Kylie and I have every intention of using it through 2009 to get fit and ready for the next time we go skiing and the spiders who’ve made their home webs there will be very mad to get kicked off.
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