Trip Home - Summary - Gadgets

A few extra photos of some highlights from our trip...


San Francisco fog & Golden Gate Bridge

Death Valley

Las Vegas - Venetian Hotel


New York Central Park

Playa del Carmen beach before rain

Cocktails at resort pool

Chichen Itza

Santa Monica

Our last day was our longest, we took a 4 hour train ride from San Diego downtown to LA. Then bus to LAX airport and a 12 hour flight home. The flight went well, it seems the more long flights we do the easier they get. Flying during the night definitely helps, we left LA at 9:30PM and arrived in Auckland at 6:30AM ready for the a day of relaxing at home.

We had the greatest honeymoon, and want to take this opportunity to again thank our friends, family and work mates who helped make it possible!

Disclaimer: the following is technical stuff, not holiday stuff, written by Peter!

Gadgets we used on the trip
From our posts and photos we managed to get on the blog, obviously some of the technology from our trip worked well. Strangely enough we had more trouble finding internet cafes with computers in USA than in other countries like Thailand and Mexico. Most internet cafes or hotels in USA expect you to have your own computer, Wi-Fi wireless access was available almost everywhere but without a laptop or wi-fi enabled PDA it was useless to us.
1 The blog worked brilliantly for us, we were able to update the text from all the internet cafes we found. We had a little trouble positioning photos on the pages and could not upload them from some cafes at all.
The biggest drawback with a blog was our readers did not know when we had updated it. The technology for doing this is available in the latest web browsers (Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox) using a features called 'RSS','Feeds' or 'Live Bookmarks'. When more people have these web browsers they will be able to tell their web browser to notify them when our blog is updated.
Also we found people preferred to email us directly instead of posting comments in the blog. Overall it worked well and provided a easy way for us to keep everyone updated.
2 Cameras, we found that many internet cafes have heavily restricted computer so this prevented us from either connected the cameras, store files on the computers. We didn't find any computers with support for firewire so video from the Sony camera was never able to uploaded.
3 The U3 USB Stick was excellent when we found computers which were not heavily restricted. It notified us about malware and virus's on the computers we were using, also the ACDSee program saved a lot of time by allowing us to resize the huge photos from the cameras before uploading them to the blog. I even managed to make a few phone calls using Skype and update my MP3 player using myPodder.

San Diego Day 2

San Diego Zoo

Today we went to San Diego Zoo, world famous for Giant Pandas. The first thing we did at the zoo was a guided bus tour around the whole park on a open top bus which was excellent. We started walking around, the zoo which is huge (40 hectares/100 acres) and saw almost everything including the Pandas, a show called 'The Wild Ones - Legends & Lore' and then took a gondola ride over the whole park back to the entrance at the end of the day.
After the zoo we travelled into the Gaslamp district for a nice meal to celebrate our last day on holiday.

San Diego Day 1

SeaWorld dolphins

Mexican food and giant margaritas in Old Town

Today we got up very early to catch a train down from Anaheim station in LA to Old Town in San Diego. The train was very quiet, huge seats with lots of leg room foot rests - a real luxury train ride. It travelled a lot of the time down the coastline past beaches, and pretty seaside towns.
Once we got to San Diego in the late morning we had a quick nap then went to Seaworld for the afternoon until early evening. Seaworld is like an aquarium crossed with a theme park. We saw a couple of good shows, the first was a pet show with cats, dogs, birds and pigs doing clever tricks. The second show was a night time show next to a huge pool, featuring killer whales splashing everyone and jumping out of the water. We also went on a rollercoaster which had a big water drop - we thought we were going to get soaked but luckily only got a light splash!
After we got back to the hotel we travelled into 'Old Town' which is the original town settlers came to in San Diego - very rustic, lots of cobblestones and spanish styled buildings. We had dinner here and a few giant margaritas.

Los Angeles Day 6

Nightime photos from Disneyland


Sarah's bug eyes at the 4D Bugs Life ride!

Day 6 and we headed back to Disneyland for our final day there. The rollercoaster, California Screamin', we had wanted to go on earlier this week was still being worked on, although they kept sending the empty cars around the track as test runs! They finally re-opened the rollercoaster late afternoon and we were very lucky to get on with minimal wait. It was worth it, very fun and not too scary at all (even with the upside down part!). We also went on the California Soaring ride again, and rode the Disney railroad around Disneyland.

Los Angeles Day 5

Day 5 we decided to go it alone, and caught a taxi to a local shopping mall. It was an outdoor mall so very nice in the sunshine. The mall wasn't huge and one of the sales assistants told us about this other mall, so we caught another taxi to South Coast Plaza, which was a huge mall filled with very expensive brand stores such as Porsche, Sony Pioneer, Gucci, Coach etc. Lots of fun window shopping, Peter found a nice watch he liked, when asked the price the sales assistant casually said it was $109,000. We also saw a couple of movies while we were there, including The Departed which was excellent.

Los Angeles Day 4

View from Universal Studios


Mock crash site on the studio tour


Peter with the Apollo 13 crew


Peter with car from the Fast & Furious Tokyo drift


Peter being eaten by the shark from Jaws

Day 4 and we went to Universal Studios. We arrived around 10am after an hour on a bus there, and went straight to ride the thrill rides. Best ride was 'Revenge of the Mummy' - an indoor rollercoaster which we thought was going to be terrifying, but was actually really fun. The Jurassic Park ride was also a lot of fun, ended with an 80 foot drop over a waterfall which meant we were a little wet!
Highlight of the day for both of us was the Studio Tour - a 45 minute drive around Universal Studio backlots past the soundstages, through mock sets including experiencing an earthquake in the subway, King Kong and Jaws. No celebrities seen, although we did see where Desperate Housewives was being filmed (closed set so we couldn't drive down the road). We also saw several Special Effects shows including Backdraft where a whole room was set on fire.

Los Angeles Day 3

After art class at Disneyland Animation



Tower of Terror


Downtown in California Adventure Park

Day 3 we headed back to Disneyland, this time to visit the California Adventure Park. We were very disappointed to see that the rollercoaster, California Screamin', was closed for repairs, but still had fun on the other rides. Highlights were the Soaring over California ride (virtual ride over the state of California, like Imax combined with a rollercoaster, complete with smellvision, e.g. orange groves and pine trees), and a river raft ride (Grizzly River Run) where we both got rather wet over a waterfall drop! We also saw sevearl shows, and attended a cartoon class where we learnt to draw Donald Duck (badly!). Peter was braver than Sarah and went on the 'Twilight Zone Tower of Terror' ride - basically an elevator ride that rose up around 10 stories, then dropped suddenly to the bottom. Peter liked it, but wasn't keen to go on it again! Another surprise was what looked like a normal ferris wheel, but once on it we realised that the cars slid on rails in and out from the centre, like a mini-rollercoaster while the ferris wheel turned. This ride had a lot of screams coming from it!