Los Angeles Day 2

The Hollywood sign taken from Holleywood town



Sarah & Conan

Peter & Russell Crow




Santa Monica pier

Today we did a tour of LA.
We started in Anaheim then cruised down the freeway into the less than spectacular LA downtown. It seems because LA is so spreadout, similar to Auckland that the city was a real let down compared to San Francisco, New York and Washington.
Next stop was Hollywood town which was nothing like the movies, picture any run down small township. They do have a few tourist attractions such at the Walk of Fame (Stars in the foot path), Kodak Theatre (where they host the Academy Awards) and the Wax Museum.
Then onto Beverly Hills which was more like the Hollywood you see on TV, flash cars everywhere, Bentleys and Mercedes everywhere. They even have a special jail for the celebrities which looks more like a hotel from the outside, Rodeo drive was impressive. On the way we also travelled down the Sunset strip and saw lots of landmarks like Capital Records, Tower Records, various Hotels and Bars which celebrities hang out at. We had lunch at the Beverley Centre which is a shopping mall in Beverley Hills, Sarah was pleased to get some shopping done.
After lunch we headed to Santa Monica where we spent the afternoon. We were lucky to see Owen Wilson filming in a pawn shop here as we drove past. We then headed down to the Santa Monica Pier and fair grounds, then back to the Prominade for some more shopping.

Los Angeles Day 1

Sarah in Frontierland at Disneyland


Peter infront of the Disneyland castle

Arrived in LA last night, caught a very dodgy shuttle bus (it was swaying around the road on the freeways) to the hotel in Anaheim were we are staying. The hotel is basic but right over the road from the entrance to Disneyland.
We spent the whole day at the original Disneyland, did most of the rides and managed to avoid the big queues by using the fast pass system they have (get a ticket and come back later and a pre-allocated time). The best rides we think were Indiana Jones, Buzz Light Year and Space Mountain. (for those of you who have been here before and actually know these).
Another part of the Disneyland experience is what we call the 4pm domestic hour, when all the children are coming down off their sugar highs and the parents are exhausted. Every second or third family are yelling at each other or having a child crying.
In the evening Disneyland is spectacular, all lit up with halloween pumpkins everywhere. Also an amazing show in the lake and a huge fireworks display just before closing at midnight.

Mexico Days 4 - 7

Monkeys in the jungle at the centre of the resort


Peter's new friend, the resort lizard

Playa DeCarmen Town/Wharf

Peter with Mayan Warrier/Priest

Playa del Carmen gift shop

Resort Restaurant/Garden at night



Playa del Carmen beach

Enjoying dinner at the resort!

The rest of our Mexico trip was spent in pure holiday mode - lots of relaxing by the pool, swimming, sailing, watching the resort entertainment, drinking and eating way too much!
Also we visited Playa De Carmen a couple of times the local town, nice place with little shops running right out on the wharf.

Washington Day 2

View of Washington skyline

Washington Monument and reflecting pool

Vietnam Memorial

Trolley tour

Today was our big sightseeing day here, we got tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus tour called the Old Town Trolley tour. It worked really well as we got to choose which parts of Washington we wanted to have a look at by just getting off the bus and having a look around. The buses stop at all the tourist attractions every 20-30 minutes.
First stop was to the National Cathedral on a hill overlooking Washington, followed by the Smithsonian Space and Science Musuem. After that, visited the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veterans Memorial, finally followed by the National Museum of Natural History, aka the 'Bones & Stones' Museum.
We then had an early night with a 4am wakeup call for our flight to Mexico.

Washington Day 1

Spy Museum

Hard Rock Cafe

Today we went to the International Spy Museum, which was excellent. We spent about 4 hours looking through the whole thing. There was a lot of Spy equipment with descriptions about how they work. Also there was stories and theme rooms about spy exploits, ranging from planting bugs through to the cold war.
For dinner we went to to The Hard Rock cafe, every city seems to have one over here.
It started raining while we were eating dinner but we didn't let that ruin our plans to take some night photos of the monuments. We walking in the pouring rain for about an hour and got some fairly good photos.

Update from 4-5th day in SF

Viansa winery

Wednesday we had a long walk to the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts (after getting on not-quite-the-right-bus-but-kind-of-close), which is an amazing building built in 1915 for an international world show. Now it houses a hands on science & technology show called the Exploratorium, it is very similary to the one at Motat in Auckland but 10X larger, it took us 4 hours to go through most of it but it was excellent. After the Exploratorium, another long (but interesting) walk through the marina district back to Fishermans Whalf. We then went to the San Francisco aquarium which is almost exactly the same as Kelly Tartons but without the penguin enclosure - took us about 15 mins to see the entire thing. That evening after going back to our hotel we decided we needed to do some laundry so off to a typical American laundry up the road - complete with the resident strange mumbling man who talked to himself continuously while doing his laundry....

Thursday we spent the day doing a wine tasting tour out to Napa County and Sonoma - about an hours drive north of SF. The countryside was very dry, no green grass, everything golden brown in colour. Apparently there is no rain at all here suring summer - not even a shower! First stop was a traditional style winery, which used to be a western style ranch. Three different wines to taste here, all were very nice. After that off to an organic winery - Madonna Estate, the wine was also very nice here. We then stopped for lunch at Sonoma Square - this was like something out of the movies, a sleepy old fashioned small American town, very pretty. Our final stop for the day was Viansa winery - this place had the wow factor, built on top of a bluff overlooking the surrounding countryside. Our guide sweared it was exactly the same landscape as Tuscany - rolling golden brown hills, blue skies and vines as far as the eye could see. The actual winery building was modelled on something from Italy and was very impressive complete with vaulted wine cellar. Despite all of this the wine here wasn't all that great! Still, the view and surroundings made up for it - apparently this is a favourite place for wedding receptions and it's easy to see why.

Photos and Update from 3rd Day in SF

Our hotel

Monday night we watched the movie 'Presidio' 1988 in the hotels cinema, we had the whole cinema to ourselves. The room we are staying in is named after the movie, and there are photos and other info about the movie in our room. All the other roms in the hotel are also named after San Francisco movies (glad we're not staying in invasion of the body snatchers room!)

Tuesday, we got up late and missed out on doing the bike ride over the Golden Gate bridge. But we did get to do some museum tours in the afternoon, the first was the California Academy of Science which was interesting. Mostly aquariums but a few very interesting snakes, including some very thin long tree snakes (will post photos when we can). Next stop was the Museum of Modern Art, but on the way Sarah found a beautifully restored caruosel, which she went for a ride on. Afterwards we realised we had actually watched a documentary on the Discovery channel earlier this year about the restoration of it. The museum of modern art was very unusual, we did a guided tour of a one of the exhibitions 'Drawing Restraint' by Matthew Barney (Bjorks boyfriend). His art is.... 'very modern' and involves a lot of petrolium jelly, white plastic & exercise equipment, and symbolism of whales and atropy which went way over our heads. It became very apparent that Sarah & I have a lot to learn about modern art. Lastly we managed to upload a lot of photo's to a photo album(set) on Flickr, you can find them on the link on the right side of this page.