Thursday 25th June 2009 is a day that will be remembered by a lot of people for a very long time. It started innocently enough for us - we awoke at the Wilshire Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and had breakfast, before I took my final drive in the Nissan Altima, taking it down to 7th and Western in Los Angeles to fill the car with petrol before returning it, then dropping the car back at the Budget Rent-A-Car office at 3600 Wilshire Boulevard, pulling into the car park and remembering the difficulties I had driving out of that same car park almost four weeks earlier!! After returning the car, then walking to the office section and returning the GPS, I walked back to the hotel, marvelling at how the walk seemed so much shorter than it did back on May 31st. Total figures for the trip - 7913 miles drive, with a total of just over $730 spent on petrol.

Sarah made sure that our bags were packed and ready to go whilst I was returning to the car, so on my return to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, we went downstairs and checked out of the hotel, leaving our luggage with the hotel and booking a service to LAX to leave the Wilshire Plaza at 6:30pm that night. With that done, and the time just after 10am, we headed for the Wilshire/Normandie subway station across the road, and headed for Hollywood.

Our plan was to go on a double-decker Hollywood tour, but this time we didn't book anything, thinking that it would be relatively easy to find a tour bus once in Hollywood. We had to travel one stop towards downtown LA on the subway, and then link up with the Metro Red Line, Los Angeles's train line leading to Hollywood. We hopped off the train at Hollywood/Vine station, thinking that if there's anywhere to be in the thick of things, it would be at the two roads where the Hollywood Walk of Fame intersected. Upon arising to street level, we saw a double-decker tour bus parked across the road, and quickly crossed over to check it out. The bus was sitting in front of the Hollywood Sightseeing office, and in talking to the proprietor, he sold us on the tour that was set to leave at 12:15pm that day, and also threw in a free tour to the Hollywood sign - enough to have me quickly reaching into the wallet to obtain currency!! We had about twenty minutes until the tour to the Hollywood sign left, so we spent a few minutes walking down Hollywood Boulevard and checking out some of the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before climbing into the back of what was an elongated ute with twelve other sightseers in open air seating, and headed out to the famous Hollywood sign.

It had started as a bit of a sombre day in Hollywood, with the passing of Farrah Fawcett that morning after a long battle with cancer, and there was more delays as a whole section of Hollywood Boulevard was closed to traffic, as they were setting up for the premiere of the new Sasha Baron Cohen (think Ali G or Borat) movie Bruno in front of Grumman's Chinese Theatre, with bleachers and a red (actually, it was black) carpet set up. Whilst on the way to the Hollywood Sign, we passed by Farrah Fawcett's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and saw a lot of people in the area paying their last respects. The ute then wound it's way up the Hollywood Hills and into the Hollywoodland housing area - the housing area set up in the mid-20's that spawned the now-famous Hollywood sign - it initially read "Hollywoodland" and was an advertisement for the housing estate, but long after houses had stopped being sold by the Hollywoodland company, the "land" part of the sign was removed and the "Hollywood" part left to become the iconic figure it is today.

We didn't actually go to the sign itself - people aren't allowed to get near the sign any more without special permits and the like, but we were transported to a look-out area in the Hollywood Hills that was billed as the best spot to take photos of, and with, the sign (we got a pretty good photo of both Sarah and I with the Hollywood sign, but I haven't been able to load it onto the computer to show you, as my repairman hasn't had a chance to look at the laptop yet!!). When we arrived, we saw a very expensive-looking white Maserati parked in the area, with cameramen taking a photo of a model who was waving her arms around in various poses on the best vantage point to take photos of people with the Hollywood sign. It turns out that they were shooting a feature for a British travel magazine called Tridente - which got better when they saw us in a sort-of tour bus, pulled the Mercedes next to the bus, and snapped off a host of shots of the twelve of us looking down at the Maserati - with the promise that the photos will be published in the July edition of the magazine (when I volunteered my address to send the royalty cheque to, the photographer laughed and said something about him not receiving any royalties, which I knew was a load of hogswollop!!). So the next month may be spent scouring the Tridente website for evidence of some new-found stardom!!

After all of the photos were taken, we loaded back into the ute and headed back for the Hollywood Sightseeing office to link up with the double-decker tour bus - we were a touch worried when we were still at the Hollywood sign at 12:05pm with the double-decker tour supposed to leave at 12:15pm, but our worries were for naught - the driver of the double-decker tour was on the ute with us!! We wound our way through the Hollywood Hills, looking at all of the expensive multi-storey homes in the area, before arriving back at the Hollywood Sightseeing office just after 12:30pm, to which we transferred straight onto the double-decker bus to commence our main tour of Hollywood.

We started by once again passing by Farrah Fawcett's star on the Walk of Fame, where the official bereavement wreath from the Academy (or Screen Actors Guild - I can't quite remember which one) was being laid at the moment that we passed by very slowly on the bus. The TV cameras soon spotted us, and they stuck a camera directly at me whilst I gave them my very best two-fingered "peace" salute, which would have featured in the LA news that night - at the time, we thought it would have been the lead story. The bus took us around all of Hollywood's major sites, pointing out the places "where the stars eat", which seemed like every restaurant that we passed - some pointed out because some obscure TV star may have eaten their once some ten years ago (the little cafe that we had lunch in later in the day trumpeted the fact that part of the movie "Million Dollar Baby" starring Hilary Swank was filmed there, and the cafe was nothing to write home about, I can assure you). As we passed the Capitol Records building, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, and ducked around to avoid the road closure for the Bruno premiere, we saw what looked to be fire trucks, but were in fact red ambulances, speeding away from us with their lights flashing - which got a "oooh, something must be happening somewhere" from our tour guide. The tour was pretty good, although I got sick of the number of places "where the stars ate", taking in some of Hollywood's most famous sites - I had to restrain Sarah from jumping out of the bus with the credit card in tow as we travelled into Beverley Hills and down Rodeo Drive, the most expensive shopping area in the USA (right up there above New York's Fifth Avenue). As we travelled past the La Brea Tar Pits, where dinosaurs perished millions of years ago and where a fossil of a wooly mammoth was discovered only recently when a car park was being built at the back of the property adjacent to the Tar Pits, one of the members of our touring party received a call from his girlfriend, and he realyed the news to us minutes later that some internet sites were reporting that Michael Jackson had just passed away due to a cardiac arrest. The news was met with disbelief amongst the touring party, especially seeing as the news was only just getting out, and mixed reports were being given - the tour guide received a phone call to say that Jackson had been transferred to the UCLA Medical Centre in nearby Westwood for a liver transplant, and when we crossed by the CNN studios, where flagship American talk show Larry King Live is filmed, moments after, the TV screens outside the complex said that Jackson had been hospitalised, but was apparently unconscious when the same red ambulances that we saw speeding by us had picked him up at his rented home in LA. The rest of the tour, as we weaved our way through Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, the Miracle Mile shops on Wilshire Boulevard and Melrose Avenue (which spawned the 90's TV series Melrose Place), went in a bit of a blur (and Sarah's camera had run out of battery just before we entered Beverley Hills) as we were trying to comprehend the Michael Jackson situation. We drove by Jackson's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Vine Avenue not long before the tour ended, which had really no-one around it, and just as the bus pulled over back at the Hollywood Sightseeing office, our tour guide received a phone call with the official word that Michael Jackson had died at the age of 50 from a cardiac arrest. As soon as we hopped off the bus, we walked the short distance back to Jackson's Walk of Fame star on Vine, where the TV news trucks had started to gather, and a small crowd had built, with a circle of about five guys in their early 20's sitting around the star. We stayed for a few minutes as the word started to get around and the news sunk in, and just as the first candles were being placed on the star, we took our leave, and headed back up to Hollywood Boulevard, where we walked around for about an hour looking at the stars on the Walk of Fame as Jackson's music played out of almost every shop, and after having a quick, and late, lunch, we made our way back to Hollywood/Vine station to head back to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel to pick up our luggage and await our transfer to the LA Airport.

We arrived back at the Hotel just before 6pm, collected our luggage from the hotel's concierge, and waited in the foyer for our ride - which was a black town car run by a service preferred by the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, and carrying a $55 flat rate - about the same as a taxi. It sounds dear, and a much more cost-effective way would have been to simply take the subway out to LAX (the LAX Fly-Away buses had ceased operation for the day), but it would have involved lugging our luggage, which had grown by an extra bag as mentioned on our previous blog post, on the subway through three or four interchanges, and we couldn't be stuffed with that!! The car arrived just before 6:30pm - our flight wasn't scheduled to leave until 11:45pm, but we wanted to get there early to make sure that we had plenty of time to locate the right terminal, check in, make sure we were in the right spot and then update the blog - and had us at LAX just before 7:30pm. We were able to check-in for our flight straight away at a pretty deserted Terminal 4, and our boarding passes were issued for both the LA/Auckland and the Auckland/Melbourne legs of our flight. Our luggage was weighed and tagged - whilst our suitcases had both added about six kilograms each, and the extra bag was another ten kilograms, we were still way under our baggage allowance of two bags each at 32kg (70 lbs) per piece!! What was different though, was the the check-in desk didn't take care of our luggage - they booked it directly through to Melbourne for us, meaning that we wouldn't have to worry about it at Auckland - but we had to take it ourselves up to the TSA screening point further along the terminal, where it was then loaded onto a conveyor and disappeared into the depths of the airport, to be seen again when we arrived in Melbourne.

It was then time to pass through the Customs screening point, where not only did we have to pass our carry-on luggage, which included the laptop having to be taken out of its bag, through the X-ray machine, but I also had to remove my hooded jacket and shoes and pass them through as well!!!! All was good though - nothing beeped at me either when I walked through the scanner or when the bags passed through the machine, and it was onto the departure lounge, where we discovered that there was very little in the way of services aside from three shops selling LA souvenirs - there was a book shop/newsagent, a Burger King, a Chili's and a Starbucks coffee, and that was it. There wasn't even any internet-enabled computers, pay or not, anywhere to be located - the reason that our promised post at the airport didn't eventuate. The wait for boarding didn't seem like it was anywhere near the actual time that it took, and we boarded the plane just before 11:15pm, thinking that we might actually get a delay-free service.

I thought wrong. The plane didn't end up taking off until just before 1:00am Friday morning, a good hour after the scheduled departure time, as some bright-spark engineer over-filled the main fuel tank, throwing the balance of the plane out of whack. The excess fuel had to be transferred to another fuel tank, and the cargo then re-arranged to distribute the weight of the plane evenly, and whilst it was the sensible thing to do, it was annoying to have to wait late at night, with our eyes hanging out of our heads, because a trained and qualified engineer couldn't do his job properly.

We eventually got airborne though, and the Qantas staff wasted no time in bringing out supper - with Sarah again being served first, a good 25 minutes before I did - so that we could wolf it down and get some shut-eye. Sleeping on the plane was much easier this time around, likely because the excitement factor of the trip up wasn't there, and also because we had done it before, and we got a good six or so hours sleep, waking to look at the destination map and see only six hours remaining in our journey. I then watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on the in-flight entertainment system, which took about two-and-a-half hours, before looking again at the destination map when the movie had finished and saw that we had only an hour-and-a-half before we reached our destination. I wondered if my calculations were out or if I had fallen asleep again when I saw that the highlighted city on the map wasn't Auckland, but the Fijian city of Nadi. Eventually, other people started to look at the destination map and think that something was up as well, and the captain soon came over the public address system to tell us that there would be another delay - early-morning fog had set in pretty thickly over the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Christchurch, so we would have to land at Nadi, re-fuel and wait until the fog had lifted. We were at Nadi for right on an hour, and we weren't able to leave the plane during the stop-over, so by the time we took off again for the two-hour trip to Auckland, we were pretty keen to get the flight over with!!

The one positive that the delays gave us was that it cut down our waiting time in Auckland - instead of a five-hour lay-over, we were looking at only about ninety minutes instead. We landed in Auckland, cleared the screening point at the International Transfers station, and then waited for about an hour before we could descend to the departure gate. In that time, I took $50 out of an ATM to find that New Zealand money is of the same plastic-y consistency of Australian cash, and bought a drink and a sausage roll that tasted like it had been sitting in the bain marie for a week, and gained $40-odd dollars change. I kept a $20 note and Sarah took the rest as souvenirs to say that we had been in New Zealand, and it also meant that I had three different countries' $20 notes in my wallet, an Aussie one (which had been there all trip), a Kiwi one and a US one!!

Our flight was supposed to leave New Zealand at 1:00pm local time - it was now Saturday 27th June - and arrive in Melbourne just after 3:00pm local time, with Melbourne time being two hours behind Auckland time, meaning four hours of flying time. The plane, which was a lot smaller than our LA/Auckland plane - it was the size of a domestic Australian plane - actually left closer to 1:30pm - we boarded late, and then had to wait on the tarmac for other planes to take off at their scheduled times before we could up and leave. We got going just after 1:30pm as it was, and they again wasted no time in bringing the food out - Qantas must think that if they feed people quickly after a delay, they'll forget all about the delay!! They were pretty good with it - the food cart came around, then the drinks (Bundy Rum and Coke - you beauty!!), and then the ice-creams, which took up a good two hours of flying time. By the time I caught a bit of shut-eye, read a book and knocked off a few puzzles from the That's Life Crack A Code book that you'll remember from one of the very first posts, that was bought with the $15 allowance that Qantas gave us as compensation for our initial flight being late, we were ready to descend into Melbourne, and back home.

In arriving at Melbourne, it took almost no time at all to clear Customs, thanks to the SmartGate passport control process that Australian airports have introduced. Instead of having to line up to speak with a Customs officer, instead you put your passport (if you have an e-Passport) into a little machine face-down on the picture page, it asks you a few questions, then spits out a ticket. You take the ticket to the second SmartGate gate, insert it into the machine, stare at a camera where it verifies that your face matches the digital image recorded on the passport, and you are away. Took me three minutes - it took Sarah a little longer though, as the machine didn't recognise her face, so she had to go through the manual gate. The main delay was waiting for our luggage to come off the plane. Sarah's suitcase and the brown duffle bag were on the first lot of luggage unloaded, and my suitcase was one of the first bags down the chute on the second unload, so we gathered them, headed for the baggage screening point (where we were seperated, as Sarah had to declare a packet of Milk Duds that she had brought back to Oz for her friend Natalie), had my luggage screened and passed, and walked out into the Arrivals terminal, where both Sarah's Mum, Trish, and her cousin Ingrid were waiting for us - Sarah emerging a minute or so after me.

And so, Shaun and Sarah's American Adventure has ended. Thank you so much to everyone for keeping track of our little holiday - it astounded us to check the site stats every so often and see how many people were reading this. Unfortunately, after a couple of days of getting our bearings, it's back to the real world tomorrow - work starts again on Tuesday, and I'm commentating the EJ Whitten Legend's Game - a charity Australian Rules Football match - tomorrow night at Etihad Stadium for Melbourne radio station 3WBC (check it out on-line from 8:30pm Melbourne time on Tuesday June 30th - would make it 10:30am US Eastern Time on Wednesday July 1). Thanks in particular to the Red Sox crew who kept checking out the blog and adding their comments along the way - plans are already in place for a return next season at around the same time, but with my brother for a baseball holiday!! And so ends this little blog - it's been a pleasure writing it for you, and I hope that it gave you a good insight into our travels, and provided any future US travellers (or Americans coming to Oz) with a few tips and hints for their trip. I'm going to end this blog in what some will consider a very familiar fashion - with the same ending that I used to use for a weekly column that I wrote on the Eastern Football League website. So, for the final time on our holiday, you can stick a fork in me, as I am done.

Back in Oz, after an interesting Thursday in Hollywood remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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But first, a recap. We left you last night reasonably early, with the birthday girl's maiden blog entry rounding out the night for you. Not so for us though. After Sarah had finished her part of the blog and I posted it, she quickly went onto Google to search for session times for the movie "The Proposal", a chick flick featuring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Not my first movie preference, I would like to add, but given that yesterday was Sarah's day, I begrudingly accepted her request!! As luck would have it, the AMC movie theatre was only a block down the road from our hotel in San Francisco, so we took the nice walk, hoping to catch the 9:00pm session so that we could have dinner (at a Denny's that we passed on the way) beforehand. Unfortunately (or was it fortunately??) the 9:00pm showing had already sold out, so we settled on the 8:00pm showing - given that we arrived at the theatre at about 7:25pm, it put dinner on the back-burner.

Going to the movies in America is very similar to doing the same in Australia - the only real difference is that Americans can, and do, bring hot food into the theatre, with the concession stand (or snack bar, Aussies) selling hot dogs, pizza, pretzels and all sorts of other no-good-for-you treats. We skipped the food part of it and settled in to watch the movie - a typical chick flick that I actually somewhat enjoyed, until the final credits started rolling and there was the now-obligatory after-movie action - although I didn't see it thanks to a young lady who started to leave when the credits started rolling, but stopped to watch the after-movie stuff - WHILST STANDING UP. A few people motioned to her to sit down, but she was having none of it, and stood all the way through the final action, ruining the experience for me a little bit. This was exacerbated when we walked out of the theatre and crossed the road at the traffic lights, with the "walk" indicator smiling brightly at us when we stepped off the sidewalk. It soon changed to a flashing red hand, with a countdown in seconds of how long you have to finish your crossing. We were about half-way through, with ten seconds left to cross, so we picked up the pace a little, only to have a bus start tooting at the car at the intersection waiting for us to cross, and gesticulating at us as if we were doing the wrong thing. This is what annoys me about this country - the United States is a wonderful place to visit, and the people in the majority are courteous and accommodating, but there's an element of the American society that are rude, pushy and downright ignorant. I suppose it's the same anywhere in the world, but it seems here as if it is almost done on purpose, as if the person in question feels it's their right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and it can grate on the nerves, I tell you.

In the end, we gave dinner a miss last night, as neither of us were really hungry - the Eating Machine had blown a gasket for the night, and instead we returned to the Pickwick Hotel and went to bed, knowing that our final big driving day was ahead of us.

The alarm went off at 6:00am this morning, and anyone who knows Sarah knows of her abhorrence at waking before 9:00am on days when she doesn't have to work, so the alarm on my phone, playing "This Ain't A Scene" by Fallout Boy, was met with various moans and groans, and when I was still trying to wake her twenty minutes later, a fearful version of "The Look" was unleashed that had me scurrying to the shower!! I eventually raised Sarah - although she wasn't anywhere near fully awake, and her eating of eggs and bacon at breakfast looked very much like it was done on auto-pilot. We were finished with breakfast, packed up and checked out of the Pickwick Hotel just after 7:00am, with the GPS set to take us to Los Angeles via Highway 1 and the famed coastal route - a predicted nine hour journey, as opposed to a five-hour trip down I-5!!

But the drive was worth it - from five minutes after leaving downtown San Francisco when we turned onto Highway 1, until just after 2:00pm when Highway 1 merged with US Highway 101 and morphed into a freeway, I was completely at home on the road, with the Pacific Ocean as my companion. Having grown up with the ocean literally a stone's throw away, it makes me feel at ease when I can see the water, and we ran right alongside the Pacific today - in some stages feeling that a slight steering adjustment to the right would send us careering into the greenish-blue waters. On the other side, for the most part, were mountains - windy, bendy, challenging stretches of road not dissimilar to our trek through the Yosemite National Park and Sierra Nevada mountain range when driving to San Francisco on Monday, and the reason that the trip took longer than the run down the interstate. Sarah was snapping away happily with her camera for the journey down, and although I haven't seen the actual photos yet, if the scenery she was photographing was any indication, we should have another set of outstanding photos to show everyone on our return to Australia on the weekend.

By 3:00pm, we had finished with our coastal run, and were making our way towards the metropolis of Los Angeles, with the fact that we still had shopping bags full of stuff in the boot of our car with no big bag to bring them back to Australia. I had the bright idea of, rather than trawling around Los Angeles - where trends had indicated that the downtown shopping areas of large cities tend to be more of a department store scene - for instance, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's and Bloomingdale's as the majors (think Myer and David Jones, Aussies), whereas the suburban areas tended to feature Wal-Mart's and Target's - cheaper department stores - to stop at one of these suburban shopping malls to pick up a cheap suitcase to bring everything home in. My prayers were answered as we entered the city limits of Cammarillo, about 50 miles out of Los Angeles, and we passed a mall with a Target, right next to a freeway exit. We nicked into Target and picked out a duffle bag - there were suitcases in our price range, but they were sets of three, and I didn't want a family of suitcases invading our trip - and went and emptied out the car, packing everything as close as possible into the bags they will be travelling back to Australia in. It was a tight squeeze, even with the extra bag, and whilst there's still a little shuffling that has to be done, most everything is packed, and the car is clean (anyone who has seen my car back in Australia knows that it tends to maintain a "lived-in" look almost year-round, and the Nissan Altima wasn't all that different!!). We then drove the 50 miles into Los Angeles without too much complaint, although we entered after 5pm, therefore copping peak-hour traffic, but the pilot was much more confident in driving through Los Angeles this time around, and we made it to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel perfectly safe and sound.

The Wilshire Plaza Hotel is at 3515 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles - remarkably, almost the identical address at which we emerged from the LA Metro system, having come from Los Angeles Airport on the FlyAway bus, back on Sunday May 31st in our first hours on American soil - the entrance to the subway station is right over the road from the hotel (in fact, it's right next to the internet cafe I am writing this from), and the Budget Rent-A-Car office that the Nissan Altima calls home is just two blocks away. All I have to do is find a petrol station, which I saw not far away as we drove in, and fill 'er up, and drop it at Budget in the morning. The road trip is officially over folks - our round-trip journey to LA has seen us cross almost 8000 miles of American roads, and has given us a lifetime of happy memories that we have enjoyed sharing with you on the way. It's almost ironic that the hotel we will stay in for our last sleep in America is right opposite the point where we first started to experience our American Dream - I'm normally not into symbolism, but I feel that this is still a pretty powerful symbol of our trip coming to an end.

But, it hasn't quite ended yet. We still have tomorrow, Thursday 25th June, in which to explore Los Angeles before boarding one of Qantas's finest for the trip back to Melbourne, with a five-and-a-half hour stop-over in Auckland, New Zealand. The plane doesn't leave LA tomorrow night until 11:45pm, which had the potential to leave us with a dilemma - check-out at the Wilshire Plaza is at 12:00pm, and we didn't fancy either being at LAX eleven hours before our flight, or dragging our suitcases with us as we checked out Hollywood. Luckily, the Wilshire Plaza offers a baggage storage facility, where we can leave our bags at the hotel after check-out, to be picked up later in the day. Which will be perfect - we plan on leaving our luggage at the hotel, checking out Hollywood for the day, returning to the hotel at around 6:00pm and making our way to LAX, most likely by taxi (costly, but more convenient than lugging our luggage through the LA nightly commute).

I'll try and post a quick something from LAX tomorrow night to let everyone know that we are at the airport awaiting our flight, which is scheduled to land at Melbourne Airport at 3:30pm on Saturday, June 27th (yep, after the 38 hour day for our first day in America, we skip completely over Friday June 26th on the way home).

And the question that you are undoubtedly asking yourself - why is he in an internet cafe instead of the hotel?? Simple, really, it comes down to economics!! The Wilshire Plaza wanted 49 cents a minute for internet access (which makes San Francisco's five bucks for twenty minutes look like a bargain), whereas I got a three-hour access card here at the internet cafe for ten bucks - the equivalent of twenty minutes of hotel time!! Whilst I won't get through three hours (although over an hour has gone already - we checked out some stuff here before dinner, including seeing the Red Sox win again, this time 6-4 over the Washington Nationals, with Big Papi hitting another home run. He had one on the season when I arrived in America - I go home with Papi having gone deep seven times in the last month - if he goes into another slump, then the Red Sox fans that read this blog need to get the organisation to fly me back over here - I'm Ortiz's lucky charm!!!), it still makes for a cost-effective session.

And so ends what will be our last on-the-road blog of the trip - as mentioned, I'll try and post from the airport tomorrow night, and will wrap things up when we are back on Australian soil (and for the non-Aussies, I'll post some of the pictures from the last couple of days so you don't miss out). It's time for me to cross the road and get some shut-eye - methinks sleep could come at a premium following tomorrow!!! Good night all, and to all a good night!!

The Road Trip comes to an end...only one more sleep to go remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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But before we do (and I revert to the normal teaser rule of saving what everybody wants to see until later in the blog), let's go over a quick (remember - five bucks for twenty minutes, although I brought a prepaid card today which gives me sixty minutes for twelve bucks - bargain!!) recap of the day's activities. Breakfast was on the house today - it was part of our accommodation package here at the Pickwick Hotel, so we ventured into Little Joe's Restaurant in the hotel foyer, and picked any item off the menu. The Ham and Egg Sandwich, with hash browns (not the square hash browns that Aussies think of - this is more like a potato put through a cheese grater then fried, and is quite tasty), was the single greatest breakfast I've eaten in America, and almost put thoughts of white Up bread toasted with Vegemite into the back of my mind!! (I've got a new craving - Aussie sausages, in bread, cooked on the barbie - it must be this summer weather!!). After that, and Sarah's fried eggs, bacon and hash browns were consumerd (well, devoured, the Eating Machine is back with a vengenance having aged another year), we stepped out into San Francisco, headed for a short stroll to where a double-decker bus was waiting to pick us up to give a guided tour of San Francisco.

I'm sure you've all seen the open-air tourist double-decker buses (if you've been to New York or Sydney, you could hardly miss them), which offer the ability to either stay on the bus as it gives you a narrated tour around your specified city, or you can hop off at any number of designated stops?? That's what we took today throughout San Francisco - and it was good. To me, there's not many things to top travelling in an open-air fashion, be it bus, ferry or otherwise, and especially when you get a sunny day that's not too hot (I don't think it would have gotten above 70 degrees today - which is about 22 degress Celsius, as San Francisco never really heats up). It showed us all of the major San Francisco downtown landmarks, but the real highlight of the bus was when it passed through the downtown city boundary, and headed for a red-coloured bridge that looked strikingly familiar!!! Yep, the bus took us to a look-out point where we could see the Golden Gate Bridge, then took us on a ride over the bridge, then back over towards San Francisco. It was pretty awesome to go over it, but this was the one disadvantage of the open-air bus arrangement, as it was bloody windy and cold going over the bridge - so much so that I had to take off my beloved Red Sox baseball cap to stop it being a resident of San Francisco Bay!! The views from the bridge weren't as breathtaking as they could have been, as it was still reasonably early in the morning and the morning fog hadn't yet cleared over the bay, meaning that both downtown San Francisco and Alcatraz weren't at their picturesque best. We disembarked off the bus in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf district - an area with heaps of shops and eateries, and headed for Pier 39, where we were to meet a connecting shuttle to the next, and major, of our activities for the day. We had some time up our sleeves though, so we wandered around Pier 39 for a while, where the fog had cleared up and we were able to take photos (which, given that I'm on a public computer, can't be uploaded, but will be shown when we get back to Oz on the weekend) of Alcatraz and of San Francisco's sea lion population, which have an area at Pier 39 where they can "beach" themselves on a series of floating pontoons and sun their bodies, or have play-fights, as most seemed to be doing. We even took in lunch at the aptly named Sea Lion Cafe, where we had great views of the sea lions, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge to accompany us (after one of our "random American" photos for the day, one of our best so far with Alcatraz featuring in the background).

After lunch, and a stop at a souvenir shop (where I couldn't help myself, and bought a Red Sox hoodie), we waited at the taxi rank for Pier 39 for our connecting shuttle to.....the San Francisco SeaPlane. One of Sarah's dreams for today was to take a helicopter ride over San Francisco - well, I went one step better and got the less noisy, better for photos Seaplane to do the honours. We were picked up (or, the "Kelly's" were picked up) and taken, along with an English couple, to the seaplane base in Sausalito, a suburb of San Francisco, which meant a less-windy ride over the Golden Gate Bridge again, and loaded into the plane for what was an awesome 35-minute plane ride (the plane was a seven-seater Fokker Friendship, but there were only five of us in there, so all was good) over San Francisco and it's surrounding areas, allowing us to view, and photograph, San Francisco from up high (and I wish I could show you the photos now, as they are pretty awesome)!! This was another of those activities that we both really enjoyed, as it was a bit of a departure from the normal kind of touristy-thing, and seemed to be over far too quickly for both of our likings.

When we landed and re-entered dry land (the plane takes off on water. so we had to walk along a dock that swayed with the tide a bit), we were shuttled back to Pier 39 at Fisherman's Pier, and jumped back on the hop-on, hop-off bus to our original stop, passing through some pretty interesting San Francisco sites on the way. After a visit to the Westfield shopping centre next door to pick up another part of Sarah's birthday present which was only released today (she'll tell you more about that shortly), as well as looking for another suitcase to bring all of our extra purchases home with us (no luck yet, couldn't find anything under $90, which is far too rude for what we need it for - no matter, the souvenir stores that specialise in 3 for $15 San Francisco t-shirts will look after us), we arrived back here at the Hotel Pickwick, which brings us to this point here. Dinner will be on the cards shortly - not sure where yet, in my role today as "birthday slave", I'm waiting to be told what to do in this regard), then I think Sarah has something else planned, which she is going to research on the Internet shortly.

Before she does though, I'm going to depart the floor for the night and say my goodbyes - I will return tomorrow night from Los Angeles (the plan for tomorrow is to take Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles - reportedly one of the most beautiful drives in America), as ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it is my great pleasure to, on the anniversary of her birth, introduce to you for this first time in these blog pages to describe her birthday and her present haul in greater detail...the one, the only, Sarah Jane Lynn...all yours, honey!!

Well did I get spoilt today. Most of my presents i already knew about due to being there when he bought them but there was one in particular that I was no around for and this is a gold necklace with a heart on it with diamentes and 3 coloured stones on it which I adore. The last minute present was a Janet Evanovich novel which was only released today and the 15th in the series.

Off to dinner now (editors note - the Eating Machine grow restless), so goodbye from San Francisco.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you... remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Going to be a relatively short blog tonight for two reasons - a). today was primarily a driving day, and b). five bucks for twenty minutes - we're in a bloomin' recession here, folks!! We left you last night in Las Vegas, moaning about the lack of go in my laptop and theorising that it could be the end of this humble little blog - which, thankfully, it isn't!! The night ended in rather tame fashion - we were going to catch up with a childhood friend of mine, Allan Barrett and his family who are also holidaying in the US right now (and happened to be in Vegas over the weekend), but Sarah came down with a bit of a tummy upset - which thankfully was cleared up by this morning, a nice long bath helped!! Thought it might have been the BLT with no T (tomato) that was devoured by the Eating Machine last night that could have been spiked, but it was bereft of mayo. butter and all things harmful. By the way - Johnny Rocket's - right up there with In-N-Out Burger as the best burger I've had in the States (and now that we are back in California, look out In-N-Out Burger!!). We also planned today's trip to San Francisco, and enquired about a couple of sightseeing adventures for tomorrow, Sarah's birthday, which we hoped to hear back on.

In inputting the destination address into Google Maps, to get a rough idea of directions and travel times, it came up with two different routes to San Francisco. The shortest was back down I-15, the same way we first came to Vegas all those many weeks ago from San Diego, over the Californian border then off I-15 at Bakersfield to transfer onto I-5, which was projected to take a touch over eight hours. The other way was through northern Nevada towards Reno, then turning off and travelling via Yosemite National Park to San Francisco, which was projected to take eleven hours. Much to my surprise, Sarah chose the longer option, wanting to see Yosemite National Park as driving scenery instead of the billboards, chain motels and fast-food restaurants that dot the usual landscape.

So we were up early this morning, checking out of the Venetian with a lot more bags than we arrived with, thanks to our expedition to the Las Vegas Premium Outlets yesterday, got the car from the valet, found out that valet parking at the Venetian was free, and we left Las Vegas, not having seen a single penny of our money leave our possession by way of gambling, which I'm pretty proud of!!

We set out for San Francisco via Yosemite, hoping that the GPS would show us the right way (I had some written directions scribbled down just in case), but when I added Yosemite as a way point, it lead us a merry dance, via the exact route set out by Google Maps last night. The drive through Nevada was pretty boring, given that we were looking at nothing but desert the entire way through, until just before a little town named Tonopah, when I saw probably the first other car on the road for about half an hour, and it had red and blue flashing lights that started once I passed it, and followed me up the road. Startled, I looked down to see my speedo reading a few miles over the posted speed limit, and thought I could be in trouble. Never fear though!! Once the officer sauntered up to my window, demanding to see my license and car registration, I unloaded with the most polite Ocker I could - and he fell for it!!! We got to talking about footy, and the differences between Australian Rules, gridiron and soccer (I was out of the car by this stage, as he wanted to see my passport in conjunction with my Victorian drivers license, and the passport was in a bag in the boot of the car). It ended with the officer apologising for being an inconvenience, wished us well for our trip, and shook my hand!!! Off scott-free!! Mind you, I did keep a close eye on my speedo from then onwards.

The trip through Nevada went without any more hassle, and we crossed into California at about midday, headed for Yosemite.

Entering Yosemite is much like entering the Grand Canyon - you have to pay a fee per car to enter the park, which in this case was $20. Yosemite, though, is more set-up for hiking and camping rather than sightseeing, although Sarah did get some pretty good photos - I didn't think I'd see snow-covered mountain peaks in a Californian summer!! Where the drive was made longer, though, was not just by the diminished speeds through the eighty-odd miles of road in Yosemite (distance-wise, the Yosemite route and the I-15/1-5 routes to San Fran were almost identical distance-wise), but by the winding hills and valleys after you get out of Yosemite's park limits, then having to deal with the RV's and caravans that are doing nil miles per hour in front of you when you get into the flats! Still, we manuevered all of them successfully, and navigated our way back onto the freeways surrounding San Francisco, then over the Bay Bridge and into the Hotel Pickwick, our home for tonight and tomorrow night!!

That pretty much sums up today - and this time I really have to duck off and get my beauty sleep, as it is a certain young lady's birthday tomorrow - she's claiming a 41-hour birthday, though, as at 7:00am here this morning, it ticked past 12:00am on Tuesday 23rd June in Australia, so it's multiple birthdays for Sarah this year. Being the dutiful boyfriend, I've allowed her control of the itinerary tomorrow (which she has been planning for a couple of weeks now) and have said I will do whatever she wants tomorrow as well. There's also the gifts, which, thanks to prudent bargain hunting, haven't left as big a hole in the pocket as they could have, but I'm hoping will still bring a smile to Sarah's face - I'll let you know tomorrow night!! Until then, though, I bid you adieu, as my five bucks has quickly turned into twelve, so I need to save some money for tomorrow night's blog. See you tomorrow night!!

Are you going, to San Francisco...?? remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Twenty minutes ago, everything was looking OK - we had just finalised our hotel bookings and driving directions for our trip to San Francisco starting tomorrow, and I was just about to start on today's blog entry, when the problem I've been having with the wi-fi connection here at the Venetian struck again, in that the computer shut itself down to safeguard against a system crash, however there was a difference this time - it hasn't fired back up since. Calls have been made to my IT support back in Australia - ie. my brother Daniel - but it looks like the computer can't be fixed without Dan looking at it, short of blowing away the hard drive and starting again, which would knock out all of our photos (which Sarah still has on her camera, thankfully) and all of her iPod songs, so I'm reticent to do that.

What that means, is that I may not have the facilities to continue writing the blog. Thankfully, after tonight we only have three more nights in America, so it's better to have happened now than at the start of the trip. Hopefully, our accommodation from here on in will have some sort of pay internet stations, so we can at least report in to say that all is well and check e-mails, comments etc (so keep commenting folks, we'll still get them)!! Luckily, not much happened today, as we basically had a "shopping" day at the Las Vegas Premium Outlet mall, but Sarah was going to make her blog debut tonight and outline the massage she had today at the Canyon Ranch Spa here at the Venetian (and Mum and Nan, we had the photo of Sarah in the top that you brought her to put up here too)!!

I'm just about out of time here, so I will have to bid you adieu for tonight, and hope that either a miracle happens and the computer regains life (it won't boot up the Windows start-up sequence), or that the Pickwick Hotel in San Francisco can look after us on the internet front. We'll try and get something up here tomorrow night, but I can't vouch for quality or quantity. Until then, folks, we are still both safe and well, so there's nothing to worry about!!

Houston, we have a problem... remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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But let’s rewind a touch, and talk about yesterday (Friday) morning, which started with the crow call – or the train horn, more appropriately – at 6:00am in Flagstaff, Arizona. Bit rude, I know, but the plan was to get up to the Grand Canyon early to try and beat some of the crowds. After getting ready and having breakfast at the Grand Railroad Café (a whopping great New York steak and eggs to fuel me for the day, whilst Sarah had an omelette that Steve Hooker would have a hard time pole vaulting over), we left for the Grand Canyon just after seven, expecting to be there not long after eight. It took a little longer than that though – it was about an eighty-mile trip, and there were some slow speed zones getting out of Flagstaff, so the trip took a little longer than I thought it would – although going past old mate Fred Flinstone at a little town called Valle on the way helped break up the drive!!

We didn’t actually get all the way to the Grand Canyon though, as we stopped at a little town called Tusayan first – about five miles from the Canyon itself, and home of an IMAX theatre playing a show called “Inner Secrets of the Grand Canyon”. We stopped and watched the movie – we had just missed the 8:30am screening, so we hung around for the 9:30am screening. The show was pretty good – as all things in IMAX seem to be – and told some of the history of the Grand Canyon, it’s former inhabitants and the men that first navigated the Colorado River through the Canyon. After the half-hour show though, our appetites for the real thing were sufficiently whetted – Sarah practically ran to the car once the movie had finished – and we set out for the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is in its own National Park, which is governed by a section of the US Government, so there’s an entry fee to get in, which was fully expected. $25 per vehicle was the charge, which is pretty good in my view. We were smart about parking too. We had already figured out that the second car park – Parking Lot A – was going to be the way to go, as we figured that the first parking lot we would come across, near a section of the Canyon called Mather Point, would be choc-a-block with people trying to park at the first lot they saw!! True to form, there was a bottleneck of twenty cars searching for one spot at the Mather Point car park, so we smiled and waved at them as we sailed past (using the term “waved” is borrowing some literary license – I was only waving with one finger!!!) and into the almost-empty Parking Lot A!!!

If you don’t like walking, then the Grand Canyon is not for you, as to get the best views, even from the rim of the Canyon, then a little bit of leg work is required. Ideally, you would spend a couple of days in the Canyon and hike down into it, but walking around the Rim was plenty for a couple of fit specimens like Sarah and I – I was fairly stuffed after a pretty steep ascent at one point!! The Grand Canyon do offer a series of shuttle buses to get you from point-to-point as well, which can be a big help (yesterday wasn’t a particularly hot day, but fatigue can set in pretty quickly regardless). A tip if you’re heading in the Grand Canyon direction – keep yourself hydrated by drinking plenty of water or sports drinks, as there’s not a lot of places to buy them once you’re up there on the Rim looking for the best shots!!!

We explored the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, easily the most popular for tourists, as it is open nearly all year round. The North Rim is only open from May through November, and can be a bit easier to get around, but whilst it is only eleven miles (seventeen kilometres) from the South Rim to the North Rim as the crow flies, the fact that the crow has to fly over a bloody big hole between the two rims means that should you want to drive from the South Rim to the North Rim, then it’s a five-hour, 215 mile drive!! The South Rim is just fine, don’t you worry about that, but I only recommend the North Rim for those travelling directly from states north of Arizona.

So, to the Grand Canyon itself. How do you describe the beauty of the Grand Canyon?? It’s hard to define it under a single term – you really have to see the scenery, and how the hues of the landscape change as shadow sets in and out – to be able to find the right words. I saw it, and even I struggle to define it. “Breath-taking” is a good start – some of the views are absolutely awesome, and we only scratched the surface of it, as we skirted only the rim of the canyon. Below are some of the photos we took – you’ll notice our mugs ruining the landscape in some of the shots, including our “random American” picture, which was actually taken this time by a family from Canberra also holidaying in the States – I nearly shed a tear when I heard the mother’s Ocker twang in her accent – so you can judge for yourself this beautiful part of the American landscape!!!

We spent a good portion of the day at the Grand Canyon (and we have heaps more photos which we will show you when we get back to Oz), with the trusty Altima pulling out of Parking Lot A just after 3:00pm, pointing in the direction of the town of Williams, Arizona, then back onto I-40 and headed for Vegas. The trip, according to our GPS, would take the best part of about four-and-a-half hours, meaning we would be in Vegas by about 7:30pm. Given that we hadn’t stopped for petrol since lunch on Thursday at Grants, New Mexico (which I mentioned in Thursday’s blog, if you haven’t read that yet), I thought I’d pull into Williams and fill up. Wrong move. Advice for young players – make sure you fill up in Flagstaff, or have enough petrol to get you about 20 miles past Williams to some of the smaller towns just off I-40. I think the people of Williams must be reading the blog, and said to themselves “hey, that Aussie fella is passing through here and will probably need petrol, so let’s take him for a ride”. And taken I was – petrol was $3.17 per gallon, easily the most expensive I have purchased in America. As such, I only put twenty bucks worth in, figuring that it would make sure I got to Vegas with no worries. I cursed a fair lick when we got twenty miles down the road and petrol was running at $2.67 per gallon – I thought such words would never spew from the mouth of a naïve, country Victorian, Christian-raised lad!!!! We pulled off Interstate 40 at a little Arizona town called Kingman – again, a place probably no bigger population-wise than Sarah’s home town of Orbost, but with every chain motel, petrol station and fast-food restaurant you could think of – and headed down Highway 93, which takes you 100 miles into Las Vegas, and also over the Hoover Dam. I’m going to quote directly from Wikipedia about the Hoover Dam, as I didn’t know much about its origins until I just looked them up – Wikipedia is a bloody handy resource, an internet encyclopedia for those unaware, located on the internet at http://en.wikipedia.org

“Hoover Dam, originally known as Boulder Dam, is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada. When completed in 1936, it was both the world's largest electric-power generating station and the world's largest concrete structure. It was surpassed in both these respects by the Grand Coulee Dam in 1945. It is currently the world's 35th-largest hydroelectric generating station. This dam, located 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, is named after Herbert Hoover, who played an instrumental role in its construction, first as the Secretary of Commerce and then later as the President of the United States. Construction began in 1931 and was completed in 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule. The dam and the power plant are operated by the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, Hoover Dam was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985. Lake Mead is the reservoir created behind the dam, named after Elwood Mead, who oversaw the construction of the dam.”

So there’s the information about the Hoover Dam – another pretty impressive place to view, and we had plenty of time to view it, as well, as traffic is a pain in the proverbial from about twenty miles before the Dam, and then as you cross over it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y in a single lane of traffic at about zero miles per hour!! The Arizona Department of Transport have decided in their wisdom to build a four-lane both ways bridge over the Hoover Dam to ease the traffic congestion for people driving to Las Vegas, and whilst this is going to be a fantastic idea once it is up and running, it wasn’t much help for us driving through their last night, and it took us about forty minutes to drive a couple of miles over the Hoover Dam – having a security checkpoint a couple of miles away doesn’t help, where the pick-up trucks that SO MANY AMERICANS HAVE (Aussies – think utes on steroids) that look the slightest bit suspicious. Knowing what was going on, but not sure if I had to hand over license and registration etc, I wound down the window and gave the young constable organising the show the biggest dose of Ocker I’ve unleashed this trip – a “G’day”, a bit of “what’s goin’ on, mate” and the like, enough to make him smile, explain that it’s a “security checkpoint, sir” and wave me on through!!! The slow drive over the Hoover Dam gave Sarah plenty of time to take photos though, and here’s a couple of them, including the bridge that is being built.

After crossing the Hoover Dam, we travelled the thirty miles into Las Vegas (with the sun in that annoying position that when you flip down the sun-visor on the car, it still gets underneath it), and thanks to the GPS doing a sterling service, drove straight into the Venetian Hotel and Casino and into the self-parking area. After driving around there for about ten minutes and not finding a park, or a way to go to find the upper parking level, I got fed up and drove to the valet level, where the valets parked my car with no problems (and no dollars changed hands, an added benefit). We grabbed our luggage and worked our way through the maze that is the Venetian – past shops, restaurant and the casino floor to the main entrance and the check-in counter. It took us a good twenty minutes waiting in line to get to the check-in counter, so thankfully things were efficient when we got there. We then headed up to the sixth floor of the Venezia tower to our room – a Deluxe King Suite, with a king-sized bed with it’s own flat-screen TV, a sunken lounge room with another flat-screen TV, an L-shaped five-seater couch, a desk with phone, copier and printer (and somewhat dodgy wi-fi – more on that later), and a small table and chairs. Then there’s the bathroom with two sinks, a separate bath and shower and ANOTHER (albeit small) flat-screen TV. Like I said earlier, a Christine suite!! After getting settled, we went downstairs to find something to eat, and got no further than a gelato stand that has twenty-four different flavours of lactose-free sorbet, which saw Sarah go weak at the knees and say “this is my dream shop”!! We had a sorbet, took a walk down the Strip to have a look around, checking out Treasure Island casino and the surrounds for a bit, then came back up to the suite, nice and stuffed after realising exactly how long the day was!!! I put the small apology post on the blog site that you saw below, not having the energy to sit up and pen the above last night, and retired for the night, knowing that the alarm wasn’t going off this morning!!

Now for Saturday, and waking up unassisted at about 9:30am after a fantastic sleep in our king-sized bed!! I got up and started writing this blog entry, but experienced a few problems with the computer, being that one of the drivers (or something like that) that is needed to power the wi-fi connection playing havoc with my laptop and frustratingly causing it to turn the computer off of it’s own accord, which got old very quickly – especially after I thought I had the problem covered and was writing away happily, only for the laptop to just turn itself off again. I’ve isolated the problem – if I turn the wi-fi connection off, there’s no problem, so this blog has been written on Microsoft Word then transferred over to Travellers Point, with the photos transferred the same way!!
At about 11:30am I gave up with the blog, vowing to write it later (reasoning that Australia wasn’t out of bed on Sunday morning yet, so it was OK), and we headed out to see what Las Vegas had to offer. First stop was again the sorbet shop, where the Eating Machine was de-railed after ordering a double scoop, but not being able to finish it off!! After that, first port of call was the Venetian’s replica of Venice’s Grand Canal, to head for a gondola ride. First, here’s some photos of the Venetian, and their re-creation of the streets of Venice. Note that most photos look like we are outside – where you see blue skies and clouds, we are actually inside!!!

The Venetian have two different gondola rides – one inside, under the painted ceiling, and one outside under the real skies of Vegas. Given that the weather was sunny without being too hot (and because we were sensible and had applied sunscreen before we went out), we chose the outside gondola ride. It’s a four person ride, at $16 a head, or you can hire a private two-person gondola for $64. That is, if you are anyone else apart from us!!! We had two groups of three in front of us in line, then only a group of four behind us (it’s usually four people per gondola), so we were bundled into to the gondola on our own!!! The ride was nice and calm, taking about twenty minutes around an artifically-made course, with the gondolier singing in Italian for some of the way around – including an early “Happy Birthday” to Sarah (it’s on Tuesday 23rd, for those of you wanting to send comments, e-mails and gifts of cash and jewellery to save my pocket-book!!) in Italian, which was really nice. Here’s a couple of photos – us on the gondola, and the view from the ride!!

After the gondola ride, we went for a walk down the Strip again, checking out a few of the casinos and just enjoying the vibe of Las Vegas. It’s interesting to see people walking the streets with beers and assorted alcoholic drinks at 12:30pm!! We headed for the Bellagio, which many of you may remember as the casino that George Clooney, Brad Pitt and mates knocked off on the movie Ocean’s Eleven, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous Bellagio dancing fountains. We caught them briefly as we crossed over the bridge from Bally’s to the Bellagio, and here’s a few photos from that!!

Knowing that the fountains do their thing every half-an-hour, it gave us a chance to check out the shops at the Bellagio, which are a veritable “who’s who” of shopping. I was led into Tiffany and Co, Chanel, Gucci and a lot of similarly expensive stores, with items that were well outside our price range (Sarah picked up a small Gucci handbag that she had taken a fancy to, only to put it back very quickly when she saw the price tag of $3150!!!). Sarah also snapped a couple of shots of the interior roof of the Bellagio’s shopping strip, which are pictured below.

We were then lucky enough to secure a spot in the shade to watch the Bellagio dancing fountains, a nice routine set against the song “All That Jazz” from the musical Chicago. Here are some photos from the routine, which was pretty cool!!

With the Bellagio in the bag, we walked back to the Venetian, via an outside shopping strip near the Flamingo where Sarah picked up a couple of dresses that can be worn in heaps of different ways, and took five before heading to the Food Court for a quick lunch, then to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum here at the Venetian!!

We picked up our tickets at a place called HalfTix, or something similar, where they sell half-price tickets to shows, restaurants, tours and the like. Instead of paying $25 a head plus tax, we coughed up $38 in total, which included HalfTix’s commission – a pretty good deal!! I really like Madame Tussauds, and their representation of celebrities, sports stars, Vegas personalities and American personalities. Here’s some of the celebrities we encountered in the museum – and yes, I’ll put beneath each of them who we are with to help you out!!

Here’s me with Julia Roberts…

“
Shaun and the “Governator”, Arnold Schwarzenger

Sarah with actor Matthew McConaughey

Sarah with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

Doing my best “People’s Eyebrow” with The Rock

Throwing out gang signs with rapper Snoop Dogg

Sarah having a casual chat with Cameron Diaz

Sarah with George Clooney

Putting with Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer watching on

An old mate, Michael Jordan

Shooting a two-pointer over Shaquille O’Neal – and scoring!!!

Sarah shaking her rump with Beyonce

Getting an autograph from a young bloke that you may know named Elvis!!

Both of us, one after the other, with Marilyn Monroe

Waiting for a deal at the poker table with actor Ben Affleck

Us with a much older Elvis!

Sarah with Vegas legends Siegfried and Roy, and their famous tiger!!

Shaping up to Muhammed Ali

Sarah with JFK and Jackie O

Sarah with Princess Di

Me walking on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

"
The both of us with President Obama

Shooting the breeze with Honest Abe.

And folks, that basically brings you up-to-the-minute with what we are doing – we’ve spent the last couple of hours relaxing – whilst I’ve written this blog entry with ESPN on in the background (watching the score ticker for the Red Sox playing the Atlanta Braves, with the Red Sox winning 3-0 on the back of ace pitcher Josh Beckett pitching all nine innings whilst keeping the Braves scoreless), Sarah has been playing with her new dresses, trying the different styles of dress she can make with them!! We’re going out for dinner shortly (and might take in a quick swim at the Venetian’s awesome pool complex) and will likely have another look around Vegas under lights, but will update you on that tomorrow night!! Wow, that one took a while, but you got two days’ worth in one hit, with some pretty good scenery on the way through, so hope you enjoyed it!!! See you tomorrow night, again from Vegas

Visiting the Grand Canyon, and living large in Las Vegas remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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But, sadly, it's a case of "more on that tomorrow". For the first time on the trip so far, I find myself so devoid of energy at the end of the day that I couldn't do the Grand Canyon the justice it deserves today. So I'm going to postpone things a bit - by about twelve hours or so, so that when you get up on Sunday morning in Australia, or as you settle into a Saturday lunch in the USA, you can do so reading about our adventures!! Apologies to anyone disappointed, but I am truly knackered. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it in the morning - a morning where the alarm won't go off!!!!

Talk soon people!!

Postponement of Grand Canyon/driving to Las Vegas entry remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Thankfully for the sanity of all concerned, it was a later start to the day than usual today. Bed was arisen from at 8:00am, and the road wasn't properly hit until 9:30am, as we had nature helping us out with our timings today. It still figured to be a reasonably long drive today - after all, 591 miles is the best part of 1000 kilometres, to help those with a more metric bent to their reasoning - but we were set to cross two time-zones today, as mentioned over the past couple of days, to give us a chop-out on the time side of things.

I slept surprisingly well last night, considering the venom that spewed out onto this page about hotel over-charges last night. Normally when something like that happens, I find myself thinking about it in bed all night, and it normally annoys me to the point where I wake up and can't get back to sleep thinking about it. No such worries last night thankfully, but the first thing I did was make the call when I woke up this morning to the Courtyard Marriott in Florida. It seems that the over-charge was actually a credit hold set by the hotel, as they do to everyone to ensure they check out at the right times and don't nick off with any of their stuff. The adjustment had been made by them yesterday, and when I again looked at the Travel Card statement on-line tonight, all was well!!

The drive today headed out over three states - Texas, where we started, New Mexico, which took the brunt of today's drive, and Arizona, where we are now. We did just over 60 miles in Texas, and a bit over 100 miles in Arizona today, which means that, yep, we saw a lot of New Mexico!!! The drive today also took in a lot of the old Route 66 - in between towns mostly, as Interstate 40 has superceded it in those areas. Texas and the eastern areas of New Mexico advertised their share of Route 66 museums, which I wouldn't have minded stopping and taking a look at, however I don't know if Sarah would have been all that interested, so we pushed on. Sarah's not really all that fond of our long, driving days - whilst she appreciates my passion for wanting to drive across this country, with nothing to really catch her attention, she finds herself a touch bored from time to time. Taking photos of the various "Welcome" signs has taken her attention - the New Mexico "Welcome" sign will be up tomorrow, as the camera is in a state of charge at the moment, preparing itself for an onslaught tomorrow, and the Arizona sign was taken on our original long driving day from Las Vegas to Denver when we flirted with Arizona - check out the entry titled "From Sin City to the Mile High City" for more details.

New Mexico was an interesting state to drive through, and you can really break it off into two segments - the horizontal points of the compass either side of the state's biggest city, Albuquerque (I made myself proud today by doing something that Bugs Bunny couldn't do!! How many of you watched Bugs Bunny cartoons as a kid, and always wondered why he always "forgot to take a left at Alburquerque"?? Well, Bugs's words were ringing in my ears as I-40 approached Alburquerque, and I took the left fork of a freeway junction to head towards Alburquerque, thinking "take that Bugs, I turned left at Alburquerque OK!!". To the east of 'Querque (spelling the whole word is doing my head in!!), the road was flat and pretty much lifeless for the best part of 200 miles. Once we got through 'Querque, though, New Mexico suddenly came to life!! The scenery changed - the Continental Divide made for some fantastic looking contours (which unfortunately the camera-woman was asleep to capture), random casino's started appearing in the middle of what looked to be desert, complete with tumbleweeds (they weren't blowing though - there was no wind and they were too far away from the 75mph legal limit on I-40). Route 66 snaked off here, there and everywhere, and some good-looking desert oases made their way into our viewing site. We allowed ourselves a stop at a place in New Mexico called Grants, about 60 miles west of 'Querque, for a meal at Denny's, a look around Wal-Mart (which again cost me money - I knew it was bad news when we stepped out of the car and Sarah said "Wal-Mart, here we come!!" - for more stuff for Sarah's birthday next week), and then soon made our way out of New Mexico, to drive the 120-odd miles required to reach Flagstaff.

When we crossed the Arizona border, I told Sarah to grab the camera and have it ready, given that Arizona had given us such a spectacularly scenic show when we briefly visited it the first time around. Unfortunately, nothing photogenic reared it's head - there were a couple of Indian reservations that we passed, with billboards galore advertising that they flog off hand-made Indian artefcats (we're talking American Indians here, not the Indians that, back home, come into me every single day with a resume asking if we have a job for them, thinking that we are a cleaning company - resume's that get thrown straight in the bin for reasons I would prefer to explain in person), fireworks and petrol a good 15 cents dearer than servo's in the main towns!! The 120 miles went fairly quickly, and soon enough we were rolling into Flagstaff, and turning off I-40 for our first drive down the real, designated Route 66 - which lasted all of about half a mile before we arrived at the Howard Johnson Motel (HoJo's, yeah!!) and ended the day's driving at about 4:45pm local time - meaning that if you take our stop in Grants out, which went over an hour, our cosmetic travel time was only about six hours (with the time-zone shifts in effect)!! Still, that's not too bad - sure, I'm tired now as my body clock is telling me it's almost midnight when the red LED display next to me says 9:44pm, but that will reset itself overnight - and besides, this is the time zone we will be in for the rest of our trip now - 17 hours behind Melbourne time (which should give me a chance to check out the Eastern Football League's video streaming of our Match of the Day tomorrow between Balwyn and Noble Park - check it out at http://www.efl.org.au from 2:10pm Saturday Melbourne time) for all taking note.

Dinner tonight was very nice as well - the HoJo's has an adjacent restaurant called the "Grand Railroad Cafe", which is made up in the style of an old American diner, with Route 66 and the train line right outside the window. As I tried (and failed) to work my way through a typically American version of a chicken parma (cheese slices on top of a crumbed breast fillet) sitting on a mountain of spaghetti and marinara sauce (tip for the uninitiated - marinara sauce here in America is simply just plain old tomato pasta sauce - marinara pasta sauce in Australia is a seafood-based sauce normally swimming with all varities of crustacea), it was pleasing to sit back and watch the cars go by on the Mother Road, thinking that the same thing was an American institution as little as twenty-five years ago.

We have to start thinking about returning to the rat race soon too - Sarah's Mum, Trish, who has been a frequent and appreciated "commenter" on the blog during our trip, as has my darling Mum Christine, left a message to say that she's right to pick us up from Melbourne Airport Saturday week, so that's one hurdle crossed!!!

Whatever you do, bookmark this blog and set your alarm for about this time tomorrow - maybe check it out after the Balwyn/Noble game - as we will have pictures from our day at the Grand Canyon, which both of us are really looking forward too. The phrases "breathtaking", "awe-inspiring" and "great place for a wedding proposal" have been thrown up by various people who have already seen the Grand Canyon, so I will confirm all of those tomorrow - except maybe the last one, I've been warned against that for the time being!!! Then, after we've done the Canyon in it's entirety, it's again time to Viva Las Vegas - and this time, no expense has been spared, as we've booked a Deluxe King Suite at the Venetian Hotel and Casino, right on the Las Vegas Strip, for the three nights we will be in Sin City - it's sort of a "thank-you" to my darling for persisting with all of the driving that we have done. Mind you, there's still two "driving days" to go for the trip (tomorrow doesn't really count, as it's only about four-ish hours from the Grand Canyon's South Rim to Vegas), and both of them are Sarah-approved drives - from Vegas to San Francisco on Monday so we're in Frisco for her birthday on Tuesday, then the trip from Frisco back to Los Angeles on Wednesday down Highway 1 - the US version of the Great Ocean Road. Which means that I need to get my beauty sleep (off-topic for a minute, I slipped that into conversation not too long ago - can't remember with who, but I'm tipping it would have been football-related - and my correspondant, who for the life of me I can't remember their identity, told me if I needed a beauty sleep, I'd have to sleep for a month!!) so that I can report in tomorrow night in decent fettle. So it's good night from Arizona then folks, and we'll be back bright and cheery tomorrow, with photos aplenty, and stories to tell. Open wide, come inside...it's Shaun and Sarah's American Adventures, in it's last week of receiving top billing in these parts!!

Getting our kicks on Route 66 remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Good evening folks, from rootin’, tootin’ Amarillo, Texas, in the Texas Panhandle. We report in from the La Quinta Inn just off Interstate 40 in Amarillo, as road trip leg number three starts to get numerical!!

I’ll get back to the magic number in a minute, as I have numbers floating through my head at the moment. I just checked our Travel Card balance and statement, so we know how much money we have left for the last week of our trip, and when I was looking through the charges that were on the card, I found that the Courtyard Marriott have over-charged me by about $50 for our recent stay in Orlando. As mentioned yesterday, the folio was slipped under our door before we left there yesterday morning, and it had the correct charge on it. I did the video check-out from our room before we left, and it had the correct amount on it. Now, though, an extra amount has been charged, which I think was for the food court dinners, which were supposed to be credited from the account. Nevertheless, a phone call will be made first thing tomorrow morning to sort it out and have the over-charge refunded back to our Travel Card, else it will be taken higher (and I already have the forms to do so).

Sorry, just wanted to get that off my chest – I hate getting over-charged at the best of times, let alone when it seems to be a clerical error that could, and should, have easily been avoided (and, in fact, given that I have the adjustment ON MY BILL, IN BLACK AND WHITE IN FRONT OF ME). There’s my rant for the day – and I’ll hold off on my final recommendation of the Courtyard Marriott in Orlando until after I’ve spoken to them in the morning.

Now, back to the magic number, 907. Why is that so special?? That’s the number of miles it is from the Super 8 Motel in Jasper, Alabama to the La Quinta Inn here in Amarillo, Texas, and hence this is the number that flashed up at me from the trip metre when I pressed the button to silence the ignition at 8:20pm today, after 13 hours of driving. Why so long, you ask?? We want to be at the Grand Canyon on Friday morning, so that the last week of our trip falls into place nicely. It was always going to take three full days of driving to get from Orlando to Flagstaff, Arizona (the closest point on Interstate 40 to the Grand Canyon, and the town we will be using as the launching pad to the Canyon), and we did our ten hours yesterday to get to Jasper, then we were going to do 10 hours today to get us to about Sayre, Oklahoma, then another ten hours tomorrow to get us to Flagstaff, knowing that we gain two hours on the drive tomorrow by passing from the Central to the Mountain time zones, and by Arizona not being on Daylight Savings time, and as such being on Pacific time. Instead, though, when we were going through the map last night, Sarah mentioned about how she had her heart set on spending a night in Texas on our journey, and so Amarillo it had to be!! Thankfully, it was pretty straight driving all the way, and hence was done easier (physically) than I thought it would be. To put it into perspective, for the Aussies reading, try driving from my hometown of Portland, an hour from the South Australian border in south-western Victoria, to Sarah’s hometown of Orbost, an hour from the New South Wales border in south-eastern Victoria, then back again in the same day. (Keep in mind though, that speed limits here make it easier time-wise than it would back home).

As a result, we passed through six different states today to get to Amarillo. The first was (obviously) Alabama, and I’ll post the “Welcome” photo here as it didn’t get a run yesterday

We drove for about 50 miles through Alabama along Highway 78, which now bypassed most towns it saw due to being earmarked as a future Interstate freeway – I-22, before we reached the border to Mississipi, in which we drove past Tupelo, the birthplace of one Elvis Presley!!

Whilst we didn’t spend a great deal of time in Mississipi, we spent even less in Tennessee – a good thing too, as Sarah missed the Welcome photo as we came in. Basically, we skirted Memphis – whilst on the Elvis topic, the home of Graceland, which we very nearly came into a close encounter with (in fact we would have if not for the LOOOOONG drive scheduled), as you will see below.

I’d reckon that we spent about 20 minutes in Tennessee, before we crossed over into Arkansas as we escaped not just the Memphis city limits, but also Highway 78, as we worked our way back onto the Interstate system, in particular Interstate 40, which carried us out of Tennessee and over a border into Arkansas. Sarah had the camera poised to photograph the “Welcome to Arkansas” sign as we crossed over a bridge that separated Tennessee and Arkansas. As Sarah scoured the end of the bridge to prepare for the photo, we saw the Welcome sign sail effortlessly above our heads, suspended from one of the “arches” (I can’t think of a better name for it) on the bridge!! We then spent a good portion of the morning driving through Arkansas, stopping at a little place about 50 miles from the Oklahoma border called Ozark to fill up the car with petrol, as I had already gone through three-quarters of a tank to drive the 420-odd miles to that point, and also to grab a sandwich at the Subway store that was in the petrol station (and yes, I know, I said that I wasn’t going to visit any chain food store that has a presence in Australia. I changed my mind slightly today, and instead ate a variation of the sandwich that we don’t have in Australia, getting it on flatbread (not pita bread). Anyway, I was craving the salad fix, so it was allright to bend the rules just this once!!).

About 40 minutes after lunch, we then passed into Oklahoma, and having been disappointed with her previous miss, Sarah made sure that she wasn’t missing this photo!!

The drive through Oklahoma was mostly ho-hum kind of stuff, mainly because we had 330 miles of it to drive before another hundred through Texas. I thought I had doomed myself again when we started to approach Oklahoma City, Oklahoma’s largest city, just after 4:20pm, but thankfully the peak-hour traffic moved in directions away from us, and any delays through Okie City were minimal at best. It was then quite eerie to see little to no traffic on the roads as we passed through smaller Oklahoma towns like Clinton and Sayre, with historic Route 66 now being usurped by I-40 through this area, except where it squirts through the town centres, and into Texas..

OK, I know, that’s not the best photo in the world. But it is the Texas welcome sign from a distance, which came up a bit quick on Sarah (may have something to do with Peter Brock behind the wheel thanks to a legal speed limit of 70 miles per hour!!). Once we passed that sign, we knew we were on the home stretch for the day, and as the night started to get darker and the warning light on my petrol gauge shone brighter – we had chewed up all of the fuel we purchased in Ozark as you would imagine, being another 500-odd miles on from that point, and we crawled into Amarillo on about 13 miles of gas (there’s a petrol station across the road from the hotel though, so all will be right for the morning).

Amarillo is a funny old town. It’s quite spread out – there are 13 miles between where we passed the “Welcome to Amarillo” sign and our La Quinta Inn – but since Route 66 was decommissioned back in the 80’s, the only real attraction to Amarillo is the Big Texan Steakhouse, which offers a free 72oz (about 2.2kg if my conversion is up to scratch) steak dinner to anyone who can eat it in a hour. Plenty have tried, and plenty have succeeded – although those who literally bite off more than they can chew get bitten again, as if you don’t eat the meal in the allotted hour, you have to cough up $72, which I’d imagine would include those two American customs – tax and tip – to bring it more likely to about $88!!!

And for those wondering, no, I didn’t give it a go. I’ve struggled eating a 1kg steak at Universal Pizza on Lygon Street in Carlton a couple of times, and couldn’t fathom eating a steak more than double the size, plus sides!! Also, the Big Texan is a good ten miles back down I-40, and after having driven 907 miles, I wasn’t going back for a meal when there were perfectly good restaurants across the road!!

Or, at least we thought there were. The Golden Corral was our intended destination – after missing out on it thanks to the stoopid lines in Orlando, we were looking forward to a buffet packed with veggies!! As we walked over the road (a tricky proposition in itself – we didn’t fancy crossing a six-lane highway in failing light, there was no footpath and the little green man at the traffic lights didn’t want to appear), we saw the lights on and few people at Golden Corral – good, no lines, and the internet said it’s open until 10pm. The internet lies. The Golden Corral shut at 9pm – no good for us standing on the doorstep at 9:15pm. Our second, and eventual, choice, was pretty interesting too – the Outback Steakhouse on the other side of I-40. No need for the car, you can cross underneath the underpass, and we were standing on the doorstep of the Outback Steakhouse in no time, practising my best Ocker accent as, you see, the Outback Steakhouse is an Australian-themed restaurant. I was actually a little excited about this – perhaps they had pie and chips, or bangers and mash, or even a dirty great parma on the menu. Nup, it was all the usual American dishes with fancy names, like “Victoria’s Steak”, “Queensland Delight” and “New Zealand Lamb Ribs”, which I wasn’t touching, as I didn’t know whether the lamb was prepared in true Kiwi style or not!!!!! (Ooops, Nanna test!!). There wasn’t even Lamb’s Fry and Bacon, which I despise, but is a staple of the Aussie counter lunch menu!! I was going to have a VB if they were on offer – but again, the best they could offer was Coopers Pale Ale, Boag’s Premium and the ubiquitous Fosters – the stuff that is synonomous with Aussies overseas, yet we Aussies never touch it back home!! Funnily, once the waitress heard our accent and asked where we were from (yep, it was an all-Yank staff as well), she immediately rushed off and got the manager, and turned us into quasi-celebrities for the rest of the night!!! Unfortunately, the celebrity status didn’t extend to picking up the tab though!!!!

And that ends another day on the road, with Flagstaff, Arizona tomorrow (Thursday) night’s destination, to facilitate an early start Friday morning to see the Grand Canyon for the day, then hit Las Vegas Friday night, this time staying for three nights though. Until then, though, there’s another 550-odd miles of I-40 to tackle tomorrow, which after today’s magic number, should be a walk in the park. Still, one thing America has taught me is take nothing for granted (apart from Red Sox victories – another win in the bag tonight, this time 6-1 against the Florida Marlins at Fenway, where the Red Sox haven’t lost since the day I was there), so I’ll put the game face on in the morning and be prepared for whatever is thrown my way. The clock jumps back another two hours for us tomorrow, for those keeping score – our anticipated arrival is for 5:00pm Central time (the time we are on now), which will be 3:00pm Flagstaff time, but will be 8:00am Friday morning in Melbourne!!

Confused?? Don’t be – just pop your head in this direction about the same time tomorrow, and all will be clarified. Au revior all, and have a good night!!

Yeehaw, the black stump gets pushed to Texas!! remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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First things first, birthday wishes must be sent out to both Sarah’s brother Andrew and her cousin Brigid, who both share June 16th as their birthday (in the same year too!!). I know that I missed your actual birthday guys, but it’s still June 16th here, so I hope I can be forgiven!!!

Secondly, for those of you trying to keep track of us via the clock, know that we are starting to move back through the time zones, and will commence to get further behind Aussie time. With the move into Alabama, we slipped into the USA Central time zone, being 15 hours behind Melbourne time (interestingly, we don’t cross into a time zone tomorrow, and then when we do on Thursday into the Mountain time zone, we’ll be crossing into Arizona (where the Grand Canyon lie waiting), which doesn’t observe daylight saving time and therefore isn’t on Mountain time, but Pacific time, the same as Las Vegas and California – don’t worry, I’ll explain it more on Thursday so you don’t get confused!!)

The morning started in Orlando by having breakfast at the Courtyard Café at the Courtyard Marriott, as we had done the last two mornings also. The self-serve buffet worked a treat, as did the chef that was on-call to whip up an omelette upon request – which I tried this morning, and was wonderful!! The best part of all was that there was no reference to the breakfasts on our bill, which was slipped under the door this morning!! This wasn’t a surprise though, as free breakfast was part of the accommodation package (although I still remembered to tip our waiter every morning). The money spent on the two dinners from the food court was also credited, so it was only the agreed amount that we paid for the room!! After using the in-room check-out, we packed the car and taxied out of the Courtyard Marriott, leaving Orlando and its long lines in the rear-view mirror (it was about then, when we were starting to rustle money together should we encounter any toll roads, that I realised I had forgotten to leave a tip for the maid!!).

Today’s drive started in pretty usual conditions – we drove north down the Florida Turnpike, turning over a total of four bucks at two different toll points for the experience, until it merged with Interstate 75 to take us over the border into Georgia…

This is actually the photo from when we first passed into Georgia on Saturday, but it hasn’t seen blog time yet and it’s the same laid-out sign as what we went passed today!! There were actually two ways to get to where we wanted to go according to Google Maps – take I-75 all the way to Atlanta and merge onto Interstate 40, or to cut across towards Birmingham off the interstate system. 62 miles into Georgia, we made the choice not only to get off I-75 at a place called Tifton in Georgia for lunch and a petrol stop, but also to stray from the interstates for the rest of today’s trip (bar a few miles here and there!!), as it was a series of US Highways that took us over the Alabama border and delivered us to our destination here in Jasper (the “Welcome” photo is still on Sarah’s camera, as she is asleep next to me – I’ll post it tomorrow with the other half-dozen “Welcome” signs you will see!!).

Driving the highways had its pros and cons. The good thing was that it felt like you were really driving through middle America, as you passed through the middle of a lot of small towns and past houses and driveways, and saw nary a billboard, just some nice flora scenery (mostly of the tree variety). Interestingly, a few of the towns we passed through would have been no bigger than Sarah’s hometown of Orbost in eastern Victoria, but were fully stocked with four or five chain motels and all of the different fast food chains that populate this country!! The highways also seem to carry a lot less traffic than the interstates, which made navigating them a touch easier.

The cons were that, as you enter into the towns, you come across traffic lights, which can have an impact on your travel time, with the stop-start and getting back up to speed, and that drivers don’t seem to be as courteous as they are on the interstates – many a time would the local farmer pull into the left lane (the highways and interstates are all at least two lanes each-way, and the left lane is the fast lane – again, backward for us Aussies) and take his sweet time, or Miss America would be talking on her mobile phone like there was no tomorrow, swerving here and there as she went along!!

The other thing that slowed us up today was, as it has done before, hitting one of the major cities right on peak hour!! Today, it was Birmingham, Alabama’s biggest city, that we copped right on 4pm, and it added an extra twenty minutes or so to our drive. Still, we got to our Super 8 Motel in Jasper at about 5:25pm, checked in, relaxed for a bit and then went out to a local restaurant called Garfield’s for dinner – steak and veggies for Sarah and Bourbon Chicken and veggies for me, and didn’t the bourbon sauce have Jim Beam all the way through it!! After dinner, we came home via the local Wal-Mart, a large department store chain (like Target or Big W back home), where I started Sarah’s birthday shopping at her insistence (I’ve got a week to get my act together) and picked up something for my brother Dan as well, before coming back to Super 8 to find that the Red Sox had defeated the Florida Marlins at Fenway Park 8-2, with David Ortiz again going deep and the Red Sox batting through their order in the fourth inning to give pitcher Tim Wakefield his team-leading ninth win for the season – go Wake!!!

I’d better be off then – tomorrow looks like it could be a long driving day. We’re going to try and hit Amarillo, Texas for tomorrow night – means it could be a long day tomorrow, but a shorter day on Thursday to rest up for the Grand Canyon on Friday (and then Vegas on Friday night). But for now it’s good night from Alabama, where as I mentioned in the sub-heading Lynard Skynard got it right – where the sky is awesome blue!!

Sweet Home Alabama remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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First thing you’ll probably notice is that we’ve got this posted a lot earlier than what we did last night. Secondly, you’ll notice a distinct lack of photographic evidence of the day!! Both of these attributes can be put down to the fact that we didn’t delve as deeply into Disney as what we did yesterday.

We started the day by choosing Disney’s Hollywood Studios as our initial Disney destination for the day, as we’ve already done a lot of animal-related stuff in San Diego (but put it on the backburner as a possible “to do”, and after viewing the guide map given to us yesterday, Sarah dismissed Epcot as a possible destination. We also had another water park visit up our sleeves as well, so we packed the togs and towels in anticipation of maybe hitting up Typhoon Lagoon, the other Disney water park after visiting Blizzard Beach yesterday, later in the day.

So off we went on our free Mariott-funded Disney transportation, which, as luck would have it, wasn’t stopping at Hollywood Studios today. No matter though – we enjoyed the trip to the Transportation and Ticket Centre, with the new movie version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory playing on the bus to distract us. From there, we then boarded a “Disney Transportation” branded bus which took us directly to Hollywood Studios, and we were away for Disney Day 2!!

My initial thoughts were that crowds didn’t initially seem as big as they were yesterday, glancing at the humanity streaming through the gates. Hollywood Studios, though, is a much smaller park than Magic Kingdom, so it filled up just as quickly, especially when some High School Musical mini-parade and performance twaddle fired up just as we walked through the gates!!

Now Hollywood Studios wasn’t as impressive as the Magic Kingdom, in my eyes. Most of it was shopping-related, and ripped off a lot of other areas of the USA – it was based in Hollywood, there was a back-drop of a New York street and also a backdrop of one of San Francisco’s famous streets. One of the main attractions was “The American Idol Experience”, for which you can audition and perform in the show in front of the crowds which, as someone who considers themselves as a bit of a singer (despite words to the contrary from EVERYONE ELSE), I flirted with the idea of auditioning, then I realised that I didn’t fulfil the main criteria – being the “American Idol” experience, I’m not American!! We actually headed straight for a ride called “The Great Movie Ride”, which Sarah had read up about last night and liked the look of, only to find that there was already a 30-minute wait for this ride!! No matter, we’ll buzz over to one of the other rides that has a Fast Pass, get the pass, come back and line up for the Great Movie Ride, and by the time the ride has done, we’ll be right to go on the other ride!! Sounds like a good plan in theory. We all know that in theory, anything can happen though, and reality can be a brutal awakening! The first ride that we went to for which we could obtain a Fast Pass, Toy Story’s Midway Mania, had a 50 minute wait time, but the kicker was that, yes, you could get a Fast Pass, but it wouldn’t be any good until 3:45pm – knocking out your ability to get a Fast Pass for anything else at the same time!! With memories of the last Toy Story ride we went on – the Buzz Lightyear ride at Magic Kingdom which turned out to be a shooting game in which I allegedly was defeated by Sarah – flooding back, and also the fact this was billed as a “game-playing adventure”, we decided to have a wander around and look at most of Hollywood Studios, including a playground based on the movie “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” – you know it, where Rick Moranis plays a nutty scientist that can never get anything right, until he builds a shrinking machine that shrinks his kids to the size of crumbs and they get lost in their own backyard, which turns into a jungle for them!! We had a quick look in there at what a backyard would look like to someone miniscule, realised we were about 20 years too old for it, then proceeded to exit stage right!!

We wandered around Hollywood Studios for a bit, seeing that the Drew Carey audio show was closed, the Indiana Jones stunt show didn’t set up until later in the day, and that there wasn’t much else in that area of the park that didn’t involve damage to the wallet, so we decided to stick out the half-hour for the Great Movie Ride. We thought we were flying, being directed into the main building within about ten minutes, before a set of doors opened to see…a massive amount of people waiting in line!!! Yep, the line snaked around for another twenty-five minutes in front of a screen playing previews of “some of the greatest movies of all time” with the one recurring theme – yep, they were all produced by Disney!!!! Still, once we got to the ride – a boat ride floating through animatronically re-enacted scenes from mostly old movies – I think Alien was about the only recent one – it was quite enjoyable!!

It was approaching 11:30am already as we exited the Great Movie Ride, and Sarah was having some problems with her right eye, as it appeared some sunscreen had sweated into her eye when we were applying this morning, and her eye was all weepy. She nicked my sunglasses (which I thought of appealing when we exited the Great Movie Ride and we saw bright sunlight for the first time in about an hour) and soldiered on towards Hollywood Studios’ two major rides – the Tower of Terror and Aerosmith’s Rock N Roller Coaster. That was, until Sarah read that the Tower of Terror was a random 13-story high drop, straight down, and put the kibosh straight onto that idea. I didn’t volunteer to go it alone – not through any lack of testicular fortitude, but more through the fact that I didn’t want to leave Sarah waiting on her own with a sore eye for an hour. She also waved off the Rock N Roller Coaster, preferring instead to visit the First Aid area of Hollywood Studios, where the person in charge gave us a couple of vials of eye drops as the best possible solution, which I had to administer to Sarah. I reckon their would have been only seven drops in the vial, and only one made the mark. Two others rolled off the eye as Sarah closed her eye at the crucial moment, and I missed the eye completely with three – causing me to fling the vial containing the last drop against a wall in frustration. That one eye drop, though, did the trick – within ten minutes, she was as right as rain!!

After the eye-drop incident, we thought that we’d seen enough of Hollywood Studios, and with the day once again heating up to temperatures in the high 90’s (mid 30’s, Aussies), we decided that the time might be right to check out Typhoon Lagoon. Before we left Hollywood Studios though, there was one task that was still required – a task from which our respective mothers’ will benefit greatly!!

With the task completed and the back-pack strangely heavier, we exited Hollywood Studios. Looking at the Bus Transportation guide at the front of the park, every other Disney theme park and resort was listed (even Blizzard Beach got a run) apart from Typhoon Lagoon, so we thought that we’d have to hoof it to one of Disney’s Resorts and get the bus from there – that’s one of Disney’s key moves – all of the outriding stuff (that isn’t Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom or Hollywood Studios) can only be reached by buses from the various Resorts, encouraging you to spend even more money at Disney by staying at their accommodation. Unless you’re smart cookies like we are though, where you can simply jump on the first resort bus you see – to Disney’s Pop Culture Resort, jump off, and jump on a bus headed for Typhoon Lagoon!! Which is exactly what we did, with a couple of waiting periods in between, and the Typhoon Lagoon bus going via Downtown Disney, which Disney designed and furnished with bars, nightclubs, a marketplace, a Cirque Du Soleil and a Planet Hollywood when they realised that resort guests wanting to escape the sounds of “it’s a small world after all” were spending money outside of Disney. “That can’t happen” said Disney’s big-wigs, and designed a place where you could let your hair down and seemingly escape Disney, but without escaping Disney!!

We entered Typhoon Lagoon at about 1:00pm, and stayed for three hours – probably my three most enjoyable hours of the last couple of days. Again, I flaunted my naked upper-body (although looking at some of the shades of pink I’m sporting at the moment, I wonder if that was a good idea) around the park, and had a ball doing it. From the “Castaway Creek”, where you could float around in an inner tube circling the park to your heart’s content, to the Surf Pool that generated decent six-foot waves that had me remembering family holidays to Queensland as a mere slip of a lad, Typhoon Lagoon was a very relaxing experience. I even coaxed Sarah into coming on a couple of rides with me!! We floated around Castaway Creek a couple of times, which was very relaxing, and my darling even accompanied me on the “Gangplank Falls” ride, where we both fitted into a rubber boat and went down a “white water rafting” course, which was tame enough to please Sarah!! She did baulk at the Crush “N” Gusher water coaster though, although there was a pool where you could sit back and watch the riders do their thing (and the line was moving pretty rapidly), so I left Sarah in the pool and climbed the stairs to coast away!!! Seeing stairs initially gave me flashbacks to Blizzard Beach’s huge waterslide that you may remember I very nearly lost control of my bodily functions yesterday (wow, today’s blog has turned out a touch more scatalogical than I had anticipated – hope it passes the Nanna Test OK!!), but I had nothing to fear, once I grabbed my inner tube, set it on the small conveyor used to launch you into the ride and stretched my slender frame onto the inner tube, it was a piece of cake. Sure, there were some dark bits, some fast bits and some bits where you drop rather dramatically, but Cool Hand Luke here showed no emotion until the end of the ride, where both index fingers were raised above the head, knowing that the Disney photographers were poised at the shutter. I haven’t seen the photo yet, but I’ve got an access code to look at it on the web, and I’ll be betting it looks pretty tough!! We had the camera in our backpack securely locked away at Typhoon Lagoon, which is why there are no pictures – and there’s that old chestnut about people probably not being too impressed with the lack of ripples in my rippling physique!!

Our relaxing afternoon at Typhoon Lagoon came to an end about 4pm, when we decided that we should enjoy the spoils of the Courtyard Marriott for a bit before going out for dinner then planning the next part of our road trip – three decent-sized days of driving to get to the Grand Canyon. We were going to wait for a bus to take us from Typhoon Lagoon to Disney’s Polynesian Resort, get the Monorail back to the Transportation and Ticketing Centre and then wait for our Marriott bus from there, but given that we weren’t likely to make it onto the Marriott bus until 5:30pm at the earliest, we instead jumped in a taxi and were back at the Marriott in fifteen minutes!!

We had spied a Golden Corral restaurant on our travels yesterday, and saw it again today, seemingly located just walking distance from our hotel room. In checking Golden Corral out on the internet, we found it was a buffet restaurant, and the fresh steamed vegetables listed on the buffet had us both drooling. We put on some decent clothes and walked back out onto Vineland Avenue and around to the Golden Corral, only to find that we’d gone the long way – had we come out of the front doors of the hotel and turned left instead of right, it was almost right around the flipping corner!! By this time, we were both tired, hungry and sick of waiting in lines, so imagine the shock when we get to the Golden Corral, and not only is there a line, it’s out the bloody door!! This wasn’t on, so we ventured over to the Bohemia Blaze restaurant opposite, which at least didn’t have lines waiting out the door. It looked pretty crowded, but we thought it must have been for people having drinks. When we requested a table for two and was told that “the wait is half an hour or less”, we spun on our heels as the electronic thingy the waitress was trying to hand us (which I presume would flash and play noises when our table was ready) crashed to the ground, and we headed back out the front door, cursing the fact that even the eateries in Orlando have huge lines. With our dreams of veggies dashed (thanks to not having the energy to get in the car and drive somewhere should the same thing happen to repeat itself), we skulked back to the Pizza Hut inside the Marriott, which thankfully was covered under our accommodation package, and picked up a ham and pineapple pizza that the pizza maker obviously stood a fair way away from when putting the toppings on!!

After our gourmet dinner, we decided that we’d better sample the Courtyard Marriott’s aquatic attractions, and headed for a nice, relaxing spa, which was fantastic, until the water heated up considerably and sweat started pouring down our cheeks. All that did was give us a chance to jump in the adjacent pool though, which started indoors and flowed outside, with the centrepiece being a fountain-type arrangement that was quite therapeutic should you be in the path of the fountains – which saved me having to perform a back massage later tonight!!

And so, that brings our Disney adventure to a close. My recommendation?? I reckon I would have enjoyed it more 15 years ago, as it seems that Disney is manufactured for the younger audience. Still, there were enough elements to keep me happy – the water parks were a great hit and it was good to see Magic Kingdom to say that I’ve been there and done that, and have a photo with Mickey Mouse to prove it!! I don’t know if I’d do Disney again, but I’m sure glad that I have done it once.

So tomorrow, we hit the road again, headed back west this time, with our destination to be a day at the Grand Canyon this Friday 19th June. Sarah brought up the fact today that we only have ten days left before we fly back to Melbourne, which was a bit of a downer, given the fun we are having!! We’ll update you tomorrow night from somewhere in America’s deep South, likely near the Alabama/Tennessee border, in Elvis country!! Until then, be good, y’all!!!!!

The Disney Sequel remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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As mentioned, we jumped on the free shuttle bus at 9:00am, after downing a hot, free, buffet breakfast here before we left – which actually resulted in a change of shirt for me, as the two lovely poached eggs that they cooked especially for me came in a little bowl, with some of the water used in poaching them still in the bottom of the bowl. In order to get them onto my waiting toast (which was soon abandoned, due to being far too sweet – what I wouldn’t give for a piece of toasted Tip Top Up bread with Vegemite right now) as dry as possible, I had to perform a maneuver with my fork that turned horribly wrong, when one of my eggs fell off the waiting toast, onto the edge of the table and decided to release it’s runny yolk all over my shirt – smelling that all day in the heat (It was 95 degrees in the old money in the shade today, which is 35 degrees in the new money) wasn’t going to fly, so it was up to the room to change, which was done with enough time so that we still caught the 9am bus with plenty of time.

To save me explaining it later on, Walt Disney World is broken up into four different theme parks, two different water parks, and a whole stack of themed resorts and hotels. The four different theme parks are the Magic Kingdom, the Epcot Centre, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The two water parks are Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon, and I’d be here all night if I listed all of Disney’s resorts and hotels!!!

Oh yeah, there’s one other thing that needs explanation, isn’t there??!! The “special day” that I’ve been building up for the last couple of days!! Well, June 14th marks the one-year anniversary of the day that Sarah and I went on our “second” first date – since that day, we’ve managed to speak to each other either face-to-face, on the phone or via e-mail every single day without fail, and now I couldn’t imagine my life without my beautiful girl by my side. Sarah, you’re probably going to read this yourself in the morning to make sure there’s certain parts of the day that I haven’t left out, so I just wanted to say Happy Anniversary again honey, and thank you for being the partner I’ve always dreamed about. I’m risking losing the male audience by writing these next three words, but I’m going to do it anyway – I love you, honey (actually, that was four words, wasn’t it!!)

Enough of this gooey sh….ow of emotion (oops, nearly forgot the Nanna Rule there – pulled myself up just in time), let’s get back to Disney. We decided that our first Disney port of call would be the Magic Kingdom, the park that most people think of when they think Disney, home of Mickey Mouse, Minnie and all of the cohorts!! The bus arrived at Disney’s Transportation and Ticketing Centre at about 9:30am, after first stopping at Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, and we had to line up in the “Will Call” line to pick up our tickets, as I purchased them on the Internet in Philly the other night, as it promised to cut your waiting time. Well, when we get there, the “Will Call” line is longer than the normal ticketing line, and it took us half an hour to get to the ticket window – a portent of things to come. When we did get to the front of the line though, the attendant was very helpful – mind you, the accent trick worked a treat – even giving us special Disney “first visit” badges, and gave us our tickets, a two day pass with Park Hopper access (allowing us to jump between the four main parks as we liked) and two visits to the Water Parks. We thanked her, got through the gate – and found that we still weren’t there – we had to catch a monorail over to the Magic Kingdom itself!!! Thankfully, all transport around the Disney grounds is free (or seems to be anyway), so we jumped on the Monorail and headed to Magic Kingdom.

We stayed at Magic Kingdom (the first time) until about 3:20pm, and found out why multiple-day tickets for Disney are so popular – the lines are LOOOOOONG for just about everything. They have, to their credit, implemented a “Fast Pass” system for the most popular rides – similar to the Empire State Building Fast Passes I spoke about when we were in New York – which helps cut waiting time down in some circumstances. It wasn’t uncommon for us to wait up to 30 minutes at some of the most popular attractions without the Fast Pass, which wasn’t actually too bad in the scheme of things. I was a touch disappointed that the two main things that I wanted to see, the Hall of Presidents and Space Mountain (after listening to Ric Flair work his magic for years and years, I’ve always wanted to ride Space Mountain!!), were both closed – Space Mountain for renovations, and the Hall of Presidents to include Barack Obama, but the main thing that Sarah wanted to see was open, alive and kicking…

…Yep, the famous “meet and greet” with Mickey Mouse, which is actually done in a backroom out the back of “Mickey’s House” in a section of the Magic Kingdom called “Mickey’s Toontown Fair”. Regardless of how well it was hidden though, there was still a good half-hour that passed between when we entered the line in the “Judging Shed” and when we were allowed our chance to go in and meet Mickey. Surprisingly, Minnie was there too, much to Sarah’s delight, who promptly received a round of hugs from both characters, and we lined up for the obligatory Disney-owned cameraman’s photograph (these photo guys are at all of the tourist attractions – we’ve got photos from Top of the Rock in New York and Fenway Park in Boston in our collection already), and we also got a chance to get our obligatory random American-taken photo together, which also included the stars of the show!!

That was undoubtedly Sarah’s highlight of the day, but a close second was a meet and greet chance with Ariel of Little Mermaid fame. I quickly snapped a photo of Sarah as we were waiting in “Ariel’s Grotto” trying to escape from the heat by lining up to meet Ariel.

We got to the front of the line after about twenty minutes, and whilst I reneged on the opportunity to have a chinwag with the actor playing Ariel, ol’ chatterbox Sarah cosied in for a nice chat, whilst I, in tandem with another Disney photographer, manned the cameras!!

I enjoyed Magic Kingdom, apart from the lines, as there were some attractions that were very good. I enjoyed a 3D movie starring Donald Duck, a “Monsters Inc Laugh Floor” featuring the cast of the kids movie from a few years ago, and a ride called Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, although this ride actually turns itself into an interactive deal by outfitting the carts you ride in with a couple of laser blasters, and you earn points by blasting targets as you go along. I thought I was going OK, blasting away to my heart’s content, not really knowing what I was shooting at and whether my blaster was working, until I saw the mini-scoreboard in front of me tick over. By ride’s end, I had clocked up 1800 points, not too bad for a rookie, I though!! That was, until I glanced over at Sarah’s scoreboard and she had 2100 points on her display!! Much to my dismay, my darling had beaten me, and I proceeded to hear about it for the rest of the day!!!!

After using our first Fast-Pass of the day on a ride called “The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh”, only to find that it sucked the big one and isn’t recommended for anyone over 4 years of age (and on the proviso that the youngster is up-to-date with the happenings of Thousand Acre Wood), we decided that the heat was getting to us, and it was time to cool down at one of Disney’s Water Parks. Our timing wasn’t great though – as we approached the exit to Magic Kingdom, not only did we pass an ice-cream shop that sold Raspberry Sorbet, which Sarah promptly put in the memory bank, but we were also escaping right on 3:00pm, when the daily Parade happened to be starting up. So we watched as the characters passed us by on various musical floats (although for a lot of them I had to ask Sarah who they were, as she is the Disney expert based on watching all of the Disney movies as a kid with her cousins Brigid, Ingrid and Olivia when they were living in Canberra), as well as a bunch of dancers shimmy their stuff – the girls all had matching hairstyles as well, which was weird when guys seemed to have free reign with their hair (and there was the obligatory guy who seemed to be over-doing it, and who you want to reach over the barrier and give a good touch-up to!!), and we eventually got out of Magic Kingdom, as mentioned, about 20 minutes after we had intended. I did snap a photo of Sarah near the Magic Castle, Magic Kingdom’s iconic landmark, before we left, which is listed below!!

From there, the fun began trying to get to the Disney Water Parks. Disney have a host of monorails, buses and water ferries to transport you to all four of the major theme parks and the resorts, but nothing seemed to be mentioned anywhere about getting to the water parks. We went to the (almost deserted) Transportation and Ticketing Centre, thinking that would be our required depot, only to be told that buses to the water parks only leave from Disney Resorts, so catching the monorail to the Disney Polynesian Resort, the closest to the ticketing centre, was the best way to get there. So we got to the Polynesian Resort, walked through the resort to their bus stop where, thankfully, a bus to Disney’s Blizzard Beach Theme Park was waiting for us, so on we hopped!!

We arrived at Blizzard Beach just after 4:00pm, knowing that the park closed at 7:00pm and we only had a few hours to get through everything!! Time didn’t go as quickly at Blizzard Beach though, as the lines weren’t as long for everything. I’d been lugging our bathers and towels around all day in a backpack, so we got changed, stored all of our stuff in a locker, and hit the small wave pool that they had operating – with only those small waves that you get in the shallows at the beach, but we didn’t last long in there, as it was too crowded and with every wave someone bumped into you in their “inner tube” they had gotten a hold of – mostly kids, but every now and then you’d get a large local bumping into you and seeming to think it was your fault they got in their way!! By the way, given the waistlines of a lot of the Blizzard Beach patrons, I felt more than comfortable touring Blizzard Beach sans shirt (and don’t worry, there’s no photos of that!!) and fitting in with the “skinny” crowd!!!

The lure of the waterslide soon overtook me though, so it was on the chairlift (Disney have set Blizzard Beach up as a kind of ski resort turned water park) and up to the “Summit Plummet”, billed as a 120-foot vertical drop free-falling body slide. There was a fair line for the Summit Plummet, as you would imagine, so it was a while before I got to the top, enjoying great views of the Disney area on the way up. At the top, sitting at the top of the slide ready to go, I was a picture of coolness, with my legs and arms crossed as instructed, and awaiting the green light. Once that light went and I laid back though, all the coolness disappeared, as I felt my body descending down a huge vertical drop, feet first. It’s a good thing that the Disney photographers took my photo at the end of the slide, which only lasted about 20 seconds, because for 18 of those 20 seconds, I was, quite frankly, pooing myself!!! I kissed terra firma when I got out of the slide, and suggested to Sarah that perhaps we do something together that was a little less intense!! We found it too – a toboggan course where I found out that I can fairly fly using a foam mat down a waterslide thanks to my natural buoyancy, getting to the bottom of the ride much faster than the smaller, lighter Sarah (and much further too), and then another similar course that instead had twists and turns, though thankfully, this time it was a head-first job and we could see where we were going!!

After the toboggan rides, and lying around on a couple of the seemingly hundred banana lounges that dot Blizzard Beach’s landscape, we decided that we’d had enough of the water rides for today, so we got our stuff, got changed and left Blizzard Beach. As we exited the park, though, we saw just over to the right, that there was a mini-golf course called Disney’s Winter Summerland, and when I broached the idea of playing a round with the better half, already thinking of revenge for the Buzz Lightyear ride, she thought it would be a good idea, and whilst it cost extra, it was well worth it when I started the course by making a hole-in-one on the very first hole that we played!!!!

As with all mini-golf courses, there was a theme and obstacles to aim for and avoid on every hole. The course we played had both a summer and winter course, and we chose the winter course, which had a Christmas theme – hearing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” in the middle of June wasn’t all that flash, though!! The mini-golf was great fun, though – I had three aces in the first nine holes, although I got a huge shock when I went around the tenth hole in three shots, only to see Sarah step up and sink her ball in the hole with her very first putt, which she duly celebrated!!

Still, I thought revenge was going to come easily and sweetly – after those ten holes I was seven shots up and tearing up the course. Things started to get shaky though – I don’t want to say that I got too cocky – and after sixteen holes, my lead was whittled to just four shots. It was two shots after the seventeeth hole, which I took a five on thanks to an ugly first shot, whilst Sarah got a three, and she thought that an upset was on the cards. It was with dismay then that Sarah found out that the eighteenth was a one-shot affair, and after I made no mistake with my shot, I engraved the scorecard with my total score of 55 (which was one under par) and “WINNER” in big, bold letters. Sarah’s score was 57, and I still have the scorecard, which is going in a prominent place in the scrapbook that Sarah is keeping of the trip, and made me think that there was something faulty about my blaster on the Buzz Lightyear ride!!

After we had finished golf, we headed back to the Magic Kingdom, as it was open until 11:00pm tonight. We didn’t last that long though – we went on a couple of rides, including a pretty cool Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and watched the 9:00pm character parade (of which some photos are below of Mickey and Minnie)

…before starting to head for the exit just as the 10:00pm fireworks show was starting, knowing that there was a bus leaving the Transportation and Ticketing Centre – a monorail ride and a fair walk away. Just as we were about to walk out the gate, the fireworks stopped, and the mad rush started – for some reason, Americans are paranoid that if they get to somewhere ten seconds later than what they expect, their chance will be gone!! We made it in enough time though, and made it back in one piece to the Courtyard Marriott.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough for today, and we’ve got another full day of Disney coming up tomorrow, so it’s time for me to get my beauty sleep so that I’m ready to go for tomorrow. The post will probably be up around the same time tomorrow, given Disney’s late closing times, so until then, it’s Shaun and Sarah signing out from Orlando, Florida!!

Attacking the monster that is Walt Disney World remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Good thing, then, that there wasn’t really a lot that happened today, as again, today was another driving day. All that will change tomorrow though, as we tackle the “special day” that I mentioned briefly last night at Walt Disney World here in Orlando (and again on Monday – trust me, it’s a big place!!)

There were a few highlights of the day though, starting with waking up this morning and flicking on the computer to see that the Red Sox had knocked over the reigning World Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, in thirteen innings last night, winning 5-2. More importantly, the computer at the same time told me that the mighty Western Bulldogs were 28 points ahead of Port Adelaide at half-time, which had stretched out to eighty points by the time the live screen loaded up, and to ninety-three points by the time the game had finished. Tempering my excitement, though, was the knowledge that Richmond had also won – proving that every now and then, the odds of winning the lottery come up in someone’s favour (I had a much funnier, and slightly more vulgar, expression to use there, but it wouldn’t have passed the Nanna Test – the one rule I have assigned myself to when writing this blog is to think before I write (which is a change from my normal practice) about whether what I’m writing would be safe to tell either of my grandmothers or either of Sarah’s grandmothers – if I can’t repeat it to them, then it doesn’t enter this page!!).

The next highlight was viewing the next in the never-ending line of “convenience” service stations, this time in Walterboro (where we stayed last night – oh yeah, that storm I mentioned last night blew over pretty quickly – it was all gone in about fifteen minutes) in South Carolina, where I filled up the petrol tank before heading on our way. In checking out the store inside the service station, it featured the now-obilgatory beer in the drinks fridges, as well as an array of South Carolina trinkets (including a mini-license plate with South Carolina across the top and “SARAH” in big letters that made it’s way to the counter), and two whole rows of fireworks, in every shape, size and even value pack that you could imagine. I know my brother Daniel will be disappointed to know that none of the fireworks accompanied me to the counter – as tempted as I was, I knew that they wouldn’t pass by the smiling faces of the Australian Customs department on our return to Melbourne, so they had to forlornly stay in their places!!

The drive itself took pretty much five hours, right on the dot. Again, Interstate 95 was our best friend today, taking us through another 53 miles of South Carolina, taking us through the state of Georgia, and through about 80 miles of the state of Florida. Unfortunately, due to some issues I’m having uploading the photos to Travellers Point, the proof that we passed through these states won’t be available for viewing until tomorrow – but I can assure you that at about 3:15pm, we pulled into the Marriott Village here in Orlando (actually, we’re about 15 miles past Orlando, almost on the doorstep of Walt Disney World, passing signs that said “Go Magic” all the way through the Orlando city limits, referring to the Orlando Magic, who are currently playing in the NBA (basketball) finals against the Los Angeles Lakers, with Game 5 scheduled to be played here in Orlando tomorrow night (and if the Lakers win it, they win the NBA championship!!), checked into our king-bed room on the second floor overlooking a pretty cool pool setting where the pool starts indoors, then flows outside, with an indoor and outdoor spa accompanying it!!! We haven’t done a lot since we arrived in Orlando, aside from grabbing dinner in the food court here at the Marriott Village (our accommodation package includes $25 per night incidentals credit, which can be used in the Food Court – currently, our bill for tonight’s dinner stands at 55 cents!!) and planning our Walt Disney World assault for tomorrow’s “special day” – another perk of our accommodation package is a free bus shuttle to and from Walt Disney World for every day we stay here at the Marriott, so we will be on that at 9:00am tomorrow, after our free buffet breakfast (yep, another perk – I did this one well!!), headed for the Magic Kingdom with our bathers at the ready to also tackle Disney’s water parks should it get too hot!!!

That pretty much takes us through Saturday 13th June folks – again, apologies for the monotony of tonight’s blog, but I will make up for it tomorrow, with pictures from our first day at Disney, as well as the explanation of the “special day” tomorrow, for those that haven’t figured it out already!!!! Hope everyone is well, and we’ll report back in tomorrow night!!

Mickey, here we come remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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We left you last night in Peterburg, Virginia, just about to head out for dinner. As there weren’t any restaurants around us, we used the GPS to help us out, as it has a feature where you can locate nearby points of interest, including restaurants. The GPS told us that there was an Applebee’s only a mile away from our hotel, so we pressed the button to send us there, and drove to where the GPS told us Applebee’s was. Or, thought it was. After a pass by the location seeing no Applebee’s, and a lap around the adjacent shopping mall to no avail, we thought that we may have missed it when we looked, so we fired up the GPS again to take us to that location. We got to the exact location, as the pleasant Aussie voice on the GPS told us “Enter Applebee’s on the left”, only to find a Burger King in it’s place!! No matter, we saw a sign for a Denny’s not far back, which offered similar Sarah-friendly fare, so we headed for it. It wasn’t a good sign when, again, we weren’t greeted with a Denny’s, but a closed-down shell of a restaurant that used to house a Denny’s!! Option three was a restaurant that was actually open called Olive Garden, an Italian chain restaurant, which started bad when we sat at our table for the best part of fifteen minutes before getting served, but when we did, the service was great (by a bloke with dreadlocks named Andre, whom I swear was hitting on me!!), and the food was excellent – the Eating Machine returned to devour an apricot chicken dish, and I had a dish called a Tour of Italy – a piece of lasagne, some fettucine alfredo and a chicken parma all on the one dish, and all for fifteen bucks!!! The parma was good – the first I’ve found in America, but was so filling that I couldn’t finish the rest!!

After a good night’s sleep, we headed back onto I-95 for another driving day, which took us over two state borders – North and South Carolina. The North Carolina border appeared not long after we jumped onto I-95 – I’d estimate about 25 miles of the top of my head, and here’s the proof!!

The drive through North Carolina wasn’t overly remarkable, apart from seeing the speed limit rise to 70 miles per hour (as you can see on the above picture), which allowed for the 180-odd miles of North Carolina to go by reasonably quickly – save for a stop at lunch at a Denny’s (which was actually open, much to Sarah’s delight) about 20 miles from the South Carolina border, where the Eating Machine again returned to full splendour, knocking off a full breakfast (minus the sausages, which are a poor imitation of the snags we get back home)!!

We got back in the car and headed for South Carolina, where we had been curiously following billboards for a place named “South of the Border”, right on the divide between the Carolina’s, for the best part of 100 miles through North Carolina, promising food, truck stop and, amongst other things, fireworks for sale (trivia point – there’s also a fireworks shop right next to the Ramada Hotel here in Walterboro)!! We spotted South of the Border, and the huge sombrero-wearing figure marking it’s arrival, as the picture below shows

Unfortunately, as we were passing South of the Border, we also passed into South Carolina, and as Sarah was getting the above photo, we drove right past the “Welcome” sign!! Oh well, the South of the Border photo shows we made it there!!

From the border, it was about another 130-odd miles to Walterboro – about 50 miles from the border to Georgia, and a nice five-or-so hour stroll into Orlando tomorrow for our date with Mickey on a special day for the two of us – which will be revealed in a couple of days!!! We checked into the Ramada Hotel, lazed around for a bit then went for a swim in the outdoor pool, which, thanks to the 90 degree (32 degrees Celsius) temperature in Walterboro today, was the perfect temperature!!! That brings us to now, and about to find some dinner before retiring for the night, and waking up to a hot breakfast buffet in the morning!!!!

That’s my cue to skidoo for the night then, so we will report in tomorrow with the last of our mini-driving days for a while, as we hit Orlando and Walt Disney World (on Sunday and Monday). Hopefully I can report a couple of sporting victories tomorrow – the mighty Western Bulldogs, boosted by the return of forwards Robert Murphy and Scott Welsh, take on Port Adelaide in Darwin, and the Boston Red Sox, fresh from a three-game sweep against the Yankees (and two Big Papi home runs in those three games), head to Philly to take on the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies!! Night all!!

PS - I'd better hurry up and get this posted - we saw a severe thunderstorm alert come through on the news before, and a huge clap of thunder and bolts of lightning are now starting to hit!! Might be a home delivery night for dinner!!

Driving to Mickey, Part 2 remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Firstly, I’ll cover off the end of last night in Philly, and the attempt to settle the great Cheesesteak debate. Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s Steaks are arguably the world’s two most famous purveyors of the Philly Cheesesteak – a delicacy found over America, but apparently invented and perfected only in Philadelphia (where they refer to it simply as a “cheesesteak”, never a Philly Cheesesteak). Pat’s and Geno’s both proclaim to be the first, and the best, makers of the cheesesteak, and it so happens that they are located across from each other on the crossroads of 9th Street and Passyunk Avenue in South Philly – an X-shaped crossroad that New Yorkers would call a “square” – don’t ask!!! Wanting to taste both of the famous cheesesteaks, I ordered one from each shop, and took them back to the Doubletree Hilton Hotel to eat them (we got a taxi from the hotel, and the taxi driver was good enough to wait whilst we purchased our food before taking us back!!). Oh yeah, here’s a look at downtown Philly – the big spired building you can see in the distance is City Hall, and was walking distance from the Doubletree.

The cheesesteak is a wonderful thing – mounds of steak loaded into a soft 9 inch roll, topped with fried onions and Cheez Whiz – a cheese spread that, before the advent of the cheesesteak, was only used on by mothers on their children’s lunches!! I tried Geno’s steak first, and it was beautiful, but I thought the Pat’s steak was tastier – there was more meat, the Whiz was cheesier, and the all-round experience was better. Geno’s tried to win brownie points by giving us free pens with the smiling visage of Geno’s owner and founder, Joey Vento, on them, with “Proud to be an American” plastered across them. After eating them I settled back to watch the Red Sox ONCE AGAIN defeat the New York Yankees 6-5, but not after some anxious moments and some great pitching from relief pitchers Hideki Okajima and Jonathon Papelbon – that’s 7-0 on the season against the Yankees, with another game tonight at Fenway to go!!

Anyway, we ordered in room service for breakfast this morning in Philly for the first time on the trip – Sarah says that the strawberries she had with her Special K were fantastic – and we packed up and checked out of the Doubletree Hotel (to find that we hadn’t been charged the extra $9 for the room upgrade I mentioned last night as a way of saying “sorry” that the internet didn’t work), then the bellhop looked as us in a funny way as he helped to load our bags in the back of the car, asked us if we needed directions and then I drove off having forgotten to tip the man – I had no money in my wallet anyway, as I found out metres down the road, which required a stop at 7-Eleven to visit an ATM (we had toll roads to go through today) and pick up a Super Big Gulp drink for $1.26, a fountain drink which at 44 ounces was, you guessed it, HUUUUUUGE (although not their biggest – a Double Gulp was 64 ounces, and the biggest soft drink cup I had ever seen!!)

Within 44 miles of setting out from Philly, we had passed through two state borders – the border to Delaware (where I re-enacted the famous line from the movie “Wayne’s World”, “Hi, I’m in Delaware”, delivered sitting still completely deadpan), and soon after the border to Maryland, which Sarah captured in picture (she missed the Delaware one, as she wasn’t expecting it so soon out of Philly amongst some reasonably heavy rain (and yes, I used the indicator instead of the wipers the first time I tried to put the wipers on, thankfully I wanted to change lanes anyway!!)) as you will see below…

The drive through Maryland was pretty interesting, as you pass pretty close to not just Baltimore, Maryland’s biggest town, but also Washington DC, the capital city of the USA. We very nearly detoured through DC, as the GPS decided that it didn’t like some of the roadworks on Interstate 95, and wanted to send us down some secondary roads through Washington. I instead stayed on I-95, which was a good move, as the roadworks on the interstate were fairly minor and hardly delayed us at all, whereas the secondary roads were more congested due to roadworks of their own, and would have meant an extra half-hour’s driving from looking at the conditions!

Not long after we had finally passed Washington’s beltway exits and service roads, we crossed into the state of Virginia, the first of America’s real “southern states” in my view.

We drove for about an hour-and-a-half through Virginia, passing it’s capital city of Richmond, which I refused to check out on principal, before driving the further 20 miles to Petersburg, where we currently sit in the nicely quaint Super 8 Motel which was booked last night. It’s redeeming feature when booking was a coin laundry to wash our clothes – Sarah has put her dirties through the wash and dryer, then, bless her heart, wandered down to put my clothes in the wash whilst I started writing this blog!!! Yep, I’ve got a real keeper on my hands here, don’t I!!!!!

That just about sums up today – Oh yeah, we booked our tickets for Walt Disney World in Orlando this morning – a two-day pass (this Sunday and Monday) with access to all four Disney theme parks and their two water parks (watersides, yeah – It’s going to be no cooler than 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius) for the three days we are in Orlando, and the hotel we have booked has three separate swimming pools!!), so it was good to get that done before we hit Florida!! Almost time for us to go and search Petersburg for a restaurant for dinner – we saw a shopping mall with quite a few external restaurants about a mile back on I-95, so I think that might be it after experiencing southern cooking at lunch at a place called Hawk’s Bar-B-Q, which served me up a pretty tasty, but hot, barbequed beef roll with fries, but Sarah’s fish looked like, as she delicately put it, “it’s still swimming” – the tails were still connected and it had bones in it, and looked to have been whacked straight into the fryer – the way Southern cooking is carried out, but not to my darling’s liking!!

We’ll be back again tomorrow – we’ve both updated our Dream Teams, so all is good for the next two weeks, Snudge – from Walterboro, South Carolina, where the lucky finger of fate landed on the map tonight!! Until then, enjoy your Friday back in Oz, cheer on the Red Sox to beat the Yankees tonight, and have yourselves a pleasant and comfortable day – temperatures are expected to be no lower than 29 degrees Celsius over our next couple of days, which should please our freezing Aussie friends and family!!!

Heading south to destination Mickey remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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We left you last night in the middle of a conundrum – food was required, and I was itching to see what was happening in the baseball between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees, our arch enemies!! Thankfully, both situations were sorted out to everyone’s happiness. It didn’t start that way though, as we decided to head out onto Times Square (remember, we were in New York last night) and into the TGI Friday’s restaurant on the corner of 46th Street and Broadway. We didn’t last there long (long enough, though, to see Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell drive in the Red Sox’s sixth run while the Yankees remained scoreless). A look at the menu indicated that the location had added to the price of most menu items – a basic cheeseburger and fries was in the order of $18.82 plus tax, rude for US prices, so we quickly downed the menus and walked out, choosing instead to try 8th Avenue, a block away from the main tourist area, and we stumbled on an Irish pub that we could actually see from our hotel (and was next to the garage where our car was parked!!) A quick look at the menu outside the pub indicated that prices were more in the range we were looking for, and when we were escorted to our table, we were seated right in line with a widescreen TV showing the Red Sox/Yankees game, and caught Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett mowing through the heart of the Yankees lineup and shortstop Nick Green’s second home run for the year. More importantly, we caught the final score – 7-0 in favour of the Red Sox!!! Dinner was good too, and I saw something I haven’t seen in a while – whilst Beckett was mowing through the Yankees on the TV, Sarah was mowing through the menu in front of me!!! She polished off her fish and chips, then made her way through a whole raspberry sorbet dessert. The “eating machine” continued her rampage today – her Egg McMuffin and orange juice disappeared in no time at breakfast today, then not only did she demolish a turkey club wrap at lunch today, but she also helped herself to a good helping of my fries!!!!!

We checked out of the Paramount Hotel at about 10:45am – check-out times at most hotels we have encountered so far is midday, and by the time our car was brought around from the valet parking and loaded, we pulled out from the kerb at about 11:00am. Our required route meant driving down 7th Avenue and turning right at 42nd Street, so we took our last look at the heart of Manhattan before leaving – or, more accurately, Sarah took her last look at Manhattan – I was concentrating more on the New York traffic!! The GPS was having a bit of trouble getting a satellite fix with all of the tall buildings in the area, so I had to do things the old-fashioned way – follow the street signs and hope for the best!!!! I didn’t do too badly either, we made our way to the Lincoln Tunnel with a minimum of fuss, which took us under the Hudson River and into New Jersey.

You might notice a distinct lack of photos in today’s blog entry as well. Lay no blame on the photographer, though, as the usual pictures of the “Welcome to” state signs were particularly difficult to locate today. We were expecting to see something as we emerged out of the Lincoln Tunnel, but as we prepared to transition on the New Jersey Turnpike and through the toll booths, there was no sign indicating that we were welcomed into New Jersey. It wasn’t until after we had passed through the toll booth and had swung onto the New Jersey Turnpike that we saw the “Welcome to New Jersey” sign above us, after Sarah had put her camera away!! We quickly pulled off the turnpike for petrol, something I hadn’t purchased since we were on our way to Boston last Saturday, and the car was starting to flash up warning lights to say that I’d better grab some petrol soon. Thankfully, the job was done and the car was filled before any more warning lights were required – and at the cheapest price I have paid for petrol in the USA - $2.399 per gallon, or just over 60 cents per litre!!

It was only a 95 mile drive from Manhattan to Philadelphia, which was anticipated to take about an hour and a half, and would have put us in Philly a good two or so hours before the check in time at our hotel – again, Hotwire has put us up at the Doubletree Hotel (more on that shortly), so after the GPS directed us off the New Jersey Turnpike and through the suburbs of southern Jersey, we came across a little sign on the GPS saying “Cherry Hill Mall”. In taking to Sarah, we thought this might be the best way to kill a couple of hours by wandering around the mall and have lunch, although when I saw that I was in the wrong lane to turn down Cherry Hill Mall Road, I thought I’d missed our chance. Not so, as we rounded the next bend in the road and the mall appeared on our right, so we pulled into the mall, found a park, and had a wander around the Cherry Hill Mall for a couple of hours – Sarah bought a couple of nice jumpers for work, I bought a book (Bret “Hitman” Hart’s autobiography – you can read it when I get back Dan), and Sarah went on her aforementioned eating rampage!!! By the time we left, it was about quarter to three – a perfect time for a gentle stroll into Philly down to the Doubletree Hotel.

The stroll wasn’t so gentle though, as the GPS took me a funny way, and was a little confusing with its turn directions, causing me to miss a turn and have to go over the Walt Whitman Bridge to cross from New Jersey into Pennsylvania (with Philadelphia right on the border) – a toll bridge which was very pretty and all, but not sure if it were worth the four bucks it cost us to go over, and to top it off, there was no “Welcome to Pennsylvania” sign to greet us – no matter though, as we had crossed briefly into Pennsylvania on Saturday when travelling to Boston!! From there, it was a gentle stroll down Broad Street to the Doubletree Hilton Hotel, where the bellhop greeted us as I pulled over in front of the hotel, helped us get our bags out of the boot and jumped in the car and took it to the valet parking for us – all the while cursing the tightness of these Aussies, as I had forgotten to hit my kick to tip the man (I’m still getting used to this whole tipping thing – as a dedicated tightwad, it seems almost foreign to hand over money for seemingly no reason, even though I know that the people I’m supposed to tip are doing a fantastic job (and I’ve tipped 95% of people I’m supposed to). Still, we took our bags in and checked into the Doubletree Hotel, to find that we had been booked into a standard room with two queen beds, as is Hotwire’s (the website that we used to book the room at a good discount!) custom. We enquired as to whether we could change this to a room with just one bed, and we were offered an upgrade to a Queen Deluxe room (we would have preferred a king-sized bed, but they were all taken) for only $9 more – well worth it too – the room is positively huge, with the bed over one side of the room, and a separate area with a desk (where I’m writing this now before heading down to the lobby to post it on the internet – the wired internet in our room is playing up, and the maintenance man has already been in to check it out, and promised a credit due to a bit of on/off action and slow loading times. The lobby has free wireless, so that’s where we are headed shortly), a chair with footrest and a three-seater couch – not bad for 70 bucks!!!!
We decided to check out the hotel’s pool facilities (see Nor, we are going swimming – just waiting for hotels with pools and the sun to appear!!), and used the spa and I had a quick swim in the pool – the spa was very relaxing and I had a chance to soothe my still-throbbing and purple big toe. That pretty much brings us to now – just watched the first inning of tonight’s Red Sox-Yankees game on ESPN, where the Red Sox have already put a run on the board thanks to my man Jason Bay ripping a line drive to left field to score J.D.Drew, and we’re about to head out shortly to taste a Philadelphian delicacy – the Philly Cheesesteak (or at least I will – Sarah can’t have the cheese) – at the supposed birth of the cheesesteak, the corner of 9th Street and Passyunk Avenue at either Pat’s King of Steaks or Geno’s Steaks, I haven’t decided yet!!! There’s a time-honoured argument as to which place makes the better cheesesteak – I’ll let you know in the morning.

Coming up, our next major destination is Orlando and Disney World!! Our reservation at the Courtyard Marriott in Lake Buena Vista doesn’t start until Saturday night (for three nights), so we can take our time getting there. The initial plan was to spend tomorrow night in Washington DC and take a look at the capital of the USA, but we’ve decided against it. It’s about a fifteen hour drive from Philly to Orlando, so we’re going to split it up over three days instead, to drive a few shorter days to enjoy a more relaxing drive and some afternoon pool time as we descend south into some warmer weather. We’re about to check out the route and break it up to see where we will land for tomorrow night, so when we check in tomorrow night, we will let you know where we end up!! Until then, it’s good night from Philly, as Red Sox catcher George Kottaras just extended our lead (the Yankees scored a run in their second inning, which I missed as Sarah was watching MTV!!) with an RBIdouble to centrefield, scoring shortstop Nick Green, so I’m going to retire to enjoy another Red Sox win, eat some cheesesteaks and enjoy the City of Brotherly Love!!

Back on the road - well, in a mini-sort of way remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Allright, where was I?? Oh yeah, New York City. From memory, we left last night’s blog just before we headed up to the viewing deck at the Empire State Building. What an experience this was, viewing New York at night from the ESB’s 86th Floor Observation Deck. Quick tip for those ever planning to visit New York and go to the Empire State Building – pre-purchase your tickets on the Internet before going, and make sure you buy the Express Pass!! It costs a little bit more – I think it was $45 as opposed to $20 per person – but it’s definitely worth the money, as the Express Pass takes you to the front of every line. We bypassed the line at the ticket stand, was escorted to the front of a LOOOONG line to the 80th floor elevator, then escorted to the front of another LOOOONG line to the 86th floor elevator and observation deck. I reckon it took no more than three minutes from the time we walked through the front doors of the building to the time we were standing on the 86th floor observation deck, whereas with no Express Pass, we would have been lining up for at least half an hour!! Anyway, check out some of the photos that we took from the top of the Empire State Building showing New York at night, the spire of the ESB itself, and some photos of the two of us taken from the top of the Empire State Building.

The new morning started reasonably early, as we had booked a guided tour of New York at 10:00am today, and given that this was something Sarah was really looking forward to, we quickly hopped up and got ready, ducked into the little Italian place next door for breakfast (where Sarah was pleased that she got potatoes with her eggs, but not so pleased that the sausage she ordered was in fact a spicy Italian sausage!), and headed the short distance to 7th Avenue, between 50th and 51st Streets, to meet the New York OnBoard tour bus. Unfortunately, New York had turned on a pretty gloomy morning, with rain constantly falling from the time we left the hotel until when we went to meet the bus. Thankfully, the rain stopped about the time we boarded the bus, and we had clear skies for the rest of the day. It didn’t verify my choice of shorts and thongs (for you Americans, I refer to thongs as the rubber sandals you put on your feet – I think you call them “flip-flops” – not what you were probably thinking of!!), as the footpaths were still pretty wet, which almost ended in tragedy, as I got a case of the slips and slides when walking along the footpath – one time so badly that I was lucky that I caught Sarah mid-slide and righted myself, but not before I stubbed the big toe on my left foot so badly that it ended up covered in blood, with some skin missing, and deep purple bruising all down the toe – it’s still tender now!!

But enough of my injuries, let’s get to the tour – here’s a photo of the tour bus….

The tour itself was sensational – more advice for those travelling to New York, book a guided tour with New York OnBoard at http://www.onboardtoursnewyork.com. Unlike most of the tour buses you see surrounding New York City, it’s not carried out on a double-decker open-top bus – handy for a day like today when the weather wasn’t flash!! You do stop at several different places on the way around New York City, and the tour guide gets off the bus with you and explains everything at the site, as well as taking about all the things you look at on the bus on the way around the city. Our tour guide was excellent, a life-long New Yorker named Jonathon, who looked a little in appearance like our friend Anthony Stanguts when Gutsy rocks the full beard (but with a few more feathers on top than our receding friend!!!), and was extremely knowledgable about all of the features that we saw on the way. The tour goes for some five-and-a-half hours, which sounds like a long time, but the time absolutely flies along. You also get about 45 minutes for lunch at the South Street Seaport, where Pier 17 offers almost a mini-shopping mall, along with a fantastic view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which you will see in the photos below. The tour also takes you on the Staten Island Ferry over to New York’s “forgotten” fifth borough, and past the Statue of Liberty on the way. Here’s some photos that we took on the tour around New York City – I’ll put a sentence after each one of them so that you know what you are looking at!!

These two photos are of the site of the former World Trade Centre. I'm sure there's not too many people reading who don't know what happened to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11th, 2001, so I won't re-tell the story. As you can see, all of the rubble has been cleared and work is commencing on re-building the site - New York is hoping that the tower which has been referred to as the "Freedom Tower" will be ready by the tenth anniversary of the tragedy in 2011.

This statue of George Washington has been erected on the site where he was sworn in as the first President of the United States of America back in 1789 - the year after Australia was founded by Captain Cook

This is us (obviously) with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background - our photo taken by a random American for the day (actually the American this time around wasn't so random, as he was on the tour with us, and was sporting a green and gold "Australia" shirt, which made us think he might have been a fair dinkum Aussie, until he opened his mouth and Americana spewed out!!)

This is the Trinity Church - which, if my memory serves me correctly, was the first Church of England in the USA, and is going on 300 years old. The church is located just near these two iconic places

Yep, the New York Stock Exchange (which wasn't as busy as it may have been previously) on Wall Street, formerly the home of the US economy, although the banks have moved out a while ago and commercialism is setting in

This photo of my beautiful girl was taken in Central Park, not too far away from the following places...

The first photo is of the Dakota Building, one of New York's oldest apartment buildings across from the corner of Central Park West. The Dakota Building houses some of the world's rich and famous, and one of their former occupants was John Lennon, Yoko Ono and their son Sean. It was also the place where Lennon was arriving home to back in December 1980 when he was gunned down and killed by Mark David Chapman (I think, correct me if I'm wrong). The "Imagine" circle you see is a memorial to Lennon located in Strawberry Fields, which was paid for by Yoko Ono as her way of her, and the community, remembering her late husband. The tiles of the mosaic were not only imported from Italy, but Italian craftsman also came over to lay and arrange the tiles.

Here's the Empire State Building from the ground - unfortunately the clouds had rolled in to obstruct the spire, but they soon cleared to give a clearer view of the whole tower

Here's the iconic Statue of Liberty - seen at first from a distance as we first boarded the Staten Island Ferry, then up close and personal as the ferry passed it by. Speaking of which, here's a picture of the Staten Island Ferry itself!

This is St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue - America's oldest Roman Catholic church

This is what greeted us as we got off the Staten Island Ferry - New York's finest by the absolute car-load!!

As many police cars as we saw, though, this is the most common site in New York City - taxis working their way through the grid. This photo was taken near Times Square, and all of the taxis were occupied - apparently it is extremely difficult to get a cab in NYC!!

After the tour finished, and we bid good-bye to Jonathon and our tour group, we quickly headed back to the Paramount Hotel so I could clean up my toe, survey the damage and put some socks and shoes on, before we headed for another of NYC's observation decks, the Top of the Rock at the Rockefeller Centre on W 50th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues (Manhattan is actually pretty easy to navigate around on foot - all the avenues are numbered and run north-south, and all of the streets are also numbered and run east-west. The only exception is Broadway, which bisects Manhattan diagonally, and throws the grid system into chaos at times!!). I can see why Top of the Rock is growing in popularity - you get similar views from their 70th floor observation deck as you do from the Empire State Building with shorter lines, audio-visuals before you reach the observation deck, and a mostly unobstructed view of New York City and it's surrounds, as you will see from the pictures we took below. The first is of Central Park, then the others are of various sites around NYC - you'll see the Empire State Building in there, along with a couple of heads that may be relatively familiar!!

We spent about half an hour at Top of the Rock - including the aforementioned birthday phone call back to Australia - before coming back to the Paramount via New York's many souvenir stores, where we picked up some nice mementos of the trip for our respective mother's, and where I am currently writing this, and trying to check up on the Red Sox-Yankees game currently happening at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox scored four runs in the second inning (thanks to David Ortiz's second home run this week), and are hopefully on their way to make it six wins from six tries against the Yankees this year (and no, not only can't I find it on TV, but I don't think I'd be allowed to watch it!!). Time to head out for a bite to eat (and hopefully find a TV showing the baseball) before our New York expedition comes to an end tomorrow, and we head the two hours down the road to Philadelphia, home of Rocky Balboa, the Liberty Bell and the Philly Cheesesteak!!

We'll report in from Philly tomorrow night - until then, keep well, be good and go Red Sox!!!

Touring the Big (Soggy) Apple remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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And here's the view when you pivot either way from that corner - the first photo looks towards 42nd Street, and the second towards 47th Street.

We left last night's blog in Boston reasonably early. After the blog had been posted, we ventured out for dinner. Knowing what we wanted to eat - Sarah requested steak - but not knowing where to go, we ventured down to the hotel lobby and checked out the rack of business cards they have from nearby restuarants. A restaurant called Joe's took our eye, it was walking distance from the John Hancock Hotel where we were staying, and the business card promised "all-American fare", so Joe's was the go!! Upon arrival, we were pleasantly surprised to see a old, lovely building housing a very classy looking restauarant, and a fantastic filet mignon for dinner with veggies!! The baked potato that Sarah had looked more like a loaf of bread, which of course pleased my potato-loving princess!!

After dinner, we went back to the hotel and hit the sack, looking forward to a sleep in!! We both rose at 9:00am, had breakfast, packed our gear and checked out of the John Hancock Hotel and Convention Centre, then headed back down the Mass Pike, past Fenway Park, where I made a silent promise to myself that I will be back soon (actually, it wasn't all that silent - Sarah heard me and said "next time take Dan (my brother) with you" - not a bad idea!!

It was a touch weird going back down a road that we had already travelled on, being I-90 back down the Mass Pike, but before long (and before the $1.25 toll out of Boston's city limits and the $2.90 Mass Pike toll) we turned off onto Interstate 84, and headed for the state of Connecticut.

For most part, the drive today was pretty easy - we only covered about 220 miles, and we were within the New York city limits within three-and-a-bit hours of leaving Boston. There wasn't a great deal of spectacular scenery to look at on the way - it was like an extended version of the drive between Melbourne and Geelong (or Melbourne and Traralgon for the Gippsland readers). We did cross over a pretty impressive-looking bridge over the Connecticut River near Hartford, Connecticut's biggest city, as shown below...

..and soon (I just got interrupted by Sarah commenting on something she's watching on the TV, and "and soon" was typed as "abd siib") after, we crossed into New York State. Sarah refused to take the picture, as she had already taken one of us crossing into New York State on Saturday on our drive from Cleveland to Boston, so that was fair enough in my view!! The trip into New York seemed to be going well, although as we got closer to the destination set into the GPS, I realised that we were actually descending into the suburbs of Brooklyn, instead of our Times Square Manhattan destination that the Paramount Hotel lay in. Sure enough, I'd put "1235 46th Street" into the GPS instead of "235 46th Street", so after a good set of profanities directed at the GPS, we then set out for our actual destination!!! It wasn't too bad though, as we got to see a fair bit of Brooklyn and suburban New York life in doing so, so it wasn't all bad!!!

We were only about 7 miles off track, so it didn't take us long to get pointed in the right direction, and over the Manhattan Bridge to cross from the borough of Brooklyn into the borough of Manhattan. Here's some pictures that Sarah took of us going over the Manhattan Bridge, with a picture of the New York skyline taken about 30 miles out of New York City as well

After we got over the Manhattan Bridge, things got interesting with the traffic. It was about 2:30pm by then, so it wasn't peak hour, but a bunch of one-way streets and roadworks throughout Manhattan made things quite interesting. The traffic wasn't all that bad to manage actually, it was much like Melbourne traffic, but with two main differences - the pushiness of the locals, who seemed to be unafraid to take a bit of paint damage to their cars to get into the lane they required (and if you are the type of driver who is very courteous when letting other drivers into your lane or trying to change lanes, then stay the hell out of Manhattan!!), and everyone just L-O-V-E-S to use their car horn. All you can hear is "HOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNK", constantly and annoyingly, all the way along!!

Things went pretty well though - I avoided any GBH to the car or any person - until we got to the intersection of 8th Avenue (which we had been driving along for a couple of miles) and 46th Street, where the Paramount Hotel is. We'd been listening to the radio on the way into New York about a "Taste of Times Square" festival going on along 46th Street and Broadway tonight, and sure enough, when we went to turn into 46th Street, the street was closed. After more obscenities, and asking a member of the New York Police Department, who was nice enough to wander over and find out why the guy with the Californian license plates was wanting to turn into a closed street, just what was going on and what to do, we did a lap of the block, parked the car on 9th Street, and walked the block-and-a-half to the Paramount Hotel to check in and find out where their parking garage was, seeing that 46th Street was closed. The hotel staff were very good - a bellhop named Rikki in particular - in directing me to the alternate entrance to their parking garage on 8th Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets, so it was back in the car on 9th Avenue, drive the short distance to 44th Street (I was parked on the corner of 9th Avenue and 46th Street, and 45th is a one-way street that runs to the right only), took a left, and drove the block-and-a-half to the parking garage between 45th and 46th Street. Sounds easy, and the drive itself was pretty easy, but with all of the buses stopping, taxis trying to do whatever they like and pushy New Yorkers driving with their phone in one hand talking a hundred to the minute and their other hand constantly on their car horn, the little trip around the block took about 25 minutes!!!

But all is safe and well now - the car is parked, not to come out until Wednesday when we leave New York, and we're safely at the Paramount Hotel in a comfortable, compact room (polite code for not big enough to swing a cat in, but that's the standard for New York hotel rooms, and we're only really using it to sleep in). Ducking out tonight for a trip up to the Empire State Building to check out the view of New York at night-time, then we have a guided bus tour of New York and surrounds, which includes a trip on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty, at 10am tomorrow morning, so expect a photo-filled entry tomorrow filled with New York facts!!! Will have to be careful what I wear though - my Red Sox gear might be out of the question, as remember how I said that the New York Yankees are like Collingwood - you either love them or hate them?? Well, that's how New Yorkers view the Red Sox - their rivalry dates back to 1912 - and a three-game series between the Sox and Yankees starts at Fenway Park tomorrow night!!

But that's another story for another day, and I'll bring that to you about this time tomorrow. For all of you Aussies, enjoy the first day back at work after the Queen's Birthday long weekend, and we'll be back on line tomorrow night!!!

Start spreading the news.... remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Today was all about the Boston Red Sox, and, from my point of view anyway, the day was awesome!! This, as mentioned last night, was the day I was looking forward to the most, so I made sure I looked my best – I had the first shave of our holiday!!! Mind you, it had been requested, so it wasn’t just for the baseball!! We were up and down at our free continental breakfast before 9am, although bowls of Sultana Bran were the only thing on the menu!! There were muffins, about six different pastries, English muffins, a huge coffee machine, but no bread for toast!! That’s the second hotel-provided breakfast we’ve been to, and the second that didn’t feature toast (come to think of it, our Breakfast with Shamu at Sea World only had French Toast as well). Thankfully, a toaster and a loaf of bread are accompanying us on our travels.

After breakfast, we walked out onto Copley Square, about a block-and-a-half from the hotel (and a beautiful place to view Boston from, as the photo below shows)…

…and jumped into a waiting taxi to take us to Fenway Park. The driver initially didn’t understand where we were going – sometimes I think I’m talking in a completely different language at times over here – and when he did, he told us that the new system that Boston’s taxi’s are setting up, where you can pay via your credit card from the back seat, wasn’t working in his cab, and neither was the meter. I told him that it cost us eight bucks last night, so I’d give him ten that morning!! He agreed, and away we went!!

We arrived at Fenway Park just before 9:30am, to take the 10:00am tour of Fenway. Upon entering the Red Sox Team Store, where we booked in for the tour, the tour guides couldn’t get over the fact that not only had we travelled all the way from Australia to watch the Red Sox, but that I was also a Red Sox Nation member (the equivalent of a non-ticketed AFL club membership back home)!! The tour was fantastic, from the guy who warmed up the crowd with some time-tested jokes before the walking tour started, to the Fenway anecdotes we heard on the way (Fenway Park features both the shortest and third-shortest home runs in Major League Baseball, the first match played at Fenway in April 1912 was against the New York Highlanders, who the next year changed their name to the New York Yankees, and stuff like that that a lot of Aussies wouldn’t understand!!). Here’s some of the photos we took on the tour. The first is of the media centre at Fenway Park, the second is of the Green Monster, the famous left-field wall (both taken from the right field roof boxes), the third is the view of Fenway from the top of the Green Monster, the fourth is of Red Sox pitcher Brad Penny (left) warming up (although he didn’t play in today’s game) and the fifth is of the ground crew preparing Fenway for the day’s play!!

The tour took us through until just before 11:00am, when we had to exit the park so it could be readied for the day’s play. Gates didn’t officially open until 11:35am, so we went for a walk around the Fenway complex (which, thankfully, was about half the distance of walking around the MCG), bought Sarah a nice little pink Red Sox visor, which she models in the photo below…

…and waited in line for the gates, or in our case where we waited, a whole street, to open. Yep, Boston’s Yawkey Way, which during most days is a normal street which cars drive up and down, turns into an admission point for Fenway Park on game-day, and the street is closed off and turnstiles are brought in!!! When we entered the gates, we headed straight back to the Red Sox Team Store, as I was keen to not just pick up a few souvenirs for myself, but also a birthday present for my brother Daniel, who’s birthday is this Wednesday, and also a souvenir for my Dad!! From there, it was straight into the park, and up to our seats in Section 1 of the Right Field Grandstand.

The Red Sox Nation membership I mentioned earlier also allowed me to purchase two tickets for a game of my choice (which was the main reason for buying it back in January, when planning for this trip was still in the larval stage), and after being allocated the tickets, I looked at a website called preciseseating.com, which shows the location of almost every seat in Fenway Park and whether they have any obstructions due to the columns that hold up the roof of the Grandstand. Unfortunately, our seats indicated that an obstruction was present, although a minor one. Here’s the view from our ticketed seat – as you can see, the batter and pitcher have a pole between them…

…I was advised by other Red Sox fans that I converse with on the Red Sox Nation forum that shelling our for tickets in other areas would be the way to go, and it was something that Sarah and I considered, until we saw the lines at the ticket windows and the no-scalp zone before the game. The last 496 games at Fenway Park have been sell-outs, and today ended up being no different, so as you can imagine, tickets were hard to come by unless you paid a scalper top dollar. Thankfully though, the baseball gods were looking down on us, as the two seats to our immediate right weren’t taken at the time the game started. I decided I would wait two innings, to give the ticket holders a chance to claim their seats, before I took ownership of them. Reality says that I lasted only one inning though, and moved over to seat 1 in the row, on the end of the row next to the Bleachers, and enjoyed the rest of the game from the below unobstructed view!! I’ve also included the view of the Fenway Park video screen, scoreboard and Green Monster from our seats!!

Unfortunately, the smiling of the baseball gods didn’t extend to the result of the game against the Texas Rangers, who have been one of the most improved teams in baseball this season. I mentioned last night that starting Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, pictured below both on the mound and via his picture on the Fenway Park video screen…

…was struggling for control a bit this season after a stint on the injured list, and today was no different. The Rangers had four runs on the board off seven hits after the third inning was over, and it looked like it could be a long day at Fenway. That was before the Red Sox bats fired up – catcher Jason Varitek walked, right fielder Mark Kotsay scored his first hit of the year, and reiging American League MVP also hit a single, bringing up Jacoby Ellsbury with the following situation prevailing…

There was a huge roar heard around Fenway when Ellsbury stroked a line drive down the centre-field line, and under the glove of Rangers second-baseman Ian Kinsler to drive in Vairtek and Kotsay, and put the Sox on the scoreboard.

When Kotsay hit his first home run of the season soon after, the Red Sox drew to within one run, but that was as close as they got though, as the Rangers extended their lead before winning the game 6-3, as the below photos show

Regardless of the result, I had an awesome time!! The dynamics of Fenway Park are very interesting, in that because the stadium only holds just over 37,000 people, fans of visiting teams are often simply unable to get tickets at Fenway, and hence the ground is usually a sea of red and blue. As the photo below shows, I was no exception, having slipped into one of my purchases pre-game.

There were photos taken of us together at Fenway, but not in a digital format. A photo of us was taken as we entered the ground on the tour, with the media centre and Green Monster as a backdrop, and as part of the Fenway First Timers program, designed for people on their maiden visit to Fenway, we also had a photo taken of the both of us with the Green Monster as a backdrop, which were printed out and given to us, and will adorn the mantelpiece back home in Australia!!

Here’s some of the other photos I took during play, including the Red Sox in the field, a close up of Red Sox skipper Jason Varitek, and at-bats from Red Sox Jason Bay and David Ortiz.

As expected, eating and drinking at Fenway Park requires a small mortgage to be taken out. One hot dog, albeit a famous Fenway Frank, cost $.4.75, although thankfully they were half-price in the first hour. A beer in a plastic cup cost $7.25, and a cup of Coke cost six bucks, although it was HUUUUUGE, and in a nifty souvenir cup that has now joined the cup collection for the trip home!! There were some other interesting quirks that we noticed during the game, including the Mexican Wave being performed without seeing the usual soft drinks, bottles, showers of water and half house-bricks being thrown into the air as we see back home, and an amusing (from an outsider's point of view) sing-along of "Sweet Caroline", with sections paused for crowd interaction and all, after the eighth inning!!!

After the game, we decided to walk the twenty minutes back to the John Hancock Hotel rather than try and catch a cab along with 10,000 other Bostonioans, and the walk took about twenty-five minutes. After checking our Dream Teams in the Business Centre at the hotel on the way up (I think I’ve got you covered Dianne!!), we came up to the room and relaxed for a bit, which continues now before we head out for dinner!!!

It’s back on the road tomorrow, although compared to what has already gone by, this four-hour trip will be like a run down the street. We’ll check in tomorrow night from New York City, on the doorstep of Times Square, so until then, be good!!!

A day in Red Sox heaven remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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You will likely have read about the up and down sort of driving day we had yesterday (and if you didn't, scroll down and read yesterday's entry first, so you are up to speed with things!!) - today was completely the opposite. We didn't have to worry about leaving anything behind, any roadworks or any time zone changes!! Upon entering the destination address into the GPS, it gave us an estimated arrival time in Boston of 5:30pm, which we very nearly almost pulled off!!

Firstly, excuse me if this seems a touch random tonight!! I had a few beers with dinner for the first time on the trip (seeing as I don't have to drive tomorrow), and given that the standard sized draught beer here in America is a pint, well, I'm a little bit under the weather!! I'll have accustomed myself to it by tomorrow though - I couldn't stand the thought of going to baseball in America and not having a hot dog and a beer, so if these reads a touch randomly tonight, that could be why!!

It was another no-fuss, no-frills driving day today, crossing three different state borders and seeing some amazing green country on the way. Within two hours of setting off from the Doubletree Hilton in Cleveland, which ranked as the better Hilton of the two we have stayed in so far - the wireless internet connection was superb (although parking was $16 for the night - a touch rude on what we had paid so far, but a snip compared to what we will pay over the next four days) - we had crossed through two states already!! Within an hour of leaving Cleveland, we had crossed the border into Pennslyvania, as shown below...

OK, OK, that's not one of Sarah's photos, I'll admit it!!! It is the exact same sign that we passed though!! Sarah took the photo from a bit far away - she was more concerned about actually getting the photo than worrying about the closeness of it, and you can barely make out the sign from the photo she took!! She got another chance not long after though, as we soon crossed into New York state after about forty minutes driving through the north-western corner of Pennsylvania!! Here's the (legitimate) border crossing photo!!

Driving through New York state took up the majority of the day's drive, with the New York State Thruway, some 270-odd miles of toll road, being the route taken for today. It was another ticketed toll road, although I did see (as well as on the Mass Pike later on) some cars with transponders zoom through the toll booths, as opposed to us taking a ticket and being on our way, and some $14.80 poorer at the end of the journey!! Interesting point about the New York State Thruway running from west to east - it's the first freeway we've been on that counted it's mile markers in reverse, starting at Mile 490 and working backwards, which was the distance from the start of the toll way to New York City!! For the Aussies reading this, think of the markers that we have on our highways every five kilometres indicating the distance to the closest main town, and that's the closest thing we have to it!!

Couple of interesting points on the trip down the New York State Thruway. Those who read yesterday's blog (and if you ignored my suggestion before, skip your way down on the page and read it NOW. Don't worry, I'll wait. I'll just go and grab a Coke from the hotel vending machine!! There, good to see you back, hope you enjoyed that quick read!!) will recall that whilst driving through Indiana, we flirted with the border crossing into Michigan to the north. Today was a similar story as we reached Buffalo in New York, except this time the border we were flirting with was Canada's!!! Niagara Falls isn't far from Buffalo, and it lies on both the American side and the Canadian side of the border!! Views, reportedly, are better from the Canadian side, and not wanting to go through the immigration procedures involved with a non-US citizen doing a road crossing into Canada, we decided to stay on the Thruway.

The second, and funnier, point came as we neared the New York state capital of Albany, and decided to pull into a Service Plaza on the side of the freeway to pick up lunch for Sarah (I wasn't hungry - and yes, you can copy and paste that ad infiniteum, you have my permission!!) and fill up the car with petrol. As I am right now, I wore my Red Sox baseball cap on the way down, knowing that the only two days I haven't worn it driving this week were games where the Red Sox lost (don't worry, it will be glued to my head tomorrow). Whilst filling up the car with petrol, and having swiped my Travel Card through the card reader on the pump to pay for the petrol, the attendant walked over and asked in his distinctive drawl whether my card had worked, as the last six apparently hadn't. When I confirmed in the positive, he said "oh yeah, look who's in first place", referring to the standings in baseball's American League East ladder, where the Red Sox and New York Yankees were actually tied in first place going into tonight's games, with a little smirk and a punch of the air. Now I'm only reasonably new to this baseball stuff, but now I can see why Yankees fans are hated with a passion here in Boston - they're like Collingwood fans, to draw an Aussie equivalent!!

Upon leaving the New York State Thruway, we soon crossed the border into Massachusetts, as per the below photo from Sarah's camera...

...and embarked on the last 150 miles of the eastern leg of our road trip, to Boston via the Massachusetts Turnpike, or Mass Pike, as it is locally referred to. The drive was painless for most part, until we reached the Interstate 90 junction (I-90 was basically the only road we travelled on today - the different names for the toll roads were all actually part of I-90) and toll booth, where traffic had banked up quite heavily - mainly due to the fact that the I-90 is one of the main connectors for Fenway Park, and Jon Lester throwing out the first pitch of tonight's game between the Red Sox and the Texas Rangers was only two hours away!! After about a half an hour of waiting, we got through the toll gate, paid our $3.85 for the 150-odd miles of travel, and drove the last seven miles (passing through another toll booth, forcing us to dole out another $1.25) into Boston to the John Hancock Hotel and Convention Centre, where I double-parked not knowing where the parking garage was, quickly checked in, then came out sheepishly to reverse the car ever so slightly into the parking garage!!!!

After dumping the bags in our seventh floor room, we decided that hunger pains couldn't be subsided any longer, and decided to walk to the Fenway Park area to check out our walk for tomorrow morning, and also so I could watch the game in a sports bar atmosphere!! We watched the first inning of the game at the hotel, then walked for about twenty minutes to Fenway Park. We arrived at Fenway at the "no-scalp" zone, where people could by walk-up tickets for face value, and considered the prospect of grabbing a couple of tickets and watching the rest of the game, but then decided that hunger over-rode the prospect, so we walked past the myriads of t-shirt vendors, hot dog carts and souvenir shops to the Cask and Flagon, right opposit Fenway Park, and which had the game on about thirty different plasma screens. We plonked ourselves down, had a bite to eat and a few drinks, and watched as the Red Sox went on a rampage, winning 8-1 thanks to some great offense and great pitching by Jon Lester, who pitched all nine innings in the game, wasn't scored on until the second-last batter of the game, and didn't even have the Rangers hit the ball safely until the seventh inning of the game (good luck to my chances of watching the Red Sox star Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who can struggle with control at times, do the same thing tomorrow). We decided to leave the Cask and Flagon before the end of the game to beat the crowds coming out of the sold-out Fenway (and at just over $45 for dinner for both of us, drinks and a tip, how can you go wrong). We caught a taxi back to the hotel, as we couldn't fathom the thought of walking again, and for only eight bucks, got back to the hotel in comfort, where we watched Lester finish off the Rangers, and I adjourned down here to the business centre to write the blog whilst Sarah watches whatever she wants on TV, given that I'll be cramming baseball down her throat all day tomorrow!!!!

If you do nothing else, make sure you log on at about the same time tomorrow!! The trip to Fenway Park, the tour we are taking at 10am and the subsequent game are the main part of the whole holiday I have been looking forward to, and I may just take control of the camera at some stages tomorrow to try and capture the essence of a day at the baseball!!! Until then, have a good night (or Sunday afternoon in Oz), and I'll be back tomorrow night, same time, same place, same website!!!

Beantown, here we are! remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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After posting last night's blog, the wireless internet access we were provided at our Thursday night pit-stop destination of Des Moines, Iowa, decided to kick the bucket, and didn’t work again for the rest of our stay, with connectivity issues between my laptop and their server the problem (on their server’s end, thankfully). I’m not going to rant and rave about it in the same fashion as I did about the shoddy connection at the Las Vegas Hilton the other night though, mainly because last night’s wi-fi connection was provided complimentary, and I was bought up to never complain about anything given to me for free!! It was frustrating for a couple of reasons, one being that I like to book the next night’s accommodation before we leave that night’s lodgings, so that I have a destination address to input into my GPS, and so that I can feel comfortable knowing that I have things already organised. The second reason was that I was hanging to find the results of Friday night’s (Melbourne time) AFL match between the mighty Western Bulldogs and perennial losers Richmond (yep, it’s my blog, and if I want to comment about Richmond’s inability to win, then I can). A quick check on Telstra’s Pocket News was required via my mobile phone, and whilst I know that it will cost me a dollar instead of the usual four cents, it was all worth it when the phone beeped at me to let me know the Doggies had defeated the Tigers by a whopping 68 points to make it two from two this season against Richmond!!! This next part is a bit of an in-joke that only a handful of people will get, but even on the other side of the world, it’s so worth gloating about – Dad, put your hand up if your team won this week!!!!

In order to try and find a connection, we headed a couple of miles down the road to a nearby McDonald’s, who I remembered offered free wi-fi hot spots (or Wireless Internet Connectivity Spots, for those of you over 40). Unfortunately, whilst my memory was correct, it’s the Aussie Macca’s restaurants that offer this privilege, and their American cousins don’t seem to offer the same services (or at least this one didn’t – and the Macca’s waitresses weren’t all that pleased when we walked in and out without buying anything!!). Unfortunatility number two (and yes, I’m allowed to make up words too!!) occurred when Sarah went to locate the road atlas that she uses to keep a track of our proceedings during the day, only to not be able to find it in the car, so a trip back to the America’s Best Value Motor Inn was required, where it thankfully lay, before we could continue on our way.

I had a back-up plan for the wi-fi thing though – I remembered seeing on signs advertising freeway rest areas yesterday that some of them offered wireless hot spots, and was hoping that this could be my saving grace. Thankfuly, we had driven no more than about 15 miles out of Des Moines on Interstate 80 before such a rest area appeared, complete with a wi-fi hot spot, so we pulled over, pulled out the laptop and were able to do what we had to do before re-commencing our journey, this time with a destination address for the Doubletree Hilton in Cleveland, booked through an awesome discount hotel website called Hotwire, where we booked the room for $49 plus tax – a bargain for a 3.5 star room!!

As per yesterday, this will be reasonably short and sweet again, as we spent the whole day driving through some unremarkable scenery as we continued to traverse America’s mid-west and started reaching some more populated areas. Whilst there weren’t many memorable photo opportunities, the camera-woman was back to bringing her “A” game, although she didn’t get much chance to show off her talents, save for pictures like this below of yours truly in mid-drive, taken just near the border between Iowa and Illinois on Interstate 80.

This was our first border crossing of three for the day, as evidenced below…

…on a day when we didn’t stray from Interstate 80 until our approach into Cleveland (save for a twenty-minute trip on a beltway freeway in Davenport, Iowa – one that skirts the outer fringes of the town rather than going down the main freeway which cuts through the town limits – to enable through traffic quicker access to the rest of their journey). This caused some frustrations in Illinois though, as the Illinois Department of Roads are currently undertaking freeway upgrades procedures along their portion of Interstate 80, which slowed traffic down quite significantly in some places. One such place was on the outskirts of Chicago, one of America’s largest cities, and one that has sprawled out so far that even 30 miles from the town’s epicentre, the traffic was packed. These delays had added about 30 minutes to our travel time (plus an extra hour that we would gain further down the road when we crossed into our fourth time zone in as many days. We’re now on Eastern time, which means we are 14 hours behind Melbourne time in Australia, and will be on Eastern time for the best part of the next ten days). We then decided to pull off the freeway and stop to re-fill the car with petrol and grab lunch, which we did at a place called JJ Fish and Chicken in Joliet, Illinois, one of Chicago’s suburbs, where the servers had obviously never come across Australian’s before (“Are you folks from England” is the question I was asked!!)

Upon re-entering the freeway, our route took us back on Interstate 80 to where it turned into the Indiana Toll Road just after crossing the border between Illinois and Indiana. Or at least that’s what we thought. Instead, our GPS navigator instructed us to get off the freeway, drive through some of suburban Chicago’s back streets, before re-entering the freeway about fifteen minutes later at a small Illinois toll point which cost us 80 cents to drive down – and which was part of Interstate 80 all along!! Even now as I write this, I can’t explain why that happened. Perhaps the GPS system had tired of directing us through freeway after freeway, and wanted to explore some new sights!! In the end, we got back on track, and crossed the border from Illinois into Indiana, as shown below, only to run into more delays as traffic crossed onto the Indiana Toll Road.

Most of the driving we did in Indiana was on tolled roads, with the Indiana portion of Interstate 80 and 90 (they had merged by this stage) being deemed the Indiana Toll Road. Unlike in Melbourne, where you can fly through the freeways either with your toll transponder or the option to pre-and-post purchase passes, the Indiana Toll Road still requires cash to pass through. We collected a ticket not dissimilar to a train ticket by entering a gated gantry and plucking the ticket from a machine, then had to hand over cash at the gantry at the other end of the freeway, which, in this instance, was $6.75. Here’s the gantry that we entered at the eastern end of the tollway, near the Ohio border, to pay our money to the little lady behind the ticket window.

From there, we crossed the Ohio border about a mile down (after having run parallel with the border of Michigan for most of our journey through Indiana – so closely in some spots that I thought the road may have crossed into Michigan for a fleeting moment)..

..only to run into another tolled section of I-80, which was tolled until we switched onto Interstate 90 about 25 miles out of Cleveland. Toll roads are common in America’s eastern states, and I expect to see a lot more of them in the coming days, although it’s worth the time savings to travel the tolled freeways rather than the alternate options. The Ohio Turnpike worked in the same way as its Indiana neighbour – we took a ticket at the gantry, then handed over six bucks when we exited I-80. From there, it was a nice 20 minute drive into Cleveland, although by that stage it was approaching 9:00pm, and we were both pretty tired. Hence why I am currently typing this from the comfort of one of the two beds in our Doubletree Hilton room, as I forgot to ask for a one-bed room at check-in, with Sarah sleeping soundly alongside of me.

That’s it for another day, as Fenway Park draws ever near. The hotel that we booked in Boston (again through Hotwire at $70 per night cheaper than if I’d gone through the hotel’s website) is walking distance from Fenway Park, which will be very handy for Sunday (and maybe tomorrow night…hmmm, while Sarah sleeps, ideas form – we should get into Boston about 40 minutes before tomorrow night’s game between the Red Sox and Rangers kicks off…hmmm).

Hope all are well – as mentioned last night, it’s been great keeping tabs with everyone so that you all know we are OK and having a ball!! See you tomorrow night from Boston!!!

The Easterly Migration Continues remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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This is going to be a shorter blog than normal, and yes, I can here you saying “yeah, right, he said that last night and we ended up with a sequel to War and Peace”. This time, though, I’m telling the truth, for two reasons.

The first is the drive itself today. Whilst we covered a lot of ground, we covered it quicker than what we did yesterday. We left the Motel 6 in Wheat Ridge at about 8:20am, and arrived at the America’s Best Value Inn here in Urbandale just before 7:00pm. Take an hour off this, as we passed into the US Central Time Zone about 30 miles into Nebraska at about 10:30am from memory, and another half an hour for stopping for lunch and petrol in Lexington, Nebraska, and we’ve covered the 660 miles in just over nine-and-a-half hours – not a bad clip, thanks to the majority of the trip being in a 75 mph zone. However, there wasn’t the scenery that there was yesterday and the day before. Today’s drive, which was mostly through the state of Nebraska, was much like driving through country Victoria (back home in Australia, for the benefit of our American readers). It was very green (well, country Victoria 18 months ago then), very flat, and there were livestock and farming equipment everywhere!! The drive not only was shorter than yesterday, but also felt like it went by a lot quicker, as there wasn’t the twists and turns of the Rocky Mountains to deal with. Physically, I felt fine all the way throughout, but I’m a bit spent as I write this!! The only real mischief we got into was in Omaha, Nebraska’s largest city, on the border of Nebraska and Iowa. We hit the city fringes of Omaha just before 5pm – yep, peak hour, and there was a bit of a stinky-poo on the I-80 freeway between a couple of cars, which slowed things down a bit and made it probably a twenty-minute gap from Omaha’s western city limits to the Iowa border. Could have been much worse, though – listening to the radio after we had just passed the city limits of Iowa border town Council Bluffs, the congestion had gotten much worse and traffic was backed up!!!

Just to clarify things, we don’t actually go through the towns themselves on our journeys down the various interstate freeways,, meaning no stopping at traffic lights or the sort, however at some stages the freeways do go through the town limits and speeds drop to reflect this. Each exit, though, is cleverly sign-posted if it does lead to a town, with the logos of hotels accessible from the exit, petrol stations (still selling beer!!) and restaurant logos (mostly fast food). We used one of these exits at lunchtime today, at Lexington, Nebraska, as we spied a billboard a few miles out stating there was a KFC at this exit. Being KFC fanatics back home, both Sarah and I were looking forward to tasting what the Americans had to offer, being, of course, the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken!! We left, though, very disappointed. The Chicken Fillet and Zinger burgers we were used to in Australia had disappeared, replaced by a Double Crunch Burger (which I had – two crispy strips inside a roll with mayo and diced tomato), a Snacker, which is like the KFC equivalent of a Macca’s Cheeseburger, and some Honey Glazed Sandwich that looked ordinary. There were no KFC chips either, replaced with potato wedges that weren’t bad, but weren’t seasoned, which is the whole pleasure of KFC chips. Sarah wasn’t happy with her Crispy Strips either, which use a spicier coating than their Aussie cousins. Faced with this disappointment, we vowed as we walked out the doors that all fast-food eating from now on will be done at establishments that don’t have a presence in Australia – that way we have nothing to compare them too!!

The second reason is that you’ll notice a distinct lack of photos in this blog today. About ten minutes out from each border, I tell Sarah to get the camera ready to take the photo of the “Welcome to” sign for the upcoming state. The state line appears on my GPS system before we reach it as well, so it gives Sarah plenty of time to get ready to take the shot. To her credit, my girl had things ready beautifully, and had the camera poised as we rounded the last little bend in I-76 in Colorado (which ended soon after the border, merging with I-80 as we entered Nebraska). It was then that I heard a distinctive “Oh crap” and a slight shaking of the camera. The batteries had run out just before the big moment, as Sarah hadn’t charged them since we entered the US, and given all the photos we have taken, plus a good 25 minutes of video from Sea World that we have to show you when we get back to Australia, the batteries had decided they needed a rest, and shut themselves down!! Thankfully, though, we’re not the only crazy people who take pictures of the “Welcome to” state signs, and I’ve found the photos from the exact crossings we did today – the first is at the Colorado/Nebraska border on Interstate 76, and the second is of the Nebraska/Iowa border as we exited Omaha.

And folks, that’s it for tonight!! See, I told you it would be short and sweet. The Aussies will note that this is posted earlier than usual – not only am I actually more organised tonight, but we’ve also pulled closer to the Aussies in time difference thanks to passing into the Central Time Zone, making the time difference 15 hours. Tomorrow (Friday), we pass into the Eastern time zone just past Chicago, which will put us only 14 hours behind Australia – a timezone that we will be in for the best part of ten days!!

Thanks for all of the comments that have been posted as well, and the messages we’ve both received asking how to post comments (there should be a blue-coloured “Comments” link right at the bottom of the post, for those both unaware and who haven’t yet made it to the end of any posts!!). The technological age seems to be growing, as we now know that my parents are accessing the blog every day, and that Sarah’s Dad has now become technologically-savvy to the point of updating and trading in his Dream Team all on his own – which reminds me – better update mine after posting before the mighty Western Bulldogs send Suntan Terry to the Centrelink queue with a nasty spanking as his final memory of AFL football – go you Doggies!! Speaking of sport, the Red Sox won again today, sweeping their three-game series with the Detroit Tigers with their 6-3 victory today, which now sends them back to Fenway Park for a three-game series against the Texas Rangers, which we will be a part of until Sunday!!!

Dinner here in Des Moines consisted of a trip to the local Applebees restaurant, a chain restaurant recommended by friends Speedy and Kate, who not long ago did their own USA road trip on holidays from a year working in Canada. Again, we had cheap, huge meals, and again, we had confused looks from the staff members as they tried to translate my Ocker accent!!! It seems like the staff are almost offended when we ask if certain items featured in meals to be removed to accommodate Sarah’s lactose-free requirements, and sometimes I have to explain the request two or three times before it sinks in!!!!

Another driving day coming up tomorrow, as we start to hit the more populated areas of the country, and expect to have our first rendezvous with American toll roads. The intended destination is Cleveland, Ohio, for Friday night, so we will report from there.

And Trish, don’t worry about Sarah apparently only contributing minimal amounts to the food fund – all of our money was pooled before we got on the plane, so in reality everything is being split down the middle!! Sarah is the custodian of the coins though, as my wallet has no provisions for coin holding!!

Until tomorrow night, from the banks of the Cuyahogan River!!

Shaun and Sarah

Driving in our own private Iowa remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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According to the little trip-metre that is fitted into the Nissan Altima, from the time we left the Arco Service Station opposite the Las Vegas Hilton to the time we pulled into the Motel 6 in Wheat Ridge, we had covered just a touch over 740 miles, or about 1200 kilometres (as says the conversion calculator in my Michelin Road Atlas!!). The trip started at about 6:45am, and ended at 7:15pm, which included a lunch stop and the extra hour added on when we crossed from the Pacific Time Zone into the Mountain Time Zone. All up, we drove for about eleven hours today, which has left us both tired, but satisfied, as the longest leg of the journey is out of the way.

I'll leave Las Vegas with a couple of quick observations, given that we will be back there in about three weeks, and will give a fuller update on the happenings of Sin City then

- We managed to leave Las Vegas without gambling a single penny! Same couldn't be said for the locals, who were pumping coins into the slot machines (or pokies, as us Aussies know them as) when we came down to check-out at 6:30am

- I didn't need to play the Aussie card too much - huge billboards of Human Nature and a Thunder from Down Under male revue show endorned the surrounds of the Hilton, and Gabriella Cilmi's "Sweet About Me" was playing in the hotel foyer, suggesting that the Las Vegans are already infatuated with us Ockers!!

- The Las Vegas Hilton is fantastic value for money, the bed was huge and comfortable, the room was huge and it had all of the creature comforts, but if you need to stay there on business or have a need to connect to the Internet whilst in Las Vegas, DO NOT STAY AT THE LAS VEGAS HILTON. Wi-fi Internet Access was $13.99 for the night - compare that to $4.99 per night at the Good Nite Inn in San Diego and $2.99 per night here in Denver - and was sporadically working all night. It was hugely frustrating, especially when I chose to use my card to pay for the bill instead of putting it on the room, yet the login page kept directing me 9 times out of 10 to the Las Vegas Hilton start-up page, where they wanted you to charge the $13.99 to your room. Whilst this didn't happen after I called Customer Service, the actual connection kept dropping in and out all night.

- After the discovery of the US service stations that sell beer, I found that not only did the Arco servo in Las Vegas sell beer at 6:30 in the morning, but it also had a row of slot machines in there?? Whassupwitdat??

After reading that, I can hear you saying "What possessed you to leave Vegas so early??" It wasn't easy, I can tell you!! I'm one of those people who, when they know they have to go somewhere early on, I prefer to just get up and go rather than wait around. Sarah, on the other hand, doesn't function all that well first thing in the morning, and especially even less so when it is against her will. Whilst I got my way and we left early, I also got the silent treatment, several versions of "the look", and even heard the word "jerk" bandied around in conversation during the day!!!

It was worth it, though, as the drive was quite spectacular. Once we left Las Vegas, it was about an hour before we crossed the border into Arizona, and it was mostly desert, and hot - the temperature in Las Vegas was already over 90 degrees fahrenheit (32 degrees Celcius) at 6:30am!! The one highlight was the town of Mesquite, located just on the Nevada side of the Nevada/Arizona border on Interstate 15, which advertised itself as a mini-Vegas, and had all the glitz and glam to suit!! It was also good to see the border!! After crossing into Nevada yesterday, we decided to get a picture of the "Welcome to (State Name)" at every state border, to prove that we're not just sitting in a room telling stories, we were actually there. We missed the Nevada sign yesterday, capturing the "Welcome to Primm, Nevada" sign instead, but have the opportunity to get the Nevada photo in a couple of weeks!! Anyway, here's Arizona!!

Arizona didn't last too long, as Interstate 15 cuts ever so briefly through the north-western corner of Arizona. We were only there for about thirty-five minutes, but went through some beautiful canyons, which are close relatives to the Grand Canyon, which is also in Arizona (and will be coming to a blog near you in about two weeks). Here's some of those canyons and mountains.

After the brief interlude in Arizona, Utah was the next state we passed through, and is the state that we spent the majority of the morning in today. Here's the border entry from Arizona along Interstate 15

One of the first things we saw crossing into Utah was a brilliant view of some far-off snow-covered peaks. For someone that has never actually seen snow in person, let alone having it seep through my hands, it was pretty exciting to see!! Here's a couple of photos that Sarah took of these mountains, which I have a sneaking suspicion may have been the Rocky Mountains (which we will see again later) as we were driving along!!

We didn't get up as high as Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah and the city responsible for the state's Mormon heritage, turning off Interstate 15 to head east along Interstate 70 at it's commencement near Richfield. It was a pleasure heading into Utah and seeing greenery after spending the best part of the road trip so far in the desert. Not only were the fields nice and green in the south-western corner of the state, we also saw some pretty good views of canyons and mountains as well.

We stopped for lunch and a petrol top-up at a little ghost town in Utah called Green River, about half an hour away from the Utah/Colorado border. It was a nice lunch (even though I discovered that American bacon is far, far inferior to Australian bacon. Picture the middle bacon rashers we eat in Australia, take the big meaty part at the bottom of it off to leave just the strip at the top with a little bit of meat and some fat, and you have American bacon), although I was most amused when it came time to pay the bill, and it came to $16.01 in total. Now, for those Americans reading this that are saying "that's not amusing, what's he on about", us Aussies had 1 cent and 2 cent coins phased about about 10-15 years ago, and anything that costs, say $3.57, is rounded to the nearest five cents use(usually up) if paying in cash. Apparenty, the 5 cent coin is on the way out now as well, which will be interesting!! America, though, still use the penny, as well as nickels (five cents), dimes (ten cents), quarters (twenty-five cents) and dollar coins at times to complement their dollar notes. I had the cash in my wallet to make the sixteen bucks, but had to revert to the self-presided coin carrier, Sarah, to get the extra penny, as had I handed over a twenty-dollar note to pay, there's no way the one cent would have been cast off, and I would have received the $3.99 change!!! Whilst Sarah't didn't want to part with it, the penny was handed over, and we were on our way to Colorado!!

It was about a 300km drive to Denver from the Colorado border, and through some pretty tough stuff at times. For most part, the speed limits on the Interstate freeways in all four states we crossed through today was 75 miles per hour, or 120/kmh, which was fairly flying, but Colorado had quite a few twists and turns through some tricky terrain at times, as we weaved our way up the Rocky Mountains and along the Colorado River. In particular, a tight stretch of road just past Grand Junction where the road hugged the Colorado River required a great deal of concentration, as did the last stretch of the journey from Glenwood Springs to Denver - the route often travelled during ski season, when chains have to be fitted to tyres, and have cut up the road pretty bad in some places.

The highlight, though, was seeing the Rocky Mountains up close. Interestingly, when Interstate 70 was constructed, it intially took in a pretty tricky drive up and over the Rockies. The decision was made in the late seventies to instead create a tunnel through the Continental Divide, to give better interstate access to Denver and the ski fields, and it's pretty awesome to see the Johnson Tunnel (on our side) and the Rockies up close, as you will see below...

About half-an-hour later, we arrived at Denver, at the aforementioned Motel 6, which was booked last night in the rare instance that the internet at the Hilton worked properly (we also booked our accomodation for the weekend in Boston, which I will touch on later this week). We arrived with just enough time to turn the TV onto ESPN, and see that the Red Sox vs Detroit Tigers game was still going in Detroit, and the Red Sox were up 10-0 in the bottom of the eighth inning!!! A couple of minutes later, the score was 10-5, as the Tigers bats benefitted from three fielding errors by the Red Sox filters, but thankfully the Red Sox got out of the inning with any further damage, and whilst we didn't add on any runs in the ninth inning, Takashi Saito managed to preserve the lead and give the Sox the 10-5 victory, which moves the Red Sox into a tie for first place with the New York Yankees in the AL East.

We then went over to the Denny's Restaurant next door to Motel 6 for dinner, which is usually a breakfast restaurant but offered up a scrumptious grilled chicken dinner with two chicken breasts, chips and veggies (and yes Mum, I'm eating my vegetables) along with a glass of Coke that was bottomless, as they kept getting replaced as I finished them (glasses though, so couldn't add one to the inventory), which cost $12.16 in total - it would have been a $25 dinner in Australia, with only one piece of chicken!! With Sarah's omelette only taking the total to $22.40 in total, with tax, I was more than happy to hand over the extra three dollars for a tip!! It had rained buckets whilst we were in Denny's, and we've gone from the heat of Vegas in the morning to an overnight forecast of 35-40 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver tonight - which is 2 to 4 degrees Celsius!!

That ends this fun day, and it's time to get some much-needed rest before another driving day, which should take us from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa - a shorter drive than today by about two hours. I'm looking forward to it though - I'm getting the biggest buzz out of the drive, and have adapted to the American style of driving now, so there's few road problems!!

Fenway Park is just four days away now, and I can't wait!!

See you tomorrow night from the cornfields of Iowa!!

From Sin City to the Mile High City remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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It's 10:23pm on Monday, 1st June as I write this, on our second night in San Diego at the Good Nite Inn. Before we recap the day, which will feature some of the photos from our trip to Sea World (and yes, I did the sensible thing tonight and uploaded all of the necessary photos before I started writing, so we shouldn't have a repeat of last night's catastrophe)!!

The main highlights of the flight from Melbourne to LAX were covered in last night's blog entry. As you just about all know now, our flight that was scheduled to take off at 10:15am didn't get going until 12:45pm, but only an hour-and-a-half was added to our travel time thanks to Leadfoot Larry, the pilot, deciding that as the traffic police don't control the airways, it wouldn't be a bad thing if he got a touch higher (11,000 metres above sea level, to be precise), crank it up to over 1000 km/hr, and get us to Los Angeles by 9:00am. Qantas gave us two $15 vouchers to compensate for the delay at Melbourne Airport. One of the vouchers was spent on a meat pie to share between both Sarah and I as a snack (at six bucks for one pie, there would have been nooooo bloody way that we would have paid for it with our own money) and a drink each, and the other voucher went on a Berlitz Pocket Travel Guide to San Francisco for Sarah, to go with the New York and Las Vegas editions that snuck onto the register at an RACV Shop back in Melbourne the week before we left when I was purchasing my International Driving Permit, a That's Life Crack The Code puzzle book for me, as an attempt to stave off the boredom that had set in whilst waiting for Flight QF093 to eventuate, and a packet of Starburst Fruit Chews (which, bar two lollies, remains in my back-pack at time of writing).

The flight over seemed to take forever. For someone who's longest flight was between Melbourne and Sydney, the flight to Los Angeles was, whilst exciting, also quite tedious. Sleeping was difficult, even if the afternoon sun disappeared not long before we crossed over the international date line just after we flew over the Fiji Islands. I reckon I managed about three hours of semi-decent sleep during the flight, with the rest of the time spent eating, watching repeats of The Simpsons and Two and a Half Men and the movie Notorious (about the life of rapper Biggie Smalls, a.k.a The Notorious B.I.G, and the East Coast/West Coast American rap war that eventually claimed the life of both Smalls and Tupac Shakur). Therefore, it was a relief when the plane touched down at LAX, Los Angeles International Airport, just before 9:00am local time (or 2:00am Monday morning Melbourne time).

Getting through Customs was much easier than anticipated. Having heard stories about waiting times that stretched into several hours and over-zealous US Customs agents, it was pleasing to have passed through Customs within 30 minutes of getting off the plane. Alll Customs declarations and forms were filled out on the plane, including a green form that was identical to the ESTA Travel Authorisation that I was strongly recommended to fill out before entering the USA by the US Government, the Australian government and Customs themselves. They don't mind making sure that they have you covered on entry to the USA though. After presenting my passport, required forms and aforementioned packet of Starburst Fruit Chews to the Customs Officer (which raised a rare smile), I was required to place both hands, one after the other, on some sort of finger-print processing pad so that the US Government has our prints on file, as well as taking an electronic photo of me as well, to cross-reference against the electronic photo stored on my Passport. After that, it took about ten minutes to get our bags, as I think Sarah's case was the very last one loaded off the plane, then we walked out of the Customs controlled area and onto our first glimpse of American soil just before 10:00am.

It was at this point that I reaped the fruits of my seven-odd months of planning for this trip. The plan was to catch the LAX Fly-Away bus to Los Angeles' Union Station (the equivalent of catching the Skybus from Melbourne Airport to Southern Cross Station), catch a Metro Purple Line subway train to Wilshire/Normandie station, then walk the short distance to the Budget Rent-A-Car outlet at 3600 Wilshire Boulevard in Downtown Los Angeles, where we were booked to pick up our rental car at 12:00pm. Everything linked up so nicely that we walked through the door at Budget just before 11:00am. The Fly-Away bus arrived by the time I had turned my mobile phone on and it had found an American carrier for international roaming (Cingular), it whizzed us down the freeway and into LAX, we paid our $1.25 in the ticketing machine to pay for the train ticket, went down the escalator to the correct platform, and jumped on the correct train, which was the first that arrived!!! The stroll from Wilshire/Normandie station to the Budget office was about two blocks through a dead Los Angeles, and was done in about five minutes. The decision was made to book a car in the city so that I had a chance to view Los Angeles traffic and the notion of driving on the wrong side of the road and the like before jumping in the car. The conversation with the bloke behind the counter at Budget was covered in last night's blog, where I unexpectedly was drawn into a conversation about Shane Warne. The guy was good enough to upgrade our booking from a small car to a medium car, as he had no small ones in the lot, and after I had handed over my credit card, license and booking sheet and was handed my GPS unit, a Garmin Nuvi not wholly dis-similar to the Navman S100 I tool around with back home (in fact, the same Australian voice was available on the unit, and has been called into duty) but with a big sand-bag attached to it to make sure it doesn't move around in the car, as affixing things to the windscreen of a car is illegal in California (amongt other states including Nevada), a stroll was made into the parking lot of the 3600 building to where our car, a Nissan Altima, was waiting for us.

There it is, the beast (and I successfully managed to post it without losing my work tonight - although I copied and pasted into a Word document to safeguard against any loss of data). And yes, when I first got the keys and went to check it out, I headed to the right side of the car to jump behind the wheel, before remembering where I was and went back around to the left, and correct, side of the car. Pleasant surprise - when I went to put the key in the ignition, there was no ignition, or no key!! It's a push-button start system - jump in the car, put your foot on the brake and press the button, and the engine starts. We got a remote for entry as well, so a nifty piece of work it is indeed.

As prepared as I thought I was for driving in America, though, it took a little more getting used to than I thought. It wasn't just getting into the wrong side of the car, the indicators and windscreen wipers were also reversed. The indicators are on the left-hand side of the car, and are backwards to what we are used to in Oz (flicking the indicator up signals a right-hand turn, and flicking it down indicates a left-hand turn). The driving on the other side of the car thing also threw up something unexpected - adjusting my lane positioning whilst driving. Having most of the car on the right-hand side meant that I was constantly having to keep adjusting to the left, which was slightly annoying, as I kept hearing a constant thudding sound that meant I was getting too close to the lane dividers. Therefore, whilst it took a little bit of getting used to, and there were a couple of mis-indications, a couple of instances of missing turns because I was in the wrong lane, and a couple of times where the thudding sound was made which made my already heightened sense of anxiousness even more so, we managed to escape the throbbing metropolis of Los Angeles unscathed, via Interstate 5 for the two-hour trip to San Diego. Mind you, getting too close to the lane dividers wasn't the only reason for the thudding - the surface of Interstate 5 isn't the smoothly-paved blacktop freeway that I'm used to in Australia - it was a grey, pock-marked eighty-mile stretch of road, where no-one at all paid any attention to the 65 mph (110 kmh) speed limit, and despite doing maybe a mile or two over this myself, I was constantly overtaken by hordes of Californians more used to the US Freeway system than I.

But we made it to San Diego in one piece, and checked in to the Good Nite Inn Sea World hotel, a booking that I made when I found it on the internet for US$109 for the two nights we are staying here just before Christmas. We arrived about fifteen minutes before the check-in time of 2:00pm, and decided it would be a good idea to grab something to eat before waiting, as it had been quite some time since we had eaten. Across the road from the hotel lies a couple of fast-food chains, Denny's and Jack-In-The-Box, and as Denny's advertises itself as more of a breakfast restaurant, Jack In The Box scored our custom. Having heard countless stories about the size of American fast-food meals (and being a bit of a burger junkie), I was anxious to check this out, so I ordered a large double cheeseburger combo meal - I would eat the burger, and Sarah wanted the chips!! As the burger and fries were being prepared, the waitress handed over the large drink cup. I swear, you could drown in this thing!! If it didn't hold the best part of 1.5 litres of soft drink, then I am not here. The burger and chips were allright too - not remarkable, but not bad, but the sheer size of this drink cup had me floored!! It's a plastic cup of the re-useable variety, so it's making the trip back to Oz with me so that I can prove this to all and sundry back home!!!

After the meal, we walked back over to the hotel, and had no problems at all with checking in - apart from the counter girl telling me she had never seen the name Shaun spelt that way, and smiling every time we seemed to say something. I paid for two days of wireless internet access at $4.99 per day, and we were given the swipe card to our room, room 113.

The room was pleasantly surprising for the price we paid for it - a ground floor room with a king-sized bed, the biggest I have ever seen!!! We spent the afternoon resting on the HUUUUUGE bed, before deciding to venture out and see what San Diego had to offer. Our mission was to find a department store and supermarket to pick up some supplies required for the upcoming road trip, so I set the address for the nearest JC Penney store into the GPS. It sent me to a shopping centre some 3.5 miles from the hotel to which the drive, apart from missing the first turn I was supposed to take by not fully knowing the GPS's commands and being in the wrong lane and a few wrong indications, went off pretty much without a hitch. The JC Penney was included in a fairly big outside shopping mall, along with other department stores Macy's and Bloomingdales, but all of them looked like American versions of Myer, and didn't contain the Esky that we were looking for, which would have been something that, it appeared, most of the staff would never have seen before!! So it was back in the car, and back to the Good Nite Inn, so we could check out the location of the bus stop that would transport us to Sea World the next morning (and so I could change clothes again - the t-shirt, shorts and thongs that I changed into once we first got to San Diego felt a bit light-on, given that the day was more overcast that I had anticipated).

We found the bus stop, which was only a short stroll away, before we realised that we were in an area that contained quite a few fast-food stores and decent sized-looking shops, and thought that we would investigate. In looking through the GPS system for local attractions whilst back at the Good Nite Inn, I saw that there was a supermarket on Rosecrans Street, one of the streets that the Good Nite Inn is near. After passing five different fast-food chains in about 700 metres - the Denny's and Jack In The Box that I mentioned earlier, a Subway, a Burger King and an In-N-Out Burger, which I will expand on shortly - we came across a store called Big Lots nestled in amongst a strip of three or four other shops, that houses a lot of different mostly-supermarket products in ultra-big packaging. We found what we were looking for - in fact there were several types of Esky's there, and as we were deciding between a slimline, traditional 24 can hard Esky ($17) and a soft 18 can Thermos-branded Can Cooler ($10), a local San Diegan strolled over and, when viewing a range of ice blocks (the blue ones that you put in your freezer and can use over and over again), asked for my opinion on whether the big one or small one would be the best for cooling his food!! When I explained to him that throwing a bag of ice in the esky would be the way to go, he picked up on the fact that I sounded kind of funny, and asked if we were from New Zealand!! When we indicated that we were in fact from Australia, he became more than helpful!! When quizzed about where a nearby supermarket might be, he indicated that not only was there one just a couple of hundred feet up Sports Arena Boulevard, which was over the road from Big Lots, he also mentioned that a supermarket was there!! We thanked him very much for his advice, and his parting words to us were, "You know, I think I might save my money this year and take a holiday in Arse-straylia - I've always wanted to meet Crocodile Dundee". Fair dinkum, those were the exact words mentioned, which sent Sarah and I into fits of laughter - respectfully waiting, though, until he had moved a couple of aisles down!! We decided to stroll down to where the supermarket was, and I got all excited when we saw Ralph's Supermarket, as I have been super-curious about exploring an American supermarket since I was nine years old, and finding out what familiar brand names we could find, what sizes stuff came in and what brands I'd only seen on TV and in movies were available. We did a bit of shopping, picking up some essential items, like dairy-free margarine and orange juice for Sarah, and some non-essentials, like a six-pack of Coke cans and Hershey's chocolate!! The total of our purchases came to over $24, but when the checkout chick asked if I had a "Ralph card" and I replied in the negative, she heard the non-local twinge in my words, and produced a Ralph card out of her drawer, cutting the bill to an even $20!! Score!! There was also a Target next store, where we picked up a toaster and a couple of other odds and sods, before starting the walk home!! Ralph's and Target were just metres away from the San Diego Sports Arena (as you would imagine on a street named Sports Avenue Boulevard), and traffic to the Sports Arena was bumper-to-bumper, as Fleetwood Mac were playing the Sports Arena that night!! HUnger pains had kicked in again, and given that Sarah mentioned that she wasn't hungry, I made a pit-stop at In-N-Out Burger, a family-owned chain of burger restaurants that is almost exclusively California-based, has the simplest menu I've ever seen in a fast-food restaurant, but has received some rave reviews that I have read for having exquisite burgers. In those reviews (and from the guy we met at Big Lots), I heard about an "Animal style" of cooking their burgers, which basically involves grilling the onions and cooking the meat with a mustard spread on it whilst cooking. I ordered their Double-Double, which included beef, cheese and what appeared to be normal salad items (without tomato, of course, which was on the burger but I asked not to include), cooked "Animal style", with a medium fries and soft drink. Good thing I ordered the medium too, as the medium sized cup I was given was the same as what you get for a large in Oz. I got the order "to go", after I first asked for it "to take away" and got a funny look, before remembering where I was and getting the terminology right!! The young waitress was quite taken aback when she heard my funny voice, and started doing that leaning-on-the-counter thing and fluttering her eyelashes, which didn't really impress Sarah all that much. It must be said, though, that the burgers were delicious, and I will definitely be finding In-N-Out Burger again when we return to California in about three weeks time.

The alarm went off this morning at 8:00am, as Sunday 31st May finally turned into Monday 1st June, and after one of the best sleeps I have had in recent memory. King-sized beds officially rule, and thankfully, they seem to be the standard across hotel accommodation in America, which will make sleeping so, so good!! We quickly got dressed, got our stuff together, hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign on the hotel room door as neither of us could be stuffed cleaning the room enough to allow a maid to perform her daily cleaning duties (and so I didn't have to leave money for a tip - something I'm still getting used too), and headed for the bus stop at around 8:30am. The number nine bus arrived just as we were getting to the bus stop, and it had us at Sea World just after 9:00am - which, considering an opening time of 10:00am, seemed that we were in for a bit of a wait, which gave us time to take a couple of photos to confirm exactly where we were (and no comments about me looking like an idiot please!!)

Much to our happiness though, the park gates opened at 9:15am, and Sarah was very happy to be the first person admitted to Sea World that day!!! Especially seeing that we had booked Breakfast with Shamu at 10:00am, a buffet breakfast combined with a close-up viewing of Sea World's (and Sarah's) main attraction!! After having our photo taken as soon as we walked through the gate, and were given a ticket so that we could claim our photo on our exit of the park (at a cost of $17, thank you very much), which will be posted into the scrapbook that Sarah is keeping of all of our little tidbits of the holiday instead of being claimed, we followed instructions around to the Dine With Shamu area, but not before venturing around to the Undercover Viewing area, where we could see not one, not two, but three Shamu's doing their best work in the tank. It was there that we found out that there are over twenty different Shamu's across Sea World's three US locations, and that Shamu is a stage-name given to all killer whales that reside within Sea World, as a tribute to the original Shamu. So basically, Shamu is their surname, to clarify things. Either way, they do a pretty good job of entertaining, and by having Breakfast with Shamu, we got the best and closest view of the killer whales in the park, as the photos below, which Sarah took during breakfast, indicate...

By the way, breakfast was ordinary - I forgot to put salt and pepper on my scrambled eggs, the bread was far too sweet for my usual taste, bacon was small and over-cooked and the sausages were small and skinny. Surprisingly, the best part of it was the fresh fruit (and yes, I ate a fair bit of it, for those of you - mainly my parents - who would doubt that I was actually eating fruit).

We did just about everything their was to do whilst at Sea World, most of which resulted in me getting soaking wet. There was the Dolphin Discovery show, which we visited after Breakfast with Shamu, in which Sarah insisted in sitting in the "soak zone" on the insistence of her friend Natalie back in Australia - a name that was mud by the end of the show when I was drenched from head to toe!! Having said that, the Dolphin show was pretty good - Sarah took some video of it, which I will figure out how to post another day and get it on here for you!!

Then there was the Journey to Atlantis ride, which is shown below in a photo that Sarah took from another of the Sea World attractions, the Skytower, with a backdrop of downtown San Diego.

As you can see, it's a kind of rollercoaster, set in a water environment. After the soaking copped in the Dolphin show, Sarah decided against going on this ride, leaving me to go this one alone. Upon arriving to the end of the line, and telling the ride attendant that there was just one riding, the attendant asked if I wanted to sit in the last seat at the front of the boat, which no-one else seemed to want to sit it. Naively, I went for it, throwing "Mate" and "G'day" around freely so that everyone knew it was the Aussie guy that was taking the seat no-one wanted!! After the ride had finished, I found out why. Take a look at the picture below - I'm at the front left of the boat

I know - it's not the best shot of me, but the photo shows the almost vertical drop involved, which was done at top speed, and with a jerking stop at the end, which resulted in water being rushed forward, and then rushing into the front of the boat in great volume, and all over me!! The ride continued, and was pretty awesome, as it took on some roller-coaster characteristics, but then we faced another drop, and another serious soaking!! Yep, those Yanks were laughing at the "stoopid Arse-ie" when I exited the ride!!

Then there was the Shipwreck Rapids - I knew what was coming, but like a fool I trotted off for the experience. A waterfall later, I exited the ride on it's completion in the same state of soakage that I had on the previous two occassions. Even Sesame Street was against me - in a 4D movie in a theatre, nevertheless!!! It was a 3D movie, which was pretty cool despite exiting the Sesame Street demographic a good 25 years ago, but with a seat that vibrated when Oscar the Grouch farted, and that sprayed us with water when Grover whipped out a hose and tried to (successfully, as it turned out) spray everyone!! Sarah was with me for that, which I insisted on as I would have looked like a doofus heading in to see Sesame Street on my own. She was also there for the Wild Arctic ride, a motion simulator that threw us around every which way, and elicited a squeal or two from my beloved!!

There were also a number of pretty cool exhibits on show, including a penguin house, an aquarium hosting all sorts of different water animals, a shark enclosure where a travelator took you through an underwater glass tunnel in which you could see the sharks all around you, and a Pets Rule show, that displayed trained dogs, cats, birds and even a pig named Hammy (and no, I haven't heard a single mention of swine flu since we arrived in America) in a pretty awesome display!! And the stadium even has a soak zone, which we avoided, thanks to some sprinkler action!!

Whilst Breakfast with Shamu was the highlight of the day, a close second was Believe, the Shamu show that is undoubtedly what most people go to Sea World to see. Whilst the back-story behind the show is incredibly mushy, what the whales do in the water is nothing short of awesome - and you'll get to see it as well too, as the gift shop sold a box set of the Believe show plus some behind-the-scenes stuff that will make it's way back to Australia in Sarah's checked luggage, along with a Shamu keyring and a Shamu hoodie!!

We left Sea World at 5pm, caught the bus back to the Good Nite Inn, then relaxed for a couple of hours before going to the Black Angus Steakhouse next to the Sports Arena for dinner - a short drive, but one piloted by a driver who is becoming more and more confident on the roads, and who thinks his brain might have flipped over to the American style of driving!! The steak was nice, and whilst I tried to do the right thing and ordered a baked potato and green beans to accompany my rib-eye steak, the potato came "loaded" with sour cream, spring onions, bacon and cheese, whilst the beans were also "sauteed in bacon". I say this next statement with the straightest face possible - here in America, I'm borderline skinny!!! The meals are huge, and so are the locals!! I also became accustomed to tipping as well, as is the American way!! Having just gotten used to forking over more than the ticketed price for most purchases, as unlike Australia, most American goods are sold without tax added to the price, which is then added at the end of the sale, I saw a $42 meal for two turn into a $45.36 meal for two (and yes, the penny is still in circulation and widely used), which then became a $52 meal after I tipped the waitress. Admittedly, she did a good job, and was very attentive, but in Australia, she would be considered a nuisance, coming up every couple of minutes to see if we were OK and if we wanted anything else. In fairness though, American waiters and waitresses are paid extremely low rates of pay, and use tips as a way to supplement their wage up to a decent level!!.

That brings me to now, after midnight, and looking at Sarah asleep in bed. Time for me to turn in as well, knowing that no other blogging day will be this long, as I won't have to fill in two days worth of action. I hope it read well though (and Trish, I hope you have enough paper in your printer so you can print it off for Nana), and I'll be back tomorrow night with a look at the San Diego Zoo and more...live from the Las Vegas Hilton!!!!!

See you soon - please, if you read this, let me know what you think - it would be good to know that family and friends are interested in our goings-on!!

Shaun

PS. Oops, there's one photo from Sea World that I initially missed. Sarah and I have made a pact to try and get at least one photo of us together in every major place that we visit, and we got our chance at Sea World. We wandered down late in the day to the Underwater Viewing section of the Shamu tank where we were for Breakfast with Shamu, and asked an American couple if they would mind taking a photo of us together. They obliged, and took the below shot - you'll see that the star of the show was worked into the photo just above Sarah's head!!

'Til later!!

A quick rewind, then a meeting with Shamu remains copyright of the author shaunsarah, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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