United Kingdom 2015/16 - Flight in and Day One

My God, I don't think it's possible to feel more tired. We left home at 7.45am on the 10th of December, and I'm writing this at 3.55pm in London, meaning we've not rested in over 40hours. I have vertigo. However, we've had a fantastic start to our trip. As we arrived well before check in, rather than sit in the hotel, we're right next to the Portobello Rd markets, so we decided to see how much we could explore. They are fantastic - I've already bought four dresses, three scarves and a pair of boots, and we saw pretty much everything. The prices range from very cheap (10 pounds for a dress) to very expensive (850 pounds for an antique cane) and all manner of things in between. The markets are a delightful mix of established clothing and antique stores, hipster eateries, old pubs, bric a brack stalls, vintage clothing shops and stalls, fresh produce and street food.




We had some lovely pastries and coffee in Second Cup, and then Andrew had a pie, mash and mushy peas with gravy from the most British eatery I could imagine - white and green tiles, washing dishes behind the counter, with an owner who sounded like Rose's mum, whose son was in the back making the mash. Delightful :) We visited virtually every shop and stall, finding a beautiful stall specialising in movable type and printing press decorative stamps - needless to say, much time was spent perusing the beautiful items. A few observations so far include: We both keep giggling at the accents, we watch too much British television and, as a result, we associate certain accents with comedy, regardless of the content of the conversation. Dogs appear to be more welcome here, with many of them being allowed in shops, and most of them are in jackets. Finally, where we're staying is both beautiful and insanely well-off, we counted no less than four Porches, one Aston, numerous Range Rovers and one Rolls Royce in less than 100m.




I think we'll go back to Portobello Rd tonight for tea, but right now it's time to have at least and hour or two of sleep as we're both virtually delirious at this point. We'll try to keep everyone updated here on the blog :)

- Jess





We didn't go back out. We just slept from 3pm until 7:33 am.



- Andrew

The last day

We woke up early enough to go and make some waffles for breakfast, before doing the final pack and heading into LA. We stopped off at the Citadel – a giant outlet mall – in the hope of getting one last cheap pair of runners, but we didn't find anything that appealed so we continued on into Hollywood. We drove the streets of Beverley Hills for a little while, admiring the homes, then found a park off of Hollywood Boulevard near the Chinese Theatre. We took some photos of the Hollywood walk of fame, did some souvenir shopping, and decided that our last meal in the USA would be at the Hard Rock Cafe. We had burgers with fries and a peach cobbler for dessert, and then it was time to leave.

Our last drive in the Mustang was the 40 minute journey to LAX and, after taking some final shots of the car, we were headed through the delights of TSA enforced customs at the busiest airport in the world. It wasn't too bad, but we always forget that you need to essentially disrobe for their scanners, but once we were through we were able to chill out and wait for our flight. The flight itself was 12 and a half hours of turbulence, some of which was quite violent, so I didn't get much sleep on the way to Auckland. We only had a brief wait there before getting on the last plane of the journey and, four hours later, we touched down in Adelaide and we were home. Our parents met us at the airport, and thus our epic adventure in North America came to an end. We had a magnificent time, made hundreds of new memories and experienced some phenomenal moments that we'll never forget. Thanks for reading and we look forward to catching up with everyone in person soon :)   

We're really 12 years old

Saturday aka Disneyland day!

The tagline is 'the happiest place on earth' and it definitely must come close. We arrived at 9am and were greeted with the scrupulously well kept main street, leading to the original Sleeping Beauty castle. We did a circuit of the park on the train and from there the day was filled with magical, fun and exciting activities, including: Matterhorn, Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Teacups, Roger Rabbit, Toad's Wild Ride, Jungle Adventure, Mark Twain, Winnie the Pooh and numerous other rides. We also visited every shop, saw a show, watched the fireworks, took over 500 photos, met some of the characters, and ate stupid amounts of food (including fairy floss, or as they call it, cotton candy). Andrew bought an Indiana Jones hat and sheriffs badge, plus a charm bracelet for my Christmas present, and I bought an Alice in Wonderland tea plunger and a photo. We left the park at midnight, so in the end our day was 15 hours of joyful fun :)

Sunday – Universal Studios

As the title says, today was our day at Universal Studios and it was fantastic. Like yesterday, we had perfect weather, sunny and 20 degrees, plus it seemed that for most of the day there was no-one really there! It's amazing how much you can see and do when there aren't any lines for anything. We only had to wait ten minutes once, for the Simpsons ride, everything else we just walked straight to the front. This meant that we saw absolutely everything, went on all the rides, saw four shows, plus we had the tour, had lunch and did shopping. We arrived at 9.30am and we'd seen everything by 4.30pm, in part because there aren't that many rides and it's much smaller than Disneyland, though it's still a lot of fun.

We then decided to have a brief look at Hollywood, so we drove into the city and saw Rodeo Drive, Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills (from the open car) but, since we'd had very little sleep, we figured that some Chinese take out and the Golden Globes in our room was a fitting (and necessary) last night as we were stuffed. Tina Fey and Amy Pohler were hilarious, the food was fine and so ended our last evening in the United States of America. It's been a truly incredible trip and, with only a few hours in LA tomorrow, we only wish it could have gone for longer. We'll be leaving tomorrow (Monday) and we'll be home on Wednesday. See ya later, y'all! :)

Driving Big Sur

Friday

This day will be forever known as 'the most epic drive ever on Big Sur'. Big Sur is a 140 km stretch of road that follows the coast of California along the shores, cliffs, forests and farmland and is widely regarded as the most remote and inaccessible part of the country due to the fact that, once you're on it, there's no way to get off of it. It's a drivers paradise, with every turn giving yet another phenomenal vista that rival's anything we've ever seen. Our day was really around ten hours of driving punctuated with a lovely lunch in the middle of Big Sur at a local organic bakery where we had the most delicious custard filled doughnut ever. Throughout the drive we saw many eagles and vultures and, the best bit, ELEPHANT SEALS!

There's a whole part of the coastline that thousands of elephant seals have chosen to reside on whilst they breed and, as it turns out, it's pupping season now. As we were driving we realised the beaches looked odd because of the thousands of mammals lolling about on them, so we pulled over and had a delightful volunteer explain what we were seeing, as well as pointing out that some of them were less than two days old. Needless to say, I was thrilled. We continued the drive and tried (somewhat successfully) to take some photos of the surf and views.

After a very long day in the car we eventually found our way to our delightful little hotel a short stroll from Disneyland and, as we were unloading our luggage, the Disneyland fireworks began, which we could see perfectly from our stairs :) We settled in, went and got a late tea, and went back to our hotel for some much needed rest as we were exhausted.

I'm only borrowing your humvee

Thursday

Today we made a early start and headed to Muir Woods, the giant redwood forest just north of San Francisco. This was an amazing way to begin our day! These trees grow to be over 115m high and live for thousands of years. We had breakfast at the small cafe there before going on a short 4km 'hike' (wander) through this beautiful forest and we were lucky enough to see a woodpecker as well as a few other types of lovely birds that I didn't recognise. We were in the reserve for around two and a half hours, following which we needed some lunch so we drove back through the hills, stopping at a few viewing sites to get photos of the Golden Gate bridge on the way. We were exceptionally lucky with the weather so we decided to make the most of the rest of our delightfully sunny day.

With the roof down and being in the most ridiculous driving city, Andrew decided that we needed to stretch the car on one of San Fran's most famous and ludicrous streets; Lombard avenue. It's an insanely steep, heavily zig-zagged one way road down a very well kept street of gardens, which then rises steeply up to a lookout over the bay. I filmed it over the top of the windscreen – hopefully that turns out, because it was totally and utterly unlike anything else in the world.

We decided to see more of the city and pick up some carry on luggage to try and alleviate some of the strain on our very full bags, so we went into Chinatown and bought some cheap bags, dropped those back to our room, and went down to Union square for some our last shopping opportunity. We found another Uniqlo (yay) so we bought a few last items, looked into numerous other shops, and suddenly it was dinner time. The Golden Gate Grill seemed like a good and fitting end to San Fran. Giant hamburgers and assorted ribs, with chips and crème brulee to end, and we were done. Heading back to our hotel, we lamented that we only had two full days in such a wonderful city. Time to get ready for more epic driving tomorrow.

The epic drive and The Rock

Tuesday 7/1/14

Mental note: Buy flowers for hair...

We had an early check out, after some challenging shuffling of the many new items we had to try and find room for in out bags. Finally we set off on our longest drive from Vegas to San Francisco. With Stephen's (Fry) help we began our 8 hour journey across Nevada, into California and towards our second to last stop on our tour. We drove for a few hours and decided a break was needed, so we stopped in a place called Bakersfield for some lunch. We had some very average food at a burger place called Carl's Jr and, unsatisfied, I took the wheel of the car for the first time and after some practice laps of the car park, we headed onto the highway. It seemed that Andrew got lucky with the traffic, because as soon as I was behind the wheel, all of a sudden it was bloody trucks and heavy traffic for a hundred miles!

I eventually became somewhat relaxed with doing ludicrous speeds on the wrong side of the road in heavy traffic, but it's not something that felt comfortable and after two hours or so it was time for another rest. The most challenging thing for me was trying to adjust my sense of how wide the car was and the road position, as everything is reversed. We wanted to buy cowboy boots at some point, so we asked the GPS to find us a Boot Barn (the recommended boot shop) and we made our way to one that was en-route to San Francisco. We found it and, after much humming and ha-ing we both decided on some boots. It was also dinner time and Andrew wanted to try In-and-out burger. With one close by we went in and had perhaps the best fast food burgers of the trip so far. They only have about three items to choose from on the menu and they appear to do them well. Rested and satiated it was time for the final haul, which Andrew completed (the traffic magically disappearing) and we got into San Francisco at about 10.30pm that night. We were both exhausted so we went straight to bed, ready for our first proper day tomorrow.

Wednesday 8/1/14

Today was all about The Rock. We awoke in our (very basic) room early and printed off our tour passes for Alcatraz. The wharf to catch the ferry is about 3km from our hotel, so we decided to walk the streets and get a feel for the city on the way, and what a lovely city it is! The architecture is very similar to that of New York, but the addition of trams and the crazy streets make for a very different feel. People appear to be slightly more relaxed here (you can smell the 'relaxant' regularly) and the pace is calmer, with everything less crowded. It didn't take us long to find the dock and soon we were on the ferry to one of the most notorious islands in the world.

We disembarked, having taken some lovely shots of the bridges and bay area, to spend about three hours learning about the surprising history of the island, which began as a military base, before becoming a prison, then hosting a political protest which lasted for over a year, until finally being taken over by the National Parks and Wildlife people and being turned into a tourist attraction and bird sanctuary. Our tickets included the audio tour, which was excellent, and I'll admit a little part of me was slightly disappointed that Ed Harris and Sean Connery didn't feature more during our visit :) We wandered around ourselves for an hour or so before heading back down to the dock to catch the ferry back to the wharf.

A short ferry ride later and we were back on the mainland and looking for some food. We made our way to pier 39 and spent some time wandering from restaurant to restaurant deciding what we wanted. We settled on clam chowder (the local speciality) and fish and chips. The chowder was excellent, a bit like cream of chicken soup but slightly more seasoned and of course with seafood in it, plus potato, served in a sour-dough bun. The fish was a bit weird, no idea what kind it was. We had a great view of the marina whilst eating and Andrew pointed out that there were hundreds of sea lions gathered at the end of the pier. Very excited, we finished our meal and headed towards the viewing platform. It was lovely. Apparently, following the earthquake of 1932 the sea lions turned up and never left, no one really knows why. We watched them for a while then wandered the shops, grabbing some cinnamon doughnuts on the way, before heading back to our room for a brief rest (and to type this up). Now it's time to go and grab a light dinner and drink.  

Sin City: Vegas Part 2

So after a much needed rest (I'm feeling much better now) we headed to Burgr (sic), Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at Planet Hollywood for dinner. While Andrew waited in the considerable line, I went to the V theatre to pick up our tickets for Evil Dead the Musical. Almost a hour later we were seated and ready to order. We both got a milkshake and burger each and it was absolutely phenomenal. The shakes are served in a giant tall glass and consist of thickshake on the bottom, about six centimetres of pudding/custard on top, with whipped cream and a biscuit on top of that. Amazing! The burgers were also brilliant, on par with Fancy, but slightly greasier and bigger. (They were amazing - Andrew)

From way too much food we made our way to the musical. Sooooo glad we weren't in the splash zone, those people were horribly drenched in watered down fake blood. It was very funny and thoroughly enjoyable. You would need to have seen all of the films, as well as having a fairly sound knowledge of Raimi and Campbell's work to get all the jokes, but as we do we really enjoyed ourselves, and were close enough to the splash zone to get a few errant sprays ourselves. We stayed afterwards for a quick photo with Ash (the main character) before heading back to our hotel. A really fun night in Vegas. (I wish we were in the splash zone - Andrew)

Saturday

Today was a special day – we went and picked up our car. Andrew's Christmas present was that we upgraded the car to...a black Mustang convertible with all the options. So we now had a ridiculous American muscle car with which to traverse the country (I'm sure many photos will follow). We decided to use the new found car freedom to go shopping at the north outlet mall that day, so we set up the GPS (best invention in the world) and drove to the mall, a stressful experience that Andrew handled exceptionally well, with help from Stephen Fry. We spent about 4 hours shopping, buying Levi's, shoes and other cheap clothes, before heading back to pick up and do washing prior to my most anticipated show, Zumanity. 

We dumped our shopping, grabbed the laundry and went to a local laundromat, where we had some delicious Vietnamese food whilst waiting for our washing to be done. An our or so later it was finished and we made our way to New York New York for the seven o'clock show. Wow, it was stunning! It's a Cirque du Soleil show that I thoroughly recommend everyone see if given the chance. Sexy, funny and amazingly well put together with a live band as well as the performers, it's definitely one of the most incredible shows I've ever seen.

From the show we wanted to do some more driving so we headed to Caesar's Palace for a wander, having not visited before, and spent some time admiring the shops before heading back to our hotel. A brilliant way to spend an evening.

Sunday

We had a sleep in and then decided to do some more driving. To get in some practice we went to check out a WalMart, having heard a great deal about them but not actually having seen one. It's basically Big W, Bunnings, K Mart and Woolworths rolled into one giant store. We bought some socks and undies, some snacks and had a look around, but it's really just basic boring shopping.

We then headed back to the strip for more of a look around. We went and got some lunch and had a look in Marshall's, a cheap designer warehouse, but we didn't get anything. We had a general last wander of the strip and then went back to our hotel for a show.

Finally it was time for our final Vegas show, The Blue Man Group! They were excellent - it's hard to describe what they do - it's a mixture of performance art, audience participation, musical theatre and comedy, plus percussion fused with electronica. It was thoroughly immersive and really brilliant, I'd really recommend it for everyone, families included (there were many children present) and we were allowed to take some video (which might help to clarify my rather useless description).

Our last show done, we went upstairs to our room (it was in our hotel) and had an early night in preparation for tomorrow.

Monday

Road trip time! Today we began early, getting up and about, ready to head to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. We hopped in the car, put the roof down (who cares that it's cold, right!?) and headed onto the open road.

Hoover Dam is around 40 minutes from Vegas, so we made our way there through the mountains and had a relatively brief look around at this engineering marvel before getting back on the road. From the Dam it's approximately 4 hours to the South side of the Canyon in Arizona, the best part for the view apparently. What a giant, geographically spectacular place Arizona is! With music blaring, and flying along at 80mph (around 130km per hour) we passed up into the mountains, wound through the desert, back into scrub, up more mountains until reaching forest and (finally) getting to the canyon at about 4.15pm in the afternoon. I will say we pulled over around three hours into the trip to put the roof on when we saw that there was SNOW on the side of the road. It clearly gets very cold in the desert at 7000 feet.

We were panicked about losing the sun and practically ran to the lookout where we were greeted by a vista that is so breathtaking your mind has to expand to try and even conceive of it. You expect the canyon to be big, but it's very difficult to capture the vastness of the expanse and depth of the ravines in words. It's a truly awesome experience and one which was well worth the long drive. With the light fading we made our way onto a small 'path' and took some photos on an unprotected ledge we were able to (relatively) safely get to before we lost the light entirely and had to make the long drive home. It was freezing but we were both exhilarated by the experience of seeing such an amazing place. I was particularly happy because we also saw some deer with huge antlers on the side of the road, and a coyote ran across our path on the way back to the car.

Driving back was fine (Andrew discovered that the car is limited to 113mph) and as we pulled into the strip we decided our last meal (at about 10pm) should be something thoroughly terrible, so we went to the Cheesecake Factory at Caesar's Place. Some deep fried mozzarella, orange chicken and key lime pie cheesecake later and we were full to bursting, it was getting late and our last night in Vegas was coming to an end. We hadn't actually done any real gambling so we each took $1 and had about 15 minutes of fun on two of the old fashioned one-armed-bandit 1c machines. I won $1.83 and cashed in. Andrew lost his dollar. Tired but happy we drove back to the Monte Carlo to crash before another long day tomorrow.