I'm a digital journalist, producer, designer, developer, social networker and communications professional living in Seattle, WA. I love Kylie Minogue, good food, good drinks, flip flops and KITTENS. Some day I'll be an expert golfer.
We’re planning on shlepping through Europe this fall, and I’m in full planning mode, so I thought I’d share some of our plans with “picture pages, picture pages, open up your picture pages” (you sing the rest). If you’ve ever traveled with the General, you know I don’t screw around with planning vacations. Since I’ve been wanting to go to Europe for, basically my entire life, I’m sewing up all the details now to make sure I don’t forget anything.
The following gallery shows all of the places we’ll be staying while in France. We’re staying for 3 nights at one of Carollani’s friends places in London when we first get there, so there aren’t any photos of that. But then we’ll travel through the Chunnel on the Eurostar Train to Paris. We’ll be staying at an apartment in Paris for five days that is literally one block from the Louvre and the Palais Royale. We decided to go this route so we could stay outside of the normal tourist comfort zone, but mostly because we want to hit up the local markets and make several of our meals.
I digress, on with the show! I recommend going full screen mode with this bish (button in the top right corner).
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Gorgeous internet distraction for a Friday at the end of an annoyingly long week. This is a video of the almost-2 million gallon tank at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. According to my buddy Logan – and confirmed by the world wide web – the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta trumped the size of this one with an EIGHT POINT ONE million gallon tank. Like, whoa.
Be sure to check out the HD version on YouTube but, as always, please don’t bother reading the comments there. They ruin everything. As always.
After four days of scenes like this (action shot!)…
… and this …
… it was rough times at work today.
After a couple nights of city fun, I headed to the woods for country fun. I just got back from a camping trip on Orcas Island where I ate more s’mores than seems humanly possibly (in a group quest for s’more perfection), climbed a steep trail to be rewarded with an amazing view and inhaled a lot of campfire smoke. It was a total blast! Now I’m super sore and longing for another weekend.
Now that it’s been three weeks since C and I went on our Seaside trip, you might think a post about it would be irrelevant and pointless. You would be wrong.
Something like slightly over a year ago, a bunch of us went to see the Sex and the City movie and, right after the show, C got sucked into some sort of “spin this wheel and win a free weekend at a beach resort!” offer.
She was all into getting a free weekend trip for the cost of sitting in a timeshare pitch. I was all into going to the bar and ordering pink martinis, so I abandoned her. Little did I know, I’d be her plus one on this trip and little did she know they’d bait and switch her and stick us in a highway motel which was most definitely NOT a beach resort.
Usually I’m a hotel snob, but I didn’t care much on this trip because when you’re surrounded by beauty like this …
This is a photo of what has been my daily alarm clock. Every morning at 8:30, one of the island’s million roosters crows and wakes me up in time for breakfast.
This particular rooster was at the top of Waimea Canyon, our big sightseeing adventure of the day. There was a high wind advisory in effect and we we nearly blown into the canyon. I didn’t get any interesting photos of the canyon that you couldn’t see by looking at any tourism site. But I had my wits about me enough to snap a shot of what has been an elusive subject. I think roosters are camera shy.
The other elusive bit of vacation goodness has been my pineapple drink. I was excited by Bill’s Googling find, but we had a long dinner with all of our traveling companions and I missed out on the opportunity to make it to Kapa’a. Mark my words, Hawaii — you will serve me a pineapple drink next year!
In the meantime, I have almost three hours in the Honolulu airport tomorrow morning, so I may try and find an airport bar that will serve me one.
This is my sad pose representative of my feelings after learning the hotel no longer serves beverages in pineapples. That was my one goal this week — to drink out of a pineapple — and, so far, no luck. Today, it was even on the menu, but when I ordered from our cabana waitress, she gave me a look of confusion and came back a few minutes later with the bad news.
So I have one more day to find a pineapple drink. If I can’t find one, I’ll just die!! It’s pretty great when your greatest current concern is that you can’t drink alcohol out of a piece of fruit.
We spent all day in this wooden plank with a green cover and it was actually a pretty good deal. For 35 bucks a day, you get your own private space and a waitress at your beck and call (You cue her with an orange flag. It’s pretty funny). You can’t bring the lounge chairs onto the sand, so this is the only other option for comfortable seating on the beach. And the shade it offered came in very handy when my shoulders started boiling off.
We visited the Napali Coast yesterday on the northern shore of the island. It was very beautiful, but the waves were very frightening. I was standing about 30 feet from the water when this wave landed right in front of me. So I decided to step back further. There was no way I was going to let the ocean sweep me away.
There was also a pretty stunning cave that seemed to go on forever, but I wasn’t about to find out how far back it actually went. I don’t think I got a discernable photo of the cave because… well YOU try taking a picture of a dark cave.
Since I missed yesterday’s Photo of the Day, I’ll post two today. I took a break for the federal holiday.
This is taken from the rocks on the shore near our hotel room. Shortly after this photo was taken, Alaina had an “incident” and scraped up her “party shorts” that she had just purchased earlier in the day as a replacement to her other “party shorts” that she busted while we wandered KMart.
She, and the new party shorts, are okay thankfully.
To add to our arsenal of wildlife sightings, we caught this Monk Seal sunbathing on Poipu Beach today after lunch. There are only about 1,300 of these left in the world and roughly 30-40 of them spend their leisure time on Kauai.
There was a sign nearby indicating the seal’s endangered status and when Alaina read the sign, I heard “dangerous” instead of “endangered” so I ran away, but I didn’t make it very far because the sand was so deep.
But not really.
Anyway, I like this guy’s style. We have similar vacation mannerisms. Lay there. Flip over. Raise your flipper. Lay there. Repeat.
Today was all about indulgence. There was lots of shoppin’, sunbathin’, Puka Dog eatin’ and Mai Tai drinkin’. After indulging in a very yummy dinner (rack of lamb, crab cakes, tiramisu), it was time to hit the workout room for a bit to ease the guilt and gut.
I’ve got a nice start on my tan and I’m looking forward to several more warm sunny days to finish it off. I’m hoping to get a good picture of one of the thousands of roosters or geckos crawling around here. Wish me luck.
