After a ten hour flight we arrived back at London Heathrow, my lovely Dad picked us up and we arrived at my mums for a delicious home cooked meal….. London was a struggle as we only had 2 weeks and lots of people to say bye to. We had our leaving drinks at a great old pub in Belsize Park, It was great to see everyone at our leaving drinks, we started at about 2pm and continued to drink through till about midnight, it was so lovely to see everyone, we really missed our friends while we travelled and will continue [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Vancouver on the Thursday before Easter. The first night we arrived, Sarah and Kyle took us to a fab Veggie restaurant in Vancouver with their good friends Jen and Erin... Jen is a shop-aholic who works for a Media Co and Erin is a huge, half Chinese(you will see relevance of that later on) mountain biking freak, I say freak because he jumps off things on his bike that are not humanly possible! Anyway we had a good night, the food was great, we had veggie Quinoa(Sam was still hungry when we left) and delicious cheesy Nachos... See [View Full Entry]

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As ever driving into places with the Tomtom is about as easy as it gets. We came into Gigs harbour across the famous Tacoma Narrows (site of the Galloping Gertie, or first bridge to self destruct due to resonance see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw). As we arrived into Gigs Harbour we were taken aback by it's beauty. Gigs Harbour is a gorgeous little town about 1 hour outside down-town Seattle. With a great view down the harbour to Mt Rainier which we took some really cool pics of. Denise parents were super cool and very welcoming, their house was huge and really homely (Sam [View Full Entry]

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Just a short blog so these photo's have a space. After leaving San Francisco we had 3 days to get to Seattle where we were staying with Denise our friend from India. We drove out of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge (of course) And continued up the US 101 coastal highway all the way to Portland before taking the I5 from Portland through Vancouver (Washington) to Gigs Harbour Seattle. The drive was beautiful and the coastline very reminiscent of New Zealand. The Oregon coast had conifers, gorse (in flower) and black rocky coast with brown/black sand. It could have [View Full Entry]

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After Yosemite we drove straight to San Fran arriving Tuesday around 1pm, we checked into our hotel in the china town area and headed straight out into town as we wanted to make the most of our 3 days there!!! With Sam in tow I made a beeline straight to Wholefoods which is now officially my most favourite store in the world and after getting some energy we bought ourselves a 3 day pass for the Municipal transport in the city. Which was quite reasonable actually, only $18 and provided full access to every part of town and the Golden Gate [View Full Entry]

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What can you say about Yosemite or Yo!-semi-te. This truly is one of the most beautiful spots I have ever seen. And I have been blessed with seeing some of the worlds most beautiful places in the last year!. If you come to America and do not see this valley you really are missing something. Spring is apparently not even the best time as a reasonable amount of the park is still snowed in and closed. But the waterfalls were in full flow and really the highlight of the valley. This really is a case of a picture is worth a [View Full Entry]

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So much is said about this place but the reality is in the name.. there is not much there as everything there is dead!.. We drove through Death Valley in a Day and marvelled at the barrenness of the landscape. It really is what you might imagine Mars to be like.. The best way to describe it is in photo's so this writing will be minimal. The highlight was my deepest decent below sea level with or without Scuba. There is a place in Death Valley called Bad water because the spring is salty that is 282 feet or 85.5m below [View Full Entry]

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Las Vegas is the city of hedonism, In my travels I have not encountered such a city. It reminds me of Costa del Sol, Falaraki and Blackpool.. full of complete tat and the worst possible excesses of humanity. But it is strangely compelling. Everything in Vegas is bigger better and completely over the top. When we arrived we went to the MGM grand and saw KA a Cirque du Soleil production that blew us away. The set was fascinating, it was a 20m x 10m platform that twisted from every angle possible and even became a climbing wall with rods popping [View Full Entry]

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Road Trip! So the drive from Vancouver to Moab took 21hours in the end, we had a great drive but it was quite long… Once we headed out of Seattle we had views of beautiful snow topped mountain ranges. Then we got to Idaho the roads looked similar to that which I have seen in films (Thelma and Louise springs to mind) long straight roads, dry flat lands and lots of diners! Salt Lake City looked cool, though we only briefly stopped there to pick up our friend Pauline from the airport who was my roomie in India, she is hanging [View Full Entry]

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So we finally left Fernie (kicking and screaming), our final 3 weeks were totally awesome, we finally got some ‘legendary Fernie pow’, lots of champagne snow. We had lots of fresh dumps and found some wicked runs through trees, and also some good on-piste skiing. We also got lucky as rat ate through one of the grid lines for the whitepass chair which is half way up and a few of the runs off the top of it were only open for hiking, which a lot of people were not keen on doing, however we took full advantage of this and [View Full Entry]

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