olza
Oliver Harmer Joined: March 30th 2008
Logged in: June 20th 2009
Logged in: June 20th 2009
Travel Blog Posts
Not quite as sunny as in the brochures
This is the last entry, as we're back home now. Some of you may have noticed this. There's just a few tales of South Sea adventures and some pictures left to post before my well of traveling inspiration runneth dry. It's actually been quite difficult to get back into the frame of mind I was in while we were away, and so I've been putting this bit of writing off for weeks! But anyway, as I was saying in the last entry, we high tailed it out of LA to Rarotonga on the Sunday the 1st at about 11:30pm. The plane was less than half full and so this meant having the relative luxury of being able to stretch out on the 3 seats in the centre and have an almost useful sleep with my knees ... read more
this old girl's gonna get us to San Fran
Righto then, lets finish this thing and get on home! When I first had the idea of writing a blog, I didn't really think it through at all. All I was going to do was write a few words, add a couple of pics and there you have it. How hard can it be? Mmmm, well... I'm going to cover this topic further in the wrap up, end of trip review, so I'll leave it for now and get back to the across America train trip I promised all a yous in the last entry. A 50 hour train trip across 3 time zones no less. You just don't realise how big a country the USA is until you spend an entire day travelling through cornfields, occaisionally broken up by little towns, flags waving with patriotic ... read more
Union Station, Washington DC
Welcome back. So, picking up where I left orrf, on the way to Chicago, travelling on the overnight Amtrak train from Washington DC. The carriages are big double decker things, kind of like being on a bus in London, except that you're not in London, you're on a train, the seats are well spaced and comfortable, and it's not painted red. Actually it's nothing like being on a double decker bus at all, I'm glad I cleared that up. We didn't get a sleeper cabin this time, because they're really expensive and the reclining seats we're sitting on seem perfectly adequate, and besides it's only one night aye, shouldn't be a problem... Now there's this thing that we seem to have noticed since arriving in the States, and it's the loud talking mobile person. Here's how ... read more
the new short term NZ envoys arrive
If I was Randy Jackson from American Idol, this is what I would say. "DC, for me it was aiight" It's only a 4 hour train ride from New York, and the Amtrak trains are perfectly decent over on the East Coast, even if we aren't rolling first class these days. It's definitely an imposing place though, big flags out front of serious buildings with names like "Department Of Homeland Security". I'm sure they'd see the humour if you walked into the lobby with a loudly ticking briefcase for a few laughs though. One of the main reasons we have come here is because Lindo has a gig at the New Zealand Embassy. We even have a paid for taxi ride up there from the huge Huge European style railway station. Speaking of European style, while ... read more
Ok, so I take it some of you are aware that my last entry was more than a little tardy. Let me explain, briefly. It's not that I have given up, it's just that since arriving in the States, the Internet Cafe has become a wholly different beast. No longer the cheap and plentiful things that they were in Europe (OK, not France or Frankfurt airport), if you can actually find one, it's going to cost around $8 per hour, and seeing as it takes me a few hours to write these things I've been unable to swallow such a bitter pill. Most places over here have free WiFi networks which you can just log onto with your laptop. Guess what, I don't have a laptop. Good one Olza, start writing a worldwide travel blog relying ... read more
baseball in Central Park
Yep, it sure is. Crikey, never seen so many buildings competing to scrape the sky either. But I reckon that most of the people who read these words actually know more about New York than I do, so I'm not going to bother preaching to the converted among you, and if you haven't been here, then all you have to do is look around this travelblog site, there's bound to be several entries by people who will be writing about all the things that you ought to write about. Getting here wasn't the best, what with the debacle at Heathrow, yet another connecting flight back to Frankfurt, then being stowed in Lufthansa cattle class for 8 hours, knees around my ears (Lindo certainly has an advantage here). The movie was a rom-com called 27 Dresses, and ... read more
Summer
London again. It's a bit like coming home really, it's certainly the closest thing we've had to a home in 2 months anyway. Only the whole place has changed. Just a week earlier we'd left London for our Scottish and Irish experience and it was still very much a city in early spring. We arrive back on the 7th of May to find summer has definitely arrived while we were away, galavanting around the highlands and watching atlantic sunsets. We have some work to do, funnily enough, and this makes it seem even more homely. Because we are more or less making this trip up on the spot, the only concrete things being our international flights into and out of the big continents, a certain amount of haphazard and last minute planning has to happen before ... read more
A tall thing built to remember someone by in Edinburgh
Well, here we are back in Herne Hill again, after a nearly a week in a couple of countries where it's good to let them know you're a Kiwi and not from Mother England. As I write these words, Lindo is filming himself playing his acoustic version of Kanye West's "You Can't Tell Me Nothing" for Youtube. He is standing in Stasa's lounge (our wonderful host), with a Japanese folding screen as the backdrop and filming with his Lumix compact camera. I can only wonder what the neighbours upstairs are thinking as Lindo is a spirited perfomer, and he's not holding anything back...He worked the song out for a pub gig in Galway. But hang on, I'm way ahead of myself, let's just go back a few days to an afternoon in Gatwick Airport, where we ... read more
catching up on the blog at Hadyn & Stasa's
Ah London, why do so many of us end up here? Why have we ended up here!? Because we need a break from all the truly beautiful places around Europe! We also need a good hard slap in the face with a dose of inefficiency, congestion, grime and free museums. I know some of you may find this hard to believe, but we know people who have moved over here from New Zealand. Catching up with them is partly why we are making London one of the more significant stops on this trip. We also need a chance to catch our breath and figure out what to do next. Our arrival into Heathrow is exactly what we had been anticipating: it's cold, raining, the underground isn't working properly and our Tokyo bought clear plastic umbrellas have ... read more
rolling high class in Paris
Ooh, nasty! I'm waking up in a train which is pulling into it's final stop, a large station ("Gare d'Austerlitz", for those of you who will be impressed by my knowledge of French words) which is cold, about 7:30 am and is full of people going to work on this Friday the 18th of April. I have spent the night curled up on 2 seats (check 2 entries back for picture) and sleeping rather well, all things considered, but that may be on account of a totally natural 100 percent organic mild tranquiliser that doctor Lindon administered earlier on in the journey. The same kind of thing they give to people who are afraid of flying, which makes sense, because I now go into a state of panic when I hear the term "night train". Paris ... read more
