What Jack thinks of America, verbatim.... There was a man with, like a man with some parrots I had one on my arm and a tattoo and then I had one on my head and my arm and the one on my head pecked my ear and it hurt a bit... And then what did we do then um (snigger) Um in Colorado we went on the alpine slide and i thought that was really fun because the last time i had a go mum was really slow and i went like ages after her and like caught up with [View Full Entry]

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San Diego Zoo Not wanting to make a habit of getting up in time for breakfast we managed to avoid having to eat it again today. Igor found its way to San Diego Zoo without Twiki’s help this morning, we used the directions given by the hotel instead and didn’t get lost (not on the way there anyway!). San Diego Zoo is meant to be one of the best zoos in the world so we were interested to see whether it would be better than Taronga Zoo in Sydney which is in our opinion (so far) the best zoo in the [View Full Entry]

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...ding ding ding went the bell So after being pursuaded by the children that it had been too many days since we'd eaten breakfast (you can probably tell from the blogs how many times we've got up and had lunch before doing anything else - well if the kids will insist on sleeping until 10am - it's like having teenagers already) we went and indulged them in the hotel restaurant. Then we piled into Igor and drove off to Old Town, the site of the original San Diego settlement. This area is now a State Historic Park and is full of [View Full Entry]

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Sunday - a day of rest After eventually dragging ourselves out of bed in time for lunch we headed to the nearest restaurant that wasn't a subway or a Jack-in-the-box (Luigi's Italian -huge pizzas, from which Ellie had a slice). It was then back to the private beach owned by the resort for a bit of slobbing out. The kids had a great time having a mud fight for the next couple of hours as the sand which had looked fairly innocuous to begin with turned out to be dark grey and mud-like once wet. Once the kids had got fed [View Full Entry]

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Disneyland After a speedy checkout we left Hollywood for the delights(?) of Disneyland, via a surprisingly stressful road journey. First impressions of the place were that it was very clean but that it lacked the 'wow' factor that we had expected. We thought it was all going to be larger than life and really over the top but not so. Our first stop was to grab a snack for breakfast and Annabel was delighted to see that they sold something healthy - fruit! Then it was straight on to TomorrowLand for the kids to queue for their first ride, Buzz Lightyear's [View Full Entry]

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A slower day in Hollywood Well the Best Western Hollywood Plaza may be a noisy place to sleep but it has the great advantage of being 5 minutes walk from Hollywood Boulevard. So after a slightly interrupted nights sleep due to noisy people/cars/doors etc. we eventually headed out to find the Hollywood and Highland Mall which is situated on the intersection off Highland Avenue (where our hotel is) and Hollywood Boulevard. A late breakfast (okay it was really lunch) of pancakes with strawberries and maple syrup (or nutella for Jack, or chocolate and banana waffles for Mark) we [View Full Entry]

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Hollywood and Universal Studios Probably the quickest checkout so far today - we were packed and ready to roll before the kids had much of a chance to wake up (the best way, as it turns out). We all piled into Igor The Boat and set Twiki to direct us to Universal Studios. By more coincidence than harmony between man and machine, we arrived at Universal Studios around midday without any incident, bar encountering a *very* helpful English woman who felt she needed to impart everything she knew about the States to us on a garage forecourt. That said though, she [View Full Entry]

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After a reeeeealllly sloooooow start to the morning we caught the bus down State Street (the main thoroughfare (we are staying at 3525 State Street) and got off the bus once we arrived “Downtown”. From here we sauntered further down State Street looking for somewhere to have lunch (we missed breakfast this morning due to oversleeping!). We found a California Pasta restaurant (that really is our idea of fast food). Mark and Annabel gorged on plates of pasta whilst Ellie had a sandwich and Jack a salad! (we really have bought our kids up well huh?). We’ve decided we like [View Full Entry]

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Highway One Another whirlwind pack, breakfast and departure, and we left Monterey to head off down Highway 1 towards Santa Barbara. The first area we hit was Big Sur derived from the Spanish name El Pais Grande del Sur (the big country to the South). The coastline was rocky, lined with trees and the sea still highly populated with Kelp. We stopped several times to take in the dramatic views. We had read about Bixby bridge, which was built in 1932 by prison inmates to span Bixby Creek and shorten their sentences (it is also the world’s tallest single span bridge [View Full Entry]

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Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea The Lonely Planet guide to California intones the following about Monterey “John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row immortalised the sardine-canning business that Monterey lived on for the first half of the 20th century. He describes Cannery Row as ‘a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream’. Predictions that over fishing could decimate the business were ignored when the catch reached a peak of 250,000 tons in 1945. Just 5 years later figures plummeted to 33,000 tons and by 1951 [View Full Entry]

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