Drew's Blog

Aussie Update

We're still in the Whitsundays, but I thought I'd send an update up until the day before we left for the islands. All of the pictures are uploaded, but I'll add them to this post when I have additional time. 

Tuesday: I woke up at about 5:30 this morning, which is a considerable improvement over forcing myself back to sleep at 2:30. We lounged around a bit in the morning. Tuesday was Sally and Rob's other house guest's, Ethan, last day in Australia. Both Sally and Rob were working, so Cheri and I decided to try our luck with the beach. We hopped in the car and headed down to the Gold Coast to stake our claim to a sandy parcel of land about the size of two beach towels. It was about an hour and a half long drive down there. We pulled into the town of Surfer's paradise and started driving south to find a non-crowded portion of the beach. The Gold Coast is a long series of beaches that stretch for miles. We made a random choice to turn towards one part of the beach and park. It turned out to be a good spot, as there weren't many people, though that probably had more to do with the fact that it wasn't very warm and it was pretty windy than any sort of good luck.

When we got back we went to dinner with another Cheri's friends, Lisa. Lisa is a friend that Cheri met on her trip to Bali. Here are a few pictures from that dinner.

Wednesday: Sally had the day off so the kids were packed up and we headed out to Mt. Coot-tha. This was a pretty sweet lookout point for the city and the surrounding area.

Then we headed to the South Bank area of Brisbane. We hopped on a City Cat boat and took it downtown, had a drink, then headed back to South Bank. We met up with Rob and had some pretty decent Indian food. 

A Little Crikey For Your Coffee This Morning?

Cheri and I flew to to Brisbane, Australia and boy, are our arms jet lagged bodies tired. On Friday Cheri and I drove down to our local Mt. Baker light rail station with our luggage, and were were off to the airport. Our first flight, at 5pm, was to LA then our flight to Brisbane left at midnight. I was dreading the 13 hour flight after how tough the 12 hour flight from Amsterdam to Cape Town was. However, this flight was a breeze. Leave at midnight made it so much easier. We were able to get a few hours sleep watched a few movies and, as Emril would say "BAM!" we were there, at 6:30am Sunday morning.

We are staying with some friends, Rob and Sally Dymond, that moved out here about a year ago. They have two young kids that help liven up nearly any situation.

Alright, so here is the plan of the trip that we can mark off as we go:

Step 1: Fly to Australia

Step 2: Hang out in Brisbane for 5 days

Step 3: Rob and Sally drop the kids off and we all head out to Hamilton Island in the Whitsunday Islands

Step 4: Come back to Brisbane for a day and head back to Seattle

Sunday: our first day, Rob picked us up from the airport and drove us back to the house. We unpacked and situated. We took some well deserved naps and awoke to a BBQ in the backyard with about 8 more people. The BBQ was for a little going away party for Ethan, another friend of Sally and Rob's who has been out here from Seattle for the last 3 months traveling around Australia. He left the Tuesday after we got here. Cheri and I hung out with everyone at the BBQ, but were forced to make it an early night, at 9pm,  when we couldn't stay awake any longer.

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Monday: Sally let us take one of their cars and check out the area. After looking at some options we decided to go to the Australia Zoo. This is the Zoo that is owned by Steve Erwin's family. The place is plastered with pictures and references to Steve. We had a great time. It was a little pricey to get in, but once in all of the shows were free. Unbeknownst to me Cheri's life long dream in this world was to hold a Koala. Who knew? So while we were there we spent the 20AUD each to hold and have our pictures taken with Koalas. Of course they had a Croc show that also included a bird show with dive bombing birds nearly taking off our heads. It was pretty cool. There was also a little Kangaroo feeding action. We went to buy some Kangaroo food, but it was 2AUD and the only change we had at that point was a $1 coin. Bummed out we just walked out to have a look. After awhile we saw about 8 Kangaroos being fed by an volunteer. We asked for a handful of food and he was down. So it worked out to not have two bucks on us. Below are some of the pictures, but there are a few more from the zoo trip, like of a Tasmanian devil.

Well, we are getting ready to head out to Hamilton Island shortly so I'll have to sign off and pick up with Tuesday (and actually proof read this post :-) when I get a chance. Hope all is well back in the States.

Almost Paradise Something Something on Heaven's Door

Well, I'm back. It would appear that I'm neglecting Tha Drizzle blog again. I will do some catch up on events in the past 6 months, as there have been quite a few, but for now it's time to do what I made this blog for, post updates on our travels.

Last week Cheri and I left on our honeymoon to Bora Bora in French Polynesia. Our final destination was the Intercontinental Bora Bora and Thalasso Spa. Unfortunately, the internet there was beyond what we were willing to spend to check e-mail and post pictures. So that means I wrote up the blog entries every couple of days, but I just didn't post them. So I'll post the entries every couple of days, similar to how I wrote them. Also, in keeping with post them as I would if I was there philosophy I didn't read over the entries for errors, so it should make it extra fun. Enjoy!

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So our trip started out pretty early...5:30am early. Our flight left at 8:00am so that would have given us two hours to sit around at the airport. Lucky for us we had called ahead for a town car to come pick us up...Hey, it's our honeymoon, we couldn't take a taxi.

We had to book two flights. The one to and from Tahiti and Los Angeles and the one between Seattle and Los Angeles. The flights weren't linked, our travel agent was kind of sucky and told us we would have to book our own flight to Los Angeles for some reason. Anyway, that meant we would have to pick up our checked bag (I'll get to why we had to check a bag a little later) in Los Angeles and recheck it again. Pain in the ass. We talked to the guy at the Alaska Airlines ticket counter, and he was pretty bad ass. We told him the situation and he took about two minutes, and put tags on our bag that got them to Tahiti. He didn't charge us the usual $15 first check bag fee. I've always liked Alaska Airlines customer service.

Our flights were uneventful. I am able to add another two airlines to my list, Air Tahiti Nui is the international carrier that got us from Los Angels to Papeete on Tahiti (about 8.5 hours), and Air Tahiti is the local carrier that got us from Tahiti to Bora Bora the next day (about 35 min). We we got off our flight in Tahiti we walked to Immigration and there was a woman holding a sign with Cheri and I's names on it. We were a little excited that it might be some chauffeur or something. Unfortunately, it was someone from the airline to inform us that they were switching us from a 10:30am flight to Bora Bora to a 9:20am flight. Super lame!

With the itinerary we had we flew to Tahiti on Friday, stayed one night at the Intercontinental Tahiti and then flew out the next morning to Bora Bora. Interestingly, it didn't cost any more for us to add that extra night in Tahiti versus flying straight to Bora Bora on Saturday.

The Intercontinental Tahiti was a pretty nice place, not spectacular, but I would put it on the same level as the room we stayed at the last two nights in Mahe, Seychelles. I'll mention here something cool that Cheri found during her research for this trip. She found that you can become an Ambassador Member of the Intercontinental chain for $150. Becoming a member means you get a few nice things including:

1. A free room upgrade to the next level that you paid for. I'm not really sure what the different room types are at the Tahitian Intercontinental, but I'm sure it was better than what we had paid for. In Bora Bora we paid for the Emerald room (the least expensive) and got the Saphire (their spelling not mine) room which looks like it would have cost about $1000 more than we paid. So it was well worth the $150. We also get a free night stay at another Intercontinental that we'll probably never use.

2. A 4:00pm check out. We didn't use it in Tahiti, but our flight out of Bora Bora is at 6:00pm so it means we won't have to stand around with our luggage for several hours.

Our next stop was Bora Bora, Our flight was about 30 min late, but who really cares when you're in French Polynesia jumping from one kick ass tropical island to another. Here are some cool pictures Cheri took, out the window of the plane, of Bora Bora:

When we got in the people from the hotel greeted us and took our checked bags (this time we checked everything except our backpacks) and loaded them onto a boat and took us directly to our new home Intercontinental Thalasso Spa and Resort.

Our room wasn't ready yet because we were put on an earlier flight and because normal check in isn't until 2. They checked us in at a table over looking the view of Bora Bora island. Quick educational moment: the resort is on a Motu. A Motu is the long islands that surround a main island. It creates a break water making the area between it and the island VERY calm and predictable. The over the water huts are only found in French Polynesia because of these Motus and because the tides are hardly noticeable.

After checking in we got some lunch at one of the restaurants, Sands. We already knew before coming here that everything will be expensive. We tried to pick out less expensive dishes, but I think that lunch was about USD50. That's not too bad, but when you have a week of that to look forward to for every meal it loses its appeal.

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We got our room right at two o'clock and were driven to our room (in an electric golf cart). At this resort all of the rooms are huts over the water. There are two docks that both split, like crab claws, about half way out. There are about 80 huts total. We think that all of the huts are the same inside, but they are more expensive the farther out you go. So our upgrade from Emerald to Saphire put us out a a little ways with 3 huts left to the end. Here are a few view pictures from the room.

Below is a 180 degree panorama picture looking our from our personal dock I made with a series of about 20 pictures. It came out pretty well.

Bora_Bora_Panarama_2

The room is definitely the nicest room I have ever been in. The obvious coolest part is the coffee table that is all glass and is over the hole in the floor so you can see into the water. We have seen all kinds of fish so far including sting rays. Here are some pictures of the room. I have a couple of videos, but I'm having problems uploading them at the moment.

We even saw this weird, creepily untanned, man fish through the coffee table. I'm going to send these to the Smithsonian to have classified because I have no idea what this thing is.

We hung around our room for the rest of the day and went swimming off our personal dock. Then we went to dinner at the restaurant Reef. Same thing as Sands the food was pretty good, but expensive. I think it was around USD70. Luckily we're going to the main island today and will pick up some food and eat over there where we know of some less expensive restaurants. One other thing to note about the restaurants here: they're out of a lot of food. At Sands the waiter told us they didn't have Sushi, Mahi Mahi, and Chicken, but said, feel free to order anything else. At Reef, I ordered something that I think was veal, whatever it was he came back and told me they didn't have any of that meat left.

Catch Up Time

I was speaking with (emailing) Mike Tippin in Little Rock, AR the other day to ask for a favor. He gave me the info I was looking for and then threatened me so I would put the pictures up from our trip to New York City. In the interest of self preservation I'm writing this post.

In March, Rolondo and I were asked to go to New Jersey for some business training with the company that recently purchased the company we worked for. We were out there for about a week and learned a lot about the new team we'd be working for, well we don't know how long our jobs will stay around, but it's good to check out new things. Anyway, there were a few of the testers from Little Rock that were joining the same team. We had been working with them for several years now, but had never met any of them.

Side note: had I known how cool and easy going Mike was back in the day when I was working on automation testing at the old company I think life would have been much easier. It's a bummer we didn't meet him earlier.

Back to the story...so we were in training every day we were there. Rolando and I gave a presentation about how our company did automation testing and it seemed like it went over really well with the new group. On Thursday of that week Rolando, Mike and I decided to drive to New York City after work.

We parked the car and the first place we hit up was the Empire State Building. It was really nice weather that day. We originally thought it would rain that day. Here are a couple of pictures:

Mike Tippin and Rolando

Drew - Empire State Building

Then we took a cab to Times Square and got some grub at the ESPN Zone and then walked around.

Drew and Rolando - Times Square

After awhile my feet and ankles really started to get inflamed and painful so we took a cab back to our car and we made it back to our hotel in New Jersey by midnight. The rest of the trip was uneventful and we headed home.

Welcome Home (for real)

We're back from Jamaica!

Well, I'll start from where I left off. The next day (Wednesday) we decided not to take the catamaran trip in the late afternoon. We got our free massages at 1:30 and then laid around the pool the rest of the afternoon. Dark clouds quickly moved in and blocked our sun. I was happy about that, but Cheri wanted to get more sun. We went to the "Eight Rivers" restaurant, one of the two that you must dress up and get a reservation for, that evening. We didn't think the food was very good there, but all of the food at the resort was much better than normal all inclusive resorts.

At this point we still don't have confirmation that we've been refunded the money the GM had agreed to. For that matter we don't know exactly how much he is giving us. The GM previously said we should check back to make sure it was taken care of. We went back each day to ask. They always had some reason that we needed to come back the next day to check in. Kind of a pain to hassle with it so much.

Cheri Dolphin Kiss

The next day (Thursday) we had breakfast delivered to the room so we could get out of the room early. We met our ride to Dolphin Cove at 10am. Cheri booked out Dolphin experience online well before we left so we could get the times we wanted to swim with the dolphins so we could take pictures of each other with the dolphins. When we got there we found there was a mix up with the times and now we were going at the same time. The manager came out and said we couldn't switch the times we do the swim but she'd give us the pictures they take for free. That sounded better to us anyway since they take much better pictures than us. Seems like the folks at our hotel could take note on how to resolve things quickly.

Once we got things worked out we took the little nature walk they had. They have a whole pirate theme there, which led to this peglegged pirate picture:

Drew Jamaica Pirate

Then we watched the shark show. It was pretty cool. They let people go in with the sharks and they were so tame you could put them on your lap and pet them. Some would even turn over and let you pet their stomach. Then Cheri got in the water with sting rays and went snorkeling with them as well. The excitement to pain in the ass rinsing and drying off wasn't high enough for me to go. We got some lunch and then it was time to get in with the dolphins. They had us do a foot push, fin pull, pet and dance with the dolphins.

For the foot push you lay on your stomach in the water with your knees locked and two dolphins swim up behind you and their noses push on the bottoms of your feet. Then you arch your back and hold your arms as high as you can. The more you arch and pull your hands back the higher out of the water you with go. Here are a couple of pictures:

Drew Dolphin Foot Push

Cheri Dolphin Foot Push

The fin pull is pretty self explanatory from the pictures:

Cheri Dolphin Fin Pull

Drew Dolphin Fin Pull

Here are some of the others dancing, petting and kissing. For the kissing they have the dolphin kiss you then you kiss the dolphin. When it was my turn the dolphin wouldn't turn away after I kissed it. Even after the blew the whistle for it come back. I was made fun of for the moves I apparently pulled on the dolphin.

Drew Dolphin Kiss 1

Cheri Dolphin Kiss

Cheri and Drew Petting Dolphin

Cheri and Drew Dolphin Dance

Drew and Cheri Light

Then it was time to leave Dolphin Cove. When we got back we checked on our refund at the front desk  At first they said to check back later, but after a little complaining they said we'd get a call back in our room. They ended up just writing a check instead of putting it back on the credit card we used to book the stay. The amount ended up being a little over $400. which is quite a bit more than we expected. Turns out it was about the same price as these two wall sconces we really liked that they sold in the gift shop. They have them in every room. We want to put them up in our new house whenever that ends up being. Here's what they look like:







On our way to the Bayside restaurant we found a great looking sunset:

Jamaica Sunset 1

Jamaica Sunset 2

The Bayside is an Asian themed restaurant that you also need to dress up for; and the food there was much better than Eight Rivers. It is on three docks and if you get one of the tables at left far end corner of the docks it has great views of the bay and Tower Island with a very intimate feeling.

The next day it was time to head home. We packed up our things and started our two hour drive back to the Montego

Bay airport. We got on our business flight to Dallas with no hitches. I guess now is a good place to say that I didn't know anything about the hijacking of a Canadian Air flight at this same airport 3 days before. I noticed Derek left a comment on the blog about not getting hijacked and Caleb sent me a similar text message, but I didn't know what they were talking about. Pretty crazy. Anyway, we had just enough time to get from that flight, through Immigration, Customs and security to get to our flight as they were boarding us. I have to interject a very funny aspect of us getting across the airport. After security we saw the signs on how to get to terminal C. Both directions said you could go that way. Since I was using the cane we asked the guy driving the cart they use to drive people around the airport (I swear he was the first airport employee we saw). Instead of telling us he said he'd just drive us. Now this is actually something on my "bucket list" so we hoped on. We had to wait for him to drop someone else already on the cart off then he drove us to the escalator no more than 300ft from where we got on. With the midway drop off it might have been faster for my crippled ass to walk. We had to take the train over, so it was pointless.

 It was first class again, and still left me wondering why anyone would pay for a first class ticket in the US. They're so expensive and they've taken away all of the amenities that you'd expect. When we had a 5 hour layover in Dallas on the way down, they said that unless our ticket was to anywhere besides North America we'd have to pay $100 to get into the boardroom there. Glad we just used airline miles.

Well, we're back and we had a great time. We're going to Kansas for 4 days in a couple of weeks for mom's burial and then we won't have to fly for two months. Hope everyone had as good of a week as we did. Yeah, Mon.

The Nudest of the Nude

We're having an irie time here, mon.

Well, I can check that off my list...going to a nude beach that is. It wasn't ever on my list of things to do, but it can be just as fun to do something then add it to your list and make you think you've accomplished something. Yes, Cheri and I took the 30 second boat ride out to Tower Island and "hung out". I thought it would be more awkward than it was. Everyone there was nice and, in my opinion, way too tan. Seems like they are expanding the square footage available for skin cancer to attack, but to each their own. They gave us a gift for going out there. It was a handmade placard thing. It was OK I guess, but the weirdest part was they said today was "silly day" and so we are going to be silly today. They had about a half dozen baseball hats that someone had picked up that looked like various animals. Cheri picked up the Panda hat and I picked up fuckle. We stayed about an hour and then waited for the boat to come get us.

We also went snorkeling. I'd say it was the lamest snorkeling experience I've been on and Cheri agreed. The water was a little choppy so I'd bet that's why. There weren't many fish and the ones that were around weren't very colorful...nothing like my language.

If you haven't already done so check out the pictures I put up from my previous post earlier this morning. Tomorrow, we're getting our free massages, and doing a catamaran that is included with our stay here.

Pictures

I've uploaded some pictures from the first few days of our Jamaica trip. Just click the Photos link above to see them. I did want to point out the difference in the rooms we've stayed in.

This is the view from the San Souci resort that they said was comparable to what we paid for:

Water view from San Souci

This is what we wanted when we booked our room. Fantastic view!

-Edit: Cheri brought to my attention that this picture looks fake, as though I'm standing in front of a green screen. I'm not.

Drew with Tower Island

Welcome Home

We made it to the Couples Tower Island resort 2 days after getting to Jamaica. The GM from Tower Island said he'd come over to the San Souci resort and talk to us personally the next day (yesterday). He didn't, but we had the front desk call him. He said our room would be ready at 2:30pm today. Seemed OK to us. Then when we were getting ready for dinner Cheri saw a paper they slipped under the door saying we had to leave our room at 1:00pm. We thought that was crap so she called them up, and I talked to the manager and he said he was "almost positive he could guarantee it would be OK to stay in the room until 2:30 when we left." Almost positive? What the hell. So today we went to the front desk after going to the Dunn's River falls. The manager at that time said they did have someone else staying in the room today, so we did need to leave, but we could do so at 2. I still wasn't very happy about how everything was going down, but seemed pointless to argue over 30 minutes.

They drove us to the Tower Island resort and checked in. Turns out our room actually wasn't ready yet. I was hurting pretty bad from activities last night, so I was ready to hit the bed, but we needed to wait in the lobby another hour before our room was ready.

I must say, our room here is VERY awesome. It was exactly what we wanted (and paid for). It has a jacuzzi tub and a large walk in shower. There are two fairly small decks. We are on the top floor with an ocean view of Tower Island. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but Tower Island is actually an island about 750ft off shore that is all nude beach. It has some sort of medieval looking tower on it. To go out there you must be with someone else of the opposite sex. Seems like a good idea to keep the rations in order :-) This place doesn't have WiFi in the room, which we knew about before hand.

So back to the story. After some much needed rest we went downstairs to speak with the GM that was supposed to talk to us in person the day before. He's a really nice guy. We explained that the room we had was not what we had paid for and it was a pain to have to move. It seemed like the guy was just going to give us two massages for our trouble until we explained how dissatisfied we were. We were able to get a better deal. There is something called a Secret Rendezvous that is quite a bit cheaper, but you don't get to choose which resort you stay at and which type of room you get. It sounded like what they did to us only we didn't sign up for that. We suggested they give us those first two nights for that Secret Rendezvous price which should come out to a little over $300 off our tab. He agreed and gave us the massages too. That's cool because I was hoping we could get massages, but didn't know if the cheap side of me would give in before we left. Everything resolved it self and we're good now.

The only other thing of note that I mentioned earlier is we went to the Dunn's River falls. It's a pretty cool touristy thing to do. You start down at the beach and climb up the whole falls. You have to hold hands in a line going up which is a little odd. We were warned before hand about how pushy the vendors are there. All I have to say is, "Damn". We bought a few things, but were very tough with our negotiating. One thing we got was a small painting to put up on our Travel wall at home. Even after we negotiated down to $10 for it, when Cheri was taking her money out the guy said "OK be a good boy and just give me an extra couple of dollars." Ha, yeah right. I had a good time going there, but we met an English couple from Manchester the night before and I guess I did too much drinking. The Dunn's River falls tour was at 10am, and I was hurtin' pretty bad most of the day.

I will upload some pictures of the things we've done so far later. Oh, and as far as the title of this post goes, everytime we went to one of these Couples Resorts every person that worked there always said "Welcome Home".

Hitting a Snag in Paradise

So we made it to Jamaica. It reminded me of why I no longer take red eye flights. They really take a lot out of you if you can't sleep on the flight. I dosed on and off on the first flight to Dallas. It left an hour late at a little after midnight. First class didn't seem to help much with sleeping. We had a 4 hour layover in Dallas before hopping on a business class flight to Montego Bay. That flight was much better and we took our share of the free drinks. No harm done.

After we got there we went to the hotel's lounge at the airport and the woman told us quickly that we had been transferred to one of their other resorts. They said the air conditioning was broken in our room. They let us talk to the GM of that hotel, but he just said he would talk to us tomorrow. We weren't happy as we had researched the Tower Isle Resort that we wanted and it seemed pretty perfect for our needs. The San Souci resort is on a steep hill which makes it tough on my ankles, especially because I'm walking with a cane now. Cheri and I did some research on the room they gave us and found that it's over $100/night less than what we paid for. It may sound like complaining but it makes it a little tough to relax when no one will talk to you about the situation for a day after you make it to a foreign country and they move you an area you don't know anything about.

When we were checking in for this place I was pleasantly surprised to find out the mini bar stuff was included so we could drink it all. What sucked was when I saw the MINI "bar". It has two beers, two orange juices, and two waters. I don't know what I will do with myself with all that booze.

I'm sure we'll get it worked out tomorrow. One person told us they thought we'd only have to stay here for two nights, but it's hard to tell at this point.

One bright point is that the WiFi spills into our room here, so I can write this out on our deck that you can see the ocean if you squint through some trees. I swear I can see Gilligan, oh wait, maybe that's just a buoy.

The word of the day is "Chilax".

Hey Mon

Cheri and I leave for Jamaica tonight. I'm pretty excited about it as we've had a pretty stressful week.

The place we're staying is called "Couples Resort" most of our friends that have been to Ocho Rios have said that the Couples Resort looked like the nicest one around and they wished they had stayed there. They closed the resort for something like 8 months while they did renovations. They were supposed to open back up 4 weeks ago. Cheri kept checking their website and every time we looked there was some delay and they would be opening up a week later than expected. That happened a few times, but the finally opened 4 DAYS AGO! I guess we lucked out they didn't have one more delay. I found out they have WiFi in the lobby so I should be able to upload some pictures from time to time while I'm there.

Weather - As of right now the weather in Jamaica calls for scattered showers for the next 4 days and then just showers for the last 3 days. Whereas in Seattle it will be sunny. It's like we've gone into some bizzaro world. Maybe I have a Jamaican doppelgänger that is coming up to Seattle this week thinking the exact same thing, but is happy about it. If anyone sees me at Pike Place market with Rastafarian Jamaican flag colored hat on take a picture and let me know about it.