Summer Fun

I can't believe we haven't posted anything since our Oregon trip. We really have been keeping busy having fun around southern California. Today we are just at home watching college football games and staying cool, but here are a few pictures of our recent adventures.

Celebrating Christie's birthday at Five Crowns in Corona del Mar.

Trying out the new ride at California Adventure. This is now one of our favorite rides.

We also checked out the Finding Nemo submarine ride at Disneyland. Glad we went on the ride but also glad we didn't wait 2 hours.

Dodger Game on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Enjoying the last summer concert at the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. We had fun listening to the Fab 4 - a Beatles tribute band.

Enjoying Labor Day at the first UCLA football game of the 2008 season. UCLA took on Tennessee at the Rose Bowl and won, 27 to 24. It was an awesome game.

Sunset at the Rose Bowl.

Just like us, Tiki is also trying to stay cool and taking a lick of his first ice cube.

Oregon/Washington

Just exactly how much can you see and do in 4 days? We have found that you can do quite a lot. In just 4 days we saw about 6 waterfalls, tasted wine at 3 wineries, saw 3 large mountains, visited 5 microbreweries, crossed the Oregon/Washington border at least a dozen times, threw and got hit by a few paper airplanes, drove about 600 miles, and went the wrong way on highway 500 about 5 times. This list may leave you scratching your head and asking "what's with the paper airplanes?"

We flew up to Portland for Shaun's cousin's wedding. Since neither of us had spent much time in Portland, we decided to take a 4 day weekend so we could see and do as much as possible. We arrived very early on Thursday morning and immediately took off down the Columbia River. We stumbled on some great little wineries all while enjoying a magnificent view of Mt. Hood, the Columbia River, and lots of waterfalls.

At Multnomah Falls

The wedding was Friday evening, which meant we had most of the day to see more. We drove from our hotel in Vancouver, WA to Mt. St. Helens. We read that the visitor center was just 1 hour north of Vancouver, so it seemed like a great little excursion. However, once we got to that visitor center we couldn't even see the mountain and found out that the best view was another 50 miles away. Fearing we might not make it to the wedding on time, we contemplated not driving the extra distance. But, as you can tell from the pictures, we raced off and made it to the observatory to take some amazing pictures of the mountain and still made it back in time for the wedding (with time to spare).

Mt. St. Helens

Kim and Doug's wedding was held at the Kennedy School, an old school turned into a fascintating hotel. The wedding was just beautiful, very romantic and serene. The cermony was followed by a rather wild and crazy reception. It was here that we learned Sigourney Weaver was the groom's aunt. We had fun with our "celebrating sighting" and took a few random pictures just so we could get her in them. We were seated next to the groom's family table which turned out to be the rowdy group. It was that table that started the paper airplane war. The school theme (complete with paper & pencil favors) made everyone revert back to their elementary school days. It made for a very entertaining and fun wedding reception - one that we won't soon forget.

The next day before joining the newleyweds, family, and friends on a microbrewery bus tour, we drove to Washington Park to check out the International Rose Test Garden. The garden was beautiful with it's more than 7,000 rose plants. We had fun strolling through the gardens and looking at the different names and seeing which roses won medals. After leaving the park, we headed back to the Kennedy School to start the brewery tour. We made 5 stops; the Girl's Room @ the Kennedy School, Bridgeport, Pyramid, Lucky Labradore, and Tug Boat. All were unique and interesting. Even though we aren't big time beer drinkers, we definitely enjoyed the tour, tasting different types of beers, and spending time with family.

The Rose Garden

Having fun tasting beers

On our last day we decided to head into Portland and see what we could see. We had to find VooDoo Doughnuts, which we saw featured on the Top 10 Donut places in the US. We enjoyed some very unique doughnuts. Shaun had a doughnut topped with mini m&m's and Christie had the "old dirty bastard" (that was it's name) which was topped with chocolate frosting, crushed oreos, and peanut butter drizzle. YUM! After our doughnut snack, we walked over to the Classical Chinese Garden. We debated whether or not to pay the admission to go in, but once inside we decided it was a good thing that we did. The garden was so beautiful and tranquil. The brochure they provided had so much information about the different areas of the garden and what they would normally be used for. We left feeling quite smart! We didn't have much time after that before we needed to be at the airport, but we did manage to find a Nordstrom so Christie could check out the Anniversary Sale in a state with no sales tax (what a bonus).

Yummy VooDoo Doughnuts

Enjoying the Chinese Garden

This was another great adventure. We feel so fortunate that we are able to visit new places together and share our experiences with you.

Vegas Baby!

We headed to Las Vegas to celebrate Shaun's big milestone birthday on July 4th. Christie secretly planned the trip with Shaun's best friend, Ken.

On our way out to Vegas, we made a few random stops as part of the "things you must do before you turn 30"...get your kicks on Route 66 (we visited the Route 66 museum in Barstow), take your picture with the tallest thermometer (a little break in Baker where the thermometer read 105 degrees), be a Desperado and get a bird's eye view of Primm (that roller coaster is freaky). Once in Vegas Shaun put money on #29 at the Roulette table, put 29 quarters in the slot machine, and then enjoyed a drink with someone at the bar who was also 29 (Ken flew out to surprise Shaun and met us at the bar at Treasure Island).

From there we headed to Cashman stadium to watch the Dodger's AAA minor league team, the Las Vegas 51's, play the Angel's AAA minor league team, the Salt Lake Bees. The stadium was quite nice and the three of us enjoyed $1 beer night. There were also going to be fireworks after the game, but we left before the end of the 9th inning to head back to the strip. When we left the game around 10 pm, it was still 98 degrees outside.


On Shaun's birthday we explored some of the different hotels. Here we are at the Mirage.
While at the Mirage we visited Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. Below is one of the baby tigers that was just 9 weeks old. There were 6 tiger cubs; all but this one were white tigers.
There weren't going to be any fireworks on the Las Vegas strip, so we drove out to Red Rock Casino. We enjoyed a nice dinner, played some craps, and then went outside to watch the fireworks. We wound up being in the perfect spot to watch them.


Once back on the strip, we headed out to get a view of the city at night.
Christie made some plans for a nice birthday celebration on July 5th, so as not to compete with the fireworks. We had a great dinner at Lawry's Prime Rib before heading to the Wynn to see La Reve. Happy Birthday Shaun!

La Reve was an amazing show. It's set in the round, so everyone has a great view. Every thing takes place in water and on platforms that come out of the water. The performers were so strong and it was incredible to watch what they did knowing that they were all pretty much soaking wet.

The picture above is looking up through an opening in the ceiling where water is raining down as the performers are being lifted up through the opening. At one point, a performer was pulled up through the opening, out of sight, and then dove into the water below. Amazing!

Laguna Beach Picnic

The weather was so nice on Saturday (June 7th) and we didn't have much going on, so we took a picnic dinner and headed to the beach. We live so close to Laguna Beach and we rarely go and just hang out there. We went to the cliffs above Crescent Bay and enjoyed a lovely evening. It's days like this when we just love living in Southern California.

It was a little windy, but quite beautiful!

We sat on the grass and ate our dinner with the bunnies. At one point there were 10 bunnies on the grass near us. One was so comfortable with us being there, that he got within just a couple feet of where we were sitting. We thought he might want to share our dinner with us.

Laguna Beach Sunset.

Our Great Alaskan Adventure

We recently celebrated our 1 year anniversary by taking a 7 day Alaska cruise. We had been planning the trip since January and were really looking forward to taking another cruise and seeing a new part of the country all while celebrating our very important 1st anniversary.

The cruise departed out of Seattle, WA on May 17th. We boarded the Norwegian Star around noon and were immediately surprised that our stateroom was already ready for us to move in for the week. The rooms aren't super fancy but quite comfortable considering the size (about 250 square feet). We had our own balcony which was a great place to relax and watch for whales.

We took over 600 digital pictures, but don't want to bore you with all of them. We've selected just a few of our favorites to add to this posting. If you'd like to see a few more, you can view the slideshow just to the right or click here and you will be directed to our picasa album slideshow.

Day 1 - Leaving Seattle

The ship left Seattle about 4:00 p.m. We had already explored the ship for a few hours prior to that, so we took a few pictures as we left the city. When we got on board we took a tour of the spa facility and were entered into a raffle for a chance to win spa treatments. The drawing was at 6:00 p.m. that night, and as you may have already guessed....we both won treatments. We scheduled those for our anniversary day and then went to dinner at Cagney's steakhouse before going back to the room to relax.


Day 2 - Day at sea

We were out on our balcony looking for whales.

Enjoying the sunset from the front of the ship.

We didn't do much on our first day at sea besides sleep, eat, and walk around the ship. We also went to the NCL "U" margarita tasting and guacamole demonstration. Other than that, we just relaxed and enjoyed being on vacation. We also enjoyed the pretty sunset as we cruised the inside passage.

Day 3 - Ketchikan

We didn't have any excursions planned for this day so we headed off to go check out the town. We took a cable car up to the Cape Fox lodge to get a good view of the town and harbor below and snow capped mountains above. The weather was pleasant, a little cool at times with occasional sprinkles, but nothing we couldn't handle. The town was filled with quite a few jewelry stores and souvenir shops, but it was fun and we managed to spend a few hours just browsing. On our way back to ship we came across some people with an eagle and owl that you could take pictures with. That was fun! We headed back to the ship for our spa treatments and enjoyed the views from our balcony as we left Ketchikan and headed to Juneau.

We celebrated our anniversary at the tepanyaki restaurant and were treated to an anniversary cake and singing by the waiters. This was fun but also a little embarrassing.

Day 4 - Juneau

As you can probably tell from the pictures, we took a helicopter ride and landed on Mendenhall Glacier. This was truly an amazing experience and we would definitely recommend it to anyone heading to Juneau. When else do you get to land and walk on a glacier?

We learned quite a bit about glaciers and particularly the Mendenhall Glacier and the Juneau Icefield. The Mendenhall Glacier is about 12 miles long and is just part of the massive Juneau Icefield which covers about 1,500 square miles.

The glacial ice is so blue because it gets very dense after years of compression. When the ice becomes this dense, the ice absorbs all other colors in the spectrum and reflects primarily blue. A view of the Mendenhall Glacier from the helicopter.

Day 5 - Skagway

We boarded the White Pass & Yukon Route train in the morning and headed out on a 4 hour tour that took us through the very scenic pass to Canada. We passed some little creeks and waterfalls before passing Bridal Veil Falls. The weather went from fairly warm at sea level to freezing as we climbed up to 3,000 feet above sea level to Fraser, Canada. The scenery went from mostly greens and browns to white. We didn't see much wildlife except a couple mountain goats clinging to the side of the mountain and some birds enjoying the beautiful day. One woman on our train supposedly spotted 2 bear cubs in a tree, but we didn't see them so it's hard to confirm their existence. It wound up being a great excursion and one that we would highly recommend if you ever find yourself in Skagway.






Day 6 - Prince Rupert, British Columbia

We didn't have any excursions planned for this stop but wound up having a great time. We contemplated the "grizzly bear experience" but decided it was a bit too pricey ($200-450 per person depending on the tour). We'll be heading to one of the local zoos soon to see some bears there instead. We walked around the town and came across this tree where about 10 to 15 bald eagles called home. It was amazing to watch them fly about and then land back in the tree.

Day 7 - Day at Sea (heading back to Seattle)

We really didn't do much on the sea days. This is not to say that there was a lack of activities on the ship, we just preferred to sit back and relax and read a bit. We don't often spend our free time this way, so it was definitely a treat.

While we were eating dinner, a few of the waiters spotted some whales. As we looked out the windows, we saw them too. This was the first time on the trip that we saw whales - or at least the first time we knew we were seeing whales. The water was very calm and you could quickly spot the spouting whales. We went outside so we could get a better view and wound up seeing quite a few whales. One actually came out of the water closer to our ship than expected and we could hear the water spouting. The sunset this evening also happened to be the most beautiful one of the whole trip, making it a truly memorable evening.

Back in Seattle

We definitely played tourist while in Seattle. We disembarked the ship around 10:00 a.m., were able to check in to our hotel and then take off on foot. It was an amazing day in Seattle so we quickly made our way to the Space Needle to get a great view of the city, Puget Sound, and the surrounding mountains.

From the Space Needle we walked closer to the water before catching a bus towards the ball parks. We were too late for the Safeco Field tour that day, but decided to go back the next morning. We walked by Quest Field and took some pictures before heading towards Pioneer Square for the Underground tour. The tour was interesting, but we found the tour guide went a little over board on the "humorous" part of the tour. She kept telling jokes that really had nothing to do with the history of the city. Nonetheless, we did enjoy seeing the underground city. We then headed over to West Seattle to meet up with Nathan and Zanna (Shaun's cousins)for drinks an dinner. We had a great time seeing the area with Nathan as our tour guide. After dinner, we headed back to the Space Needle to get a view of the city in the evening (for just $4 more for the ticket we could go back that night) before heading back to the hotel to rest.

On Sunday morning we headed back over to Safeco Field for the 10:30 tour. It wound up being an awesome tour. We got to see the owner's suite, the Diamond Club, the visitor locker room, the press room, and we went on to the field and into the dugouts. For two baseball fans, this was a great experience.

After the tour we met up with Christie's friend from high school, Tiffany, and her sister, Amanda, for lunch. It was another beautiful day so we sat outside at the Fisherman's restaurant on one of the piers. From there we walked over to Pike Place Market to watch the guys throw the fish and see the fresh flowers and produce. The Market was quite busy so we didn't stay long. We decided to just take our time and walk back to the hotel. We found Top Pot Donuts which was on our list of things to do in Seattle. We had seen a tv show highlighting the country's top 10 donuts shops, so we were inspired to find it. Top Pot also makes the donuts sold at Starbucks (in case you were wondering). The donuts were good and provided a nice resting stop on our walk.

As you can probably tell from all the pictures, we had a great trip. And as most vacations go, we have already started thinking of where we will go next.