Green with envy

Yesterday as I left the office, I stopped by a colleague’s desk to say goodbye, to give her a hug and to wish her safe travels. It was her last day at the office before taking off on a belated five week honeymoon to the USA. Lucky duck!

She’d been planning this trip for weeks and weeks now and of course she came to me and only me for advice knowing that I too had spent five amazing weeks there not too long ago. When she first told me her itinerary for the five weeks, it surprised me on how similar it looked to mine! Like me, she will be spending time in LA, San Francisco, Vegas and New York. Despite my best efforts to lure her to Chicago, it didn’t quite work! I absolutely loved Chicago.

So I’ve been helping her plan her trip. And it’s been so, so exciting helping her with all the planning but boy has it hurt too. I remember exactly what it felt like the weeks leading up to ‘the day’ when it came time to leave. It mostly seems surreal that the moment you’ve been waiting for forever finally arrives.

I’m so thrilled for her though. I only assured her about a bajillion times that she would no doubt have the time of her life. I reminded her to soak it all in. To make the most of her time there. Because I did. And I swear when I say this, that there was nothing that we did do or didn’t do that we regretted. No regrets. And that’s exactly what made it a trip to remember. One for the memory bank, for life.

One year ago

 

One year ago today, we left Melbourne for Los Angeles to begin out little adventure. Wow. It’s weird and kind of stupid but a part of my heart really aches today. So much of it is because we wish we were in our shoes this time last year, but I’m pretty sure most if it is because I’m just missing our travels so much. We just had such a great time. I was thinking about doing a day to day post for December to blog about what we did each day last December on our travels – yes, I remember all of it! – but you know me. Me, blog everyday? Yeah right.

Funny thing that happened the other night on the way to my work Christmas party? We ordered a cab because we were both going to have a few drinks at the party, so we didn’t want to drive in. When the cab came, we hopped in and immediately I thought I was going to end up in a really bad car accident. Okay so it really isn’t that funny. But the ‘funny’ thing was that it reminded me of our cab driver in LA the first night we arrived. We took a cab from LAX to our hotel in Hollywood and the cab driver was INSANE. Swerving in an out of traffic. Heavy breaking. Sudden lane changes. Accelerating to a red light. Speeding over bumps. LA cab driver and Melbourne cab driver were eerily similar. Aside from hanging on to dear life the other night, I also managed a little chuckle to myself. I reminisced about our first night in LA whilst praying I would turn up to the Christmas party in one piece.

The Christmas party was actually pretty good… the aquarium was beautiful and my favourite was of course, the penguins (there’s one swimming in their pool in the picture above). They are such gorgeous animals. The penguins have been in Melbourne’s aquarium for a little while now but they are still the main attraction there I reckon. Aside from the ginormous stingray in the ‘fish bowl’. Many of my friends from work turned up which I was glad to see… it was so nice to see everyone dressed up and having a great time outside of work. We drank, we danced. The food wasn’t all that great to be honest. But it didn’t really matter because we got there after 9pm and already had dinner beforehand so we weren’t all too hungry. They had fortune tellers, or rather, tarot card readers walking around trying to read people’s cards… I picked two cards and the lady said “There will be changes coming up, new beginnings… and you need to diversify….” Ooookay then. The ‘changes’ and ‘new beginnings’ I get (wedding, being married, hello?) but… the need to diversify? Kind of stumped me. I didn’t get a chance to ask her what she meant. Diversify my share portfolio? Diversify my friendships? What?? Oh well!

There was also a ‘tattoo’ artist there which I thought was kind of cute. Fake tattoos that is. I’m so not a tattoo girl, but I decided to get a fake one done that night – of Rudolph! They had a ton of Christmas themed tattoos and non-Christmas themed ones. Of course I went with the Christmas theme. I had a black Rudolph on my arm and he had a glittery red nose and glittery red paws.

Love that it’s Friday tomorrow! I’ve worked pretty hard all week so hopefully I get to leave work earlier tomorrow and just have a completely chilled out night at home with Marc. We plan on cooking up a special dinner tomorrow night. No reason, just to celebrate Friday!

Have a great end to the week, everyone!

Almost a year ago…

Oh my. I found this kitchen on pinterest. Need I say more… I know, it’s a bold move to use bold colours in your home, and there’s always that risk of it totally backfiring… but I just LOVE this green… the white against it? Marvellous! I really need to start a hard copy collection of my favourite kitchen designs – everything from layouts to tiles to cabinets to colours… if I had a kitchen to renovate this time next year? I would be so over-the-moon happy.

I’ve been feeling a little flat over the last few weeks… with being sick and not really sticking to my exercise routine like I did awhile ago now (yeah, remember that?), I’ve just been feeling, like I said, flat. I thought about it a little harder the other day and it dawned on me that it was almost a year ago that we left on a 2-month adventure we had been planning for so long. This time last year, I had resigned and given my two weeks notice. It was such a funny feeling doing that. I was so extremely busy tidying up loose ends before I left my job that I barely had time to think about our overseas travel. But I do remember the excitement every time I thought about our travel plans and all that we were going to do and see. And to be honest? I’m positive that all of that has something to do with me feeling just a tad flat right this moment. We don’t have a 2-month holiday planned for this year. We had such a fantastic time in America that we just long to go back… we still talk about our American travels often – that time we watched the NBA game at Hooters (Miami vs Cleveland of course), that time we rode our bikes from Santa Monica to Venice Beach so I could see those beautiful canals, that time we were brave enough to venture out in -20 degree cold and knee-deep snow in Steamboat Springs in search of something to eat (we lasted 10 minutes and then ordered a pizza!), that time we stood in the middle of a snowing Chicago and we couldn’t believe just how beautiful snowflakes actually look and feel, that time we spent Christmas night at the top of the Empire State Building, that time we kissed each other as it hit midnight on New Year’s Eve and we could not believe we were lucky enough to be in the middle of it all in New York City. No wonder I’ve been feeling a little blah!

All is good though. I only have a lifetime of memories to keep and I became an engaged woman out of our travels. I have a wedding to plan and a new year to look forward to. And hopefully more travels? A new house? A baby? Who knows! I do know though, that thinking of the future is enough to take the flatness away… there is just too much to look forward to, to be excited about… life is here in front of me and I need to remember to take it by its horns and just LIVE and LOVE.

We’re half way through November, it’s almost December… the month which I feel is all about reflecting on the year that’s been, Christmas parties, carols in the park, a bit of last minute crazy Christmas shopping, slowing down at work and just down to earth appreciation on all that we have around us…

I’m so excited for Christmas, is all… Happy Friday tomorrow!

Road tripping from LA to San Fran

So often, I just wish we were doing this… driving along the Pacific Coast. Leaving our worries behind. Only an adventure before us. I long for those days! The only consolation at the moment is that we will do it all again some day. Perhaps not the same roads or perhaps not the same cities. But somewhere within this big, big world of ours. We will do it again. We will travel, taking only our hearts with us, filling them with memories and experiences only we can have for ourselves. So, after we spent a few days in LA, we started to make our way up to San Francisco.

We made a few stops along the way of course. Santa Barbara. I actually loved Santa Barbara. Solvang. Originally, we weren’t going to stop in Solvang. But I just couldn’t not do it. I have a soft spot for Solvang. My family and I traveled to America years ago when I was about 10 or 11 and though I don’t remember most of the trip, the only three things I do remember of the trip is – Disneyland, Sizzlers and Solvang. A cute, little, Danish town… I just had to go back for old time’s sake. Although we didn’t do much, it was a pretty quick stop, I don’t regret it. I had the warm fuzzies as we drove through… it’s special when you have some sort of connection with a town 8,000 miles away!

As the drive along the Pacific Coast up to San Francisco was going to be a long one, we decided to break the journey up over 2 days. So, after the first day of driving from LA, we stopped for the night at San Simeon. The next morning, we started our day early so that we would make it to San Francisco before sundown. Big Sur was amazing. Breathtaking views is all I can say. We met some very lovely people on the way… a retired couple from the Central Valley who had a son traveling through Australia at the time. What a coincidence! A single man traveling on his own with the aim on taking some fantastic pictures… he was quite obsessed with the elephant seals we came across on our drive up. Nevertheless, all interesting people with fascinating stories who were just as interested and fascinated with our story and our travels.

In the distance, you can sort of see the Big Sur Bixby Bridge… such an amazing structure! The night before our drive, we were completely hoping for fine, clear weather. Turned out, the weather couldn’t be any more perfect than it was. It did start out foggy in the morning, but the time we got to Big Sur around mid-day, the fog had cleared completely and the sun came out. I couldn’t be happier. Had it been raining or stormy, we would’ve had to make a detour and not do the Big Sur drive, with the risk of a landslide and just dangerous driving. Lucky for us, we got to see Big Sur and we were not disappointed. The photos I took just don’t do the real thing any justice! Which is a shame because when you’re at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean… you feel like you can just fly. Like you’re on top of the world. Like that there’s no other place as beautiful.

We stopped for lunch at Monterey, a little coastal town south of San Francisco. We entertained ourselves by trying out a Mirror Maze – which is actually pretty hard! As much as I wanted to check out the aquarium (apparently it’s awesome), we just didn’t have the time as we still had a couple of hours (add a few in case we got lost!) before we actually got into San Francisco. We didn’t particularly fancy the idea of driving at night time (dark), trying to find our way around a strange city in city traffic, navigating a car from the ‘wrong’ side of the car, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road! Trust me, it was a challenge driving in the LA and San Francisco city areas!

Overall, we had the most fantastic road trip and I would do it over a million times just because of the fun we had, the people we met and the places we saw… I knew even before we planned our American travels that the Pacific Coast drive was one of the best in the world and I completely know why! Something that we’re happy we didn’t miss…

 

 

Snowstorm in New York – Part 2

Before I continue on from my last post, I have to apologise for the numerous spelling and grammatical errors in my last one! I obviously did not read it over or spell checked it, so there you go… horrible I know.

So, the winter storm came and left. The next morning, we woke up to this.

Yes, cars all over Manhattan (and all over New York State) were completely buried under snow. Not only cars, pretty much everything that had been left wide open to the elements were buried under snow. It was the most amazing sight I’d ever seen.

A car was parked in that spot and actually managed to get out. I have no idea how. I think we stood on the front step of our hotel for a good five minutes just taking it all in. We couldn’t believe the amount of snow that had fallen over the last 24 hours.

Slowly, we walked away from our hotel… I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I remember thinking to myself, “I LOVE THIS. THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL” and I repeated it in my head over and over. Luckily all the snow that had fallen onto the footpaths had already been shoveled away. Apparently if you are a business and have a footpath in front of your shop, you need to shovel all snow away within 3 hours of it having fallen so that it’s safe for the public to walk on.

This is one of my favourite photos of our time in NYC. We walked away from our hotel and crossed the street… or tried to anyway. I stood right in the middle of the street for at least five minutes trying to take photos of everything around me. No traffic to worry about because no one was going anywhere! As I took this shot, I remember saying to Marc, “Hear that?”… and he goes, “What?”… “Silence.” And that was exactly what we heard… nothing. Complete silence. So very strange for a city like Manhattan. There was a strange, mystifying hush over the city that morning. There were only a handful of people on the streets. No shops were open. No cars were on the roads. The only vehicles around were taxis… and even so, minimal. We had checked out of our hotel that morning and were due to stay at another hotel in midtown Manhattan. There was no way we could lug our suitcases fifty blocks downtown so we had to get into a taxi. At first they weren’t even willing to stop as we hailed tried to hail a taxi. Most of them thought we were wanting to head to the airport which apparently was just impossible. All major roads and freeways had to be shutdown overnight because of the snow. Even the airports had to close. Luckily once they realised we just wanted to head downtown, we managed to get in a taxi and made our way to our next hotel.

We didn’t have anything specific planned for the day. We were just going to do whatever we felt like, whatever came up, whatever seemed like a good idea. So, of course with the arrival of all that snow, we knew it was going to be an interesting and fun day. As soon as we checked into our hotel in midtown, we had a quick breakfast at Sixth Avenue Cafe. After breakfast, we headed to Central Park which was only a block away and strolled the streets within Central Park…

How do I say ‘beautiful’ in fifty other languages? I don’t have another word. It was simply that. Beautiful. Completely magical. I don’t know what it is about snow but all that white against nature? Just brings out the warm and fuzzies within me.

I think that particular day and walk in the park made me want to live in New York. No matter how unrealistic that seemed at the time (and still is!)… it just made me think about living there. How could you not want to live in a city with so much natural beauty? Yes, concrete jungle it is… but just as much concrete there is, Central Park makes up for it and more. So much more. It is officially my favourite park in the world. Even though I haven’t seen it ‘green’.

Although I have never been to NYC during any other season except winter, I am almost certain that it is a completely different city in the winter time compared to summer time. I have friends who have been there in the summer time and they, for whatever reason, did not fall in love with the city. When they told me that? I felt genuinely sorry for them. I truly believe if they were to make a visit in the winter time and if they were to experience the snow like we did, that they would have a complete change of heart.

It honestly makes my heart ache hearing of people who ‘disliked’ or ‘hated’ (I know, crazy right!) this city.  And I completely get that everyone is different and people are obviously entitled to their own opinions.  I am in so many ways grateful that we decided to make our visit in winter. Because I found this city to be nothing short of magical and endearing. We want to go back during the summer time. We want to see a very green Central Park in all its glory! We want to lay a blanket on the grass in the middle of  Central Park people-watching whilst working on a tan. We want to walk the streets of Manhattan again. We want to explore all the nooks and crannies that we missed the last time.

We will go back. That, I’m sure of.

Snowstorm in New York – Part 1

It’s been about eight months since we spent the most amazing 10 days of our lives in New York City. Before we made the trip, it had been a dream of mine to experience a ‘white’ Christmas and what better city to spend Christmas in than New York City! My time in NYC was very well spent and I made sure we treasured every moment we had with the city but till today, it still sometimes seems surreal to me that I got to live one of my many dreams. So it’s been eight months. And I still think about our time in this city almost everyday.  To be honest, part of my procrastination of putting up photos of our adventure is because, I know that my words will never be able to do any justice to everything that we experienced and all that we felt while having the time of our lives.

But I did promise a little story on the snowstorm we experienced while we were in New York. Though the word ‘snowstorm’ may have a bit of a scary tone to it… it was honestly, one of our best experiences ever… and just one of the most memorable parts of our trip.

We flew into NYC from Chicago a couple of days before Christmas Eve 2010. I don’t particularly remember what the forecast for NYC was going to be over Christmas but I do remember knowing that they weren’t predicting snow which kind of disappointed me just a tad because it wasn’t going to be a ‘white’ Christmas. Disappointment didn’t last long because I knew that it was a big thing anyway being in NYC for Christmas. Christmas in NYC will be a whole other post so I’ll skip to Boxing Day – the day after Christmas.

On boxing day we decided to spend the morning at the American Museum of Natural History. Fantastic museum by the way! I’m not a museum person, but this one? This one was not only tolerable, but it was actually fun. An entire learning experience. We spent a good 3 – 4 hours in this museum and we didn’t even see half of it. Before we headed to the museum, we had breakfast at Nice Matin, a  French cafe, only a couple of blocks from the museum in one direction, and a couple of blocks from our hotel in the other direction.

This was the only photo I took of the view from our seat in the cafe and you can’t really see it here, but there were the tiniest snowflakes falling to the ground. It was the first sign of snow we saw in NYC and we had already been there 3 or 4 days. Needless to say I was getting pretty excited. After breakfast, we headed to the museum where we did a little tour of the museum and half way through the tour, I peeked out one of the windows of the museum to find this.

Snow! There was snow in the city! I could not believe how much snow had already fallen in the two hours we had been in the museum since breakfast. Whilst the others in the museum tour were listening on to the tour leader babble on about dinosaur fossils and what not, I was too busy staring out the window just gasping in wonder of how beautiful it all looked to me. The bare trees. The snow-covered cars. The wet roads. That’s Central Park across the road and before we had gone into the museum, it was not blanketed with snow in the slightest! This is when I really, and I mean really, started to fall in love with New York City… it was the snow. It made me love the city so much more.

After a few hours at the museum, it was time for lunch and we decided to head down to Times Square. Our original plan was that we were going to have a quick bite and then do a little shopping. But as soon as we stepped outside, we knew we had to change our plans. It was SNOWING. And RAINING. Like really, really snowing and raining. When it snows, it’s great. But when it snows and rains, it’s just yuck. We still headed to Times Square and by the time we got there the snow and rain was just getting worse.

We headed to Applebees for a quick lunch and when we stepped outside again, the snow was coming down like there was no tomorrow. Times Square was jam packed with people. To me, it seemed like everyone in Manhattan decided to crowd out Times Square right that moment. The snow was blowing in from every direction. There were kids even crying! But Marc? And me? We LOVED IT!

Our shopping plan sort of went down the drain with all the chaos around Times Square. I believe it was also NYC’s very first snowfall and snowstorm that winter, so it was all a little crazy. Instead of shopping, we decided to head to the movies and we went to see Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter. I was a little relieved to get away from the crowd and the craziness on the streets. And the movie turned out awesome too which was a plus. As soon as we got out of the movie,  that was when we really knew we were in for a snowstorm…

Here’s Marc after the movie. It had snowed a ton while we were in the warm movie theatre. By the way, do you know how hard it was to take these photos? Not only was it snowing and raining, it was also absolutely freezing and windy. I had to take my gloves off each time we wanted to take photos and there is no such thing as a ‘steady hand’ in weather below 3 degrees. By the time we got out of the movie, we were starving and it was time for dinner. The night before, we had planned to head to Brick Lane Curry House for dinner. Us being curry lovers, this was going to be one our highlights of our NYC trip. And it was. The blizzard did not deter us! Don’t get me wrong, looking at the insane amount of snow falling from the sky and the fact we couldn’t see 20 meters in front of us, we did consider skipping the idea of heading all the way downtown (more than 90 blocks away from our warm hotel!) just for Indian. But alas, the things we do for a good curry… that night, curry won. We took the subway down to NoHo and from the Astor Place subway, we somehow trekked along the streets covered entirely with snow almost half way up to our knees, to the restaurant. Looking back now, I have no idea how we made it to the restaurant. We had address but no map. We didn’t know our way around NoHo at all but we somehow through the incredible blizzard managed to find the restaurant. Don’t ask me how. It was so extremely worth every trudge me made in that snow.

After dinner, the blizzard was nowhere near finished. It was only really getting started. We knew we had to make our way back to the hotel. Pronto. Having never ever been in a blizzard before, we didn’t have a clue of all the usual ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ that comes with blizzard weather. We just did our best and tried to make our way safely to the subway on foot. At this stage, there were no cars around, not even taxis. It was 9pm and the streets around NoHo were dead.

To most, this snowstorm was only a hassle and an inconvenience. But to me? In a way, it was all that I dreamed of. It was hard walking through all that snow. I didn’t have the right footwear at the time. The wind made it hard to stand still let alone walk. It was freezing. The wind only blew snow into our faces as we walked. So trying to walk 100 meters without falling over was quite an achievement. But having said all of that? We had an absolute blast that day/night. It was such a novelty to us. We saw it as nothing but an adventure and just a magical experience that we could only find in NYC at that time of the year. We didn’t complain once. We didn’t wish we were somewhere else. We were completely in the moment. One hundred percent. Our hearts were full. Completely full and grateful that we were there, standing in the middle of a snowstorm in New York City.