I have posted some pics from Vegas. The trip was good: to give you an idea, we gambled a total of $100 between us because there was too much other stuff to do.

A warning: when going to Vegas, plan to spend $100–200 per person per day on miscellaneous stuff. By the time you have a nice dinner and go to a show, $100 is gone, and that only entertains you for the evening.

The highlight for me was probably the Gun Store (not-even-subtly-racist targets aside). When else am I going to shoot an assault rifle? I should have upgraded the package to shoot a handgun too.

Other than that, we had a good set of the standard holiday stuff (including our open house, which I haven’t done the time lapse video for yet). All of that went well, but all happened much too fast.

I haven’t gone back to see my family for a while: it’s much nicer to go back (and deal with flying to Ontario) in the summer. Kat’s family does Christmas eve, not Christmas day. For the last few years, we have spent Christmas day with friends, which has always been a lot of fun, but this year all of the friends are scattering to the four corners of the world.

So I thought to myself: What’s keeping us in Vancouver? After Christmas eve with Kat’s family, we’re pretty much done with the holiday. But, anywhere we could go after that would be closed for the holiday, with one exception:

Vegas.

So, on Christmas day we’re flying from YVR to Vegas and spending four days at the MGM Grand. On the menu this time:

• We want to shoot some guns (just like Angelica did). I’ve got to shoot a Kalashnikov.
• Fremont Street.
• Seinfeld is in Vegas around then: that would be awesome.
• I have wanted to see Penn & Teller for a while and they’re performing through Christmas.
• We have never eaten the food of Thomas Keller, so Bouchon is a distinct possibility.
• Boxing day outlet shopping.
• I want to see if I can find somewhere to make a prop bet and bet on something crazy.

As an added bonus, our friend Suyoko (and her mom) are going to be in Vegas for Christmas. That means (among other things) that I don’t actually have to wait through the outlet shopping: they can go and leave me behind.

Manhattan Part 1

[Manhattan Part 1 pictures] We got to New York City early on the red-eye. We managed to get early check-in to the hotel, which was awesome. After a bit of a nap, we hit the city, ready to go.

• Our first stop was the American Museum of Natural History. This was chosen as the one big tourist stop. I spent my entire childhood being dragged around to museums and thinking “I thought they were supposed to have dinosaurs at museums.” Finally, I got to go to a museum with dinosaurs. Even though I’m not eight anymore, it was pretty aweseme.
• We took the subway to the museum, which is right beside Central Park. Subway: check. Central Park: check.
• We pretty much walked from Columbus Circle around Midtown for the rest of the afternoon: Radio City Music Hall, Rockefeller Center, the TV studios there, the MoMA store, the theatre district, Times Square.
• After a little rest back at the hotel, we went out to see things at night. How bright is Times Square at night? I was shooting up to a full stop over my camera’s meter to get things to look right.
• Somewhere in there, we found some pizza and hot dogs in the local style.

The next morning, we went out to grab a bagel, and had a leisurely walk to Penn Station to get the train to Poughkeepsie.

Manhattan Part 2

[Manhattan Part 2 pictures] On the way back, we had a nice long layover in Manhattan: our train got in at about 3:00 and our flight wasn’t until 10:30. We managed to check our bags at Penn Station and get a few more hours in the city:

• We started at the Empire State Building. It was a clear day, so it was a nice view of the city.
• The big reason for going back out: we went to the NY Public Library which had the original Pooh and Piglet stuffed animals. (It was closed for part 1.) Kat has always been a big Piglet fan (“He’s little, like me.”) so this was definitely a highlight.
• On the walk back to Penn Station, we happened by a White Castle. Summary: I can’t imagine why anyone would drive overnight to get White Castle. Maybe being stoned helps.

I had my handheld GPS in my camera bag and on for most of the walking. So, I can offer our tracks in Google Earth for your viewing pleasure. Keep in mind the error inherent in the GPS, particularly when surrounded by tall buildings: we weren’t walking around as spastically as it looks.

Overall, I think we got as much as we could have done without ever entering “death march” territory. Excellent trip. Next time, we’d stay at the south end of the island: Chinatown and Little Italy.

Tomorrow night, Kat and I are headed to Brian and Lisa’s wedding. Here’s the plan:

Wednesday:

Four hours of lectures; Kat picks me up Daniela kindly picks me up immediately after lecture and we head to collect Kat and go to the airport. Red-eye to JFK in New York.

Thursday:

Get in to NY really early. Try to get to the hotel: hopefully check in and take a nap, at least drop off our luggage. Explore NYC for the day. Goal: limit ourselves to about two things and see them well; don’t run around like crazy people.

Friday:

Take the train to Poughkeepsie. Get rental car. Dinner at the CIA. [CMPT 165 lecture cancelled.]

Saturday:

There’s a “hike”. Comparing the elevation changes in Poughkeepsie to Vancouver, this can’t be too bad.

Sunday:

Wedded bliss.

Monday:

Train back to NYC and fly out, getting back to Vancouver super-late. [Anne covering CMPT 165 lecture.]

Tuesday:

Recovery.

Wednesday

Back to the grindstone with four hours of lecture.

With any luck there will be enough downtime around the edges to recover from the drag of overnight travel.

During the week we saw a wolf (dark brown and kind of mangy. Just realized that this wolf was probably shedding it’s winter coat – hence it’s mangy look), a bear, a martin (Greg’s mom saw it at the dock at Juneau), black-legged kittiwakes and other gulls, pupping and diving harbour seals, and a pod of orca.

Holland America has what they call “dam dollars”. They’re pretty much play money that you earn by participating in ship activities. Other cruise lines have similar things like Royal Caribbean’s “Ship-Shape dollars”. Anyways, all week I dragged Greg to team trivia ($1 each for participation), name that tune ($3 each), Wii bowling ($1 each + $3/spare and $5/strike), and the most profitable, polar bear swim ($10 each! + a nice certificate!). In the end we’ve ended up with 59 dam dollars! We got a hat for Greg’s dad and two mugs for us and gave the rest of our dollars to a boy that was at all of the activities. While I did have to “drag” Greg to these events, he did have fun while we were there, honest!

After playing team trivia almost every day (and doing fairly mediocre at it the whole week) we finally won on the last day, and we weren’t even there to see the victory. We teamed up with a couple from Burnaby and another couple from Vancouver Island, and ended up in a quadruple tie at the end of what was possibly the toughest game during the week. We initially thought it was a 3-way tie not involving our team, so Greg and I left for our 5:30 dinner seating. However, after we left, our team found out that due to a miscalculation, it was actually a 4-way tie. The rest of the team won during the tie-breaker and our entire team won Holland America picture frames, which were the nicest trivia prize of the week. The two guys actually came and found us in the dining room and presented us with our frames! Yippee!!

The views of the Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park were really stunning. If you’re ever in Skagway, I recommend the Skagway Brewing Company beer tasting which comes with a free hat!

• Saturday: Get on the boat; start sailing.
• Sunday: At sea and the Inside Passage.
• Monday: Tracy Arm and Juneau.
• Tuesday: Skagway.
• Wednesday: Glacier Bay.
• Thursday: Ketchikan.
• Friday: At sea.
• Saturday: Off the boat.

I put pictures of the cruise up if you want to see it. There’s some good stuff in there. Again, many of the pictures are geotagged, so you can click the Google Earth/Maps link on the left of the gallery.

I wasn’t expecting wild excitement on an Alaska cruise with Holland America (which has an older demographic). But, I was looking forward to the downtime and being bored, so that was just fine with me.

That kind of worked out, but I spent a lot of time being dragged around by Kat to events on the boat. Kat decided to collect ship bucks that could later be redeemed for swag. That meant participating in (for example) several Name-That-Tune games which consisted entirely of music for the Holland America demographic which we didn’t know.

The shore days were a little depressing. The three cities we went to seemed to only exist for the purpose of providing cruise ships somewhere to dock and their passengers to buy crappy souvenirs. (That’s probably not entirely true, but from what a cruise ship passenger sees, that’s what it looks like.) Ketchikan was my favourite: it felt the least artificial.

That’s not much of a summary of a week of travel, but short of describing every day in excruciating detail, I’m going to stop. Kat probably has more highlights that she can blog about all by herself.

My parents came along with this idea some time last year. They have done the Alaska cruise before and wanted to take us with them. Fine by me.

I guess I don’t have much to say about the cruise other than “we’re going”. With the China trip two three weeks ago, I haven’t had much mindshare for the cruise. Plus, there isn’t much to plan: get on the boat and figure it out from there.

I’m planning to rent a 70–200mm lens for the cruise (since I don’t have a decent long lens). That should keep me occupied for a while, and get some nice pictures of the glaciers, etc. That was lens #2 on my recent Lens Wish List. I already bought lens #1, the 4.5mm fisheye. This is my attempt to stop myself from actually buying the zoom: I can play and get it out of my system.

Note that they are (almost) all geotagged, so you can click the left-side links “View Album on a Map” or “View in Google Earth” on the album (or any subalbum) to see the pictures geographically. This was done with a handheld GPS and some cleverness. The tags seem to generally be within about a few metres of the true location where the photo was taken.

I’ll explain all of the geotagging stuff in a later blog post.

Edit: By the way, I rolled over the odometer on my Rebel XT on the trip: I took img_9999.jpg, then img_0001.jpg in the mini-three gorges. Ten thousand pictures on that camera over its lifetime. It now officially owes me nothing.

I temporarily blocked access to our “china” gallery while we get the photos up. Don’t want anybody getting an incomplete experience.