USA – Hawaii & San Diego: 5th-16 Oct 2016

5 October 2016

We began this journey with a flight to Sydney, for a wedding, staying for a couple of days with our friends Joe & Miriam Gelbart, and very hospitable they were too. They live in Gordon, to the north, a beautiful green and leafy area, that typical treed mix of suburbia and forest you don’t find very often in Melbourne.
Miriam drove us around to see the sights, one of which was West Head, a fabulous lookout area, where you can see from the Hawkesbury to Pittwater. Governor Phillip must have thought all his Christmases had come at once when he saw these waterways, in fact he did say that it was the finest stretch of water he had ever seen. Wish we had bought then!

Near Pittwater

West Head

The wedding was most enjoyable, with pre ceremony drinks where we met most of the bridal party, including the groom, and that put everyone in a relaxed mood. After the service the reception was held at the Manly Golf Club – a beautiful setting and delicious food.
The few days and the wedding were over soon enough and we boarded our Jetstar Boeing 787 to Honolulu. The reasons we went via Honolulu were:

Since we no longer have the luxury of concessional travel, we can’t afford to swan around everywhere in business class, so we decided to break the journey for a couple of nights to do the time zone adjustment.

Avoiding the Los Angeles customs and immigration system. This is one of the horrible things about travelling to the USA. All the inbound procedures are done at Honolulu, where the staff were really nice.

Another good thing was that we could fly direct from Honolulu to San Diego, which is where we needed to be because our travels to mainland USA were to begin with – another wedding! The son, Andrew, of our close friends, LInda and Mark, was to marry Traci, an American girl, in San Diego. One week, two weddings, two countries.

Now is the time to lay out our plans for this trip.

After the San Diego wedding, we will meet up with our travelling partners, Bev and Andrew Gelbart, with whom we have travelled far and wide in the last several years, and we will tour many of the National Parks. This we will do for several weeks, eventually arriving in Washington around election time, just in time to see Don.. er, I mean Hillary, take office!

We will then fly, via an airline named “WOW”, really! to Berlin via Iceland. Here we will spend some time with our son, Michael, who lives there. For the few who don’t know, Michael is a professional violinist who plays with several orchestras, both in Europe and elsewhere. He has a concert in Berlin, which we will attend, and then more in the Netherlands, which we will attend – groupies that we are.
From there we will travel to Prague and Brno ,where Elly’s maternal grandparents were from, together with Michael and his lovely girlfriend, Nora, before returning to Berlin and then home.

So there we are, that is all in front of us!

The 787 flight was pleasant enough, the first flight I have been on for ages that wasn’t totally full, so we had room to spread out. Now this was my first flight in a 787, and I noticed that they seem to have eliminated that annoying (for the crew) feature, the flight attendant call button! Either that or I just couldn’t find it, which is just as effective. What a wonderful idea! I always thought, when I was flying that the whole operation would run much more smoothly if you didn’t have passengers. This is why they invented cargo flights!

We arrived in Honolulu at 6:00 am after a nine hour flight during which I had no sleep, and Elly very little, to be told, as expected that our room would be ready in 3 hours, maybe. I had thought that, as we were here to rest and adjust our body clocks, that we should just lay about for the first day, maybe by the pool, with a gin & tonic or two or three, then perhaps visit the Pearl Harbour memorial for our one full day there.

But Elly doesn’t do rest!

Across to the concierge desk we went to talk to the nice lady there about what we might do. Now we were talking about not only Pearl Harbour, but also hiring a car to circumnavigate Oahu. No point in hanging around when your room isn’t ready, when you can catch the next shuttle bus (leaving in 15 mins) for Pearl Harbour, you can sleep tonight. Then tomorrow you can hire a car and spend the day circumnavigating!

Arizona Memorial Pearl Harbour

Pearl Harbour was very interesting and really well done – interestingly a lot of Japanese tourists there. We looked over the battleship Missouri, the “Mighty Mo” which has had some renovations, including replacement of what must have been steel plate decking, with beautiful timber which really would be more at home on a luxury yacht.

Missouri

On the bridge

We headed back to the hotel completely stuffed, grabbed a couple of hours sleep, then opened a bottle of duty free Champagne for Happy Hour, went to the in house Japanese restaurant, very nice, fell in to bed and I woke up with the cold I thought I had beaten!

We picked up our hire car, fortunately with GPS included, and I braved my first attempt in years to drive backwards and upside down – at least it felt like that. Actually it wasn’t too bad, and we managed to survive. We cruised anti clockwise keeping the water on our right, which worked well. The mountains to our left were a beautiful deep tropical green with ragged cloud clinging to the peaks.

We diverted up towards a lookout point which would have been spectacular, if not for the fact that as soon as we left the car the cloud came down and started raining on us, so we scampered back to shelter of the car and kept driving.
We stopped at a spot for Elly to try to photograph some surfers catching some waves, and then further on we found a spot with “Shrimp buses” which was a must visit for Elly. This was a bit of a grubby area, with Giovanni’s shrimp bus, a rather tatty bus with years of people’s signatures all over it, doing a roaring trade, with a steady stream of people lining up to place orders at the serving window.
All the consuming was done in an adjacent covered area next to the bus. I think Giovanni and his family are doing OK!

Giovanni’s Shrimp bus at Kahuka

Elly was hoping for a sunset photo, but, alas no good sunset, and too many clouds, so we headed back to the hotel at the end of a very pleasant day, with the car still in one piece.
We decided we would have dinner at a restaurant named BLT which had been recommended, walking distance from the hotel. This was a steakhouse, and to my surprise ( not pleasant) it turned out to be on the ground floor attached to the Trump Hotel. It was expensive, but then again half a cow would be expensive, but it was delicious and fortunately we decided to share one meal which was enough for 4.
I gather from the price that they are paying Donald a lot of money to have their restaurant there!

11 Oct

This day was pretty much absorbed by a five and a half hour flight and a three hour time change to San Diego. We travelled with Hawaiian Airlines on an A330, which was ok, although I detected an anti litigation policy on behalf of the airline. On what was a very smooth flight, at the first sign of a ripple, the seat belt sign was switched on, – and it stayed on for hours! Finally everyone just simply ignored it!

View from our room at Hyatt Mission Bay

12 Oct

After a night’s sleep and a bit of a room mix up, we looked out over a massive marina, from our balcony at the Hyatt Mission Bay, then met up with Linda & Mark for breakfast. We were to meet again in the evening for a get together barbecue, but in the meantime we took an Uber to the old city. Uber works well here, and is much cheaper than taxis. The old city was very cute, and is the site of the first European settlement on the west coast of the US.

view of San Diego from Cabrillo monument

Old Town

We decided we would walk back to the hotel, since our maps, or what passed as maps, indicated it was about 2 miles. Well, it wasn’t! After about two and a half hours of walking beside freeways and overpasses, we finally made it, just in time to head off to the meet the family BBQ. We had fun and surprizingly we were the last to leave!

Last to leave

13 Oct

Today we were to attend an American football match between the San Diego Chargers and the Denver Broncos. This was preceded by something called “Tailgating”, which, unlike the Australian connotation of someone driving up your ginger, consisted of the stadium car park being totally occupied by people having barbecues, picnics, games etc and drinking lots of beer, cocktails, wine, or whatever. We were all transported to the event by bus, as part of the extensive pre weddding activities. The tailgating went on for a couple of hours until we finally filed in to the stadium to our seats high up in the gods.

I had absolutely no idea of the rules, other than to know that you had to try for a touchdown and sometimes you could actually kick the ball!

This actual kicking didn’t seem to happen very often for a game called “football”. This game has four quarters of 15 mins each, and yet lasts for more than three hours! Why should this be so? Well, it starts with a guy throwing the ball backwards through his legs to another guy who is waiting to catch it and then tries to find someone else to throw it to. That takes around fifteen seconds, then the game stops and both teams go into conference mode to discuss what tactics they are going to use next time – this lasts for several minutes. So, play for fifteen seconds, talk for three minutes.

Despite the strangeness of the game, it is enormously popular, and even though it was just a normal mid season game, they still had a flyover by a military Hercules aircraft, fireworks whenever there was a score, and cheerleaders dancing during the breaks. It was an amazing spectacle, and we did enjoy ourselves. And the San Diego Chargers won!

14 Oct

A lovely lunch with Linda and Mark was followed by an evening sailing on San Diego Harbour with two other Aussie couples, Jenny and Mark Foley and Linda  and Steve Bourke. That was pleasant, although a little chilly, but we had bought our own wine so what could be so bad?

We returned to the hotel just in time for the closing stages of another pre-wedding party.

15 Oct

The wedding day dawned with the usual barking of seals resting on a platform in the middle of the marina. We had grown accustomed to their barking all through the night, and it became a part of our stay in the hotel, in fact when they weren’t barking, we wondered what was wrong.

Seals and sea birds on a platform near our hotel

The wedding was in the afternoon, so the Foleys, Bourkes and us Ubered ourselves down to Balbao Park, which is close to the San Diego CBD. It was another perfect day in paradise as we wandered through what is not so much a park as a selection of grand, Spanish influenced buildings housing museums, horticulture displays and art galleries.

As time was ticking by we scurried back to the hotel, changed into our wedding attire, met in our room to drink more champagne prior to the official pre- wedding champagne gathering scheduled to begin almost immediately.

Together with Jenny & Mark Foley & Linda & Steve Bourke

Jenny & Mark

The wedding was set up outside the hotel near the water. There apparently wasn’t any weather risk as “it never rains in Southern California ” The bridal party was beautiful, the couple was beautiful, Linny (American for Linda and also known as MOG -mother of Groom, and Mark -FOG  and even most of the guests were beautiful – Elly was beautiful, and even I scrubbed up OK!

Elly was doing lots of unofficial photographing, alongside the official photographer. There was even a drone with camera attached watching over the whole ceremony. (Wedding photos can be viewed in a separate gallery and blog on the website )

A few of my favourite photos-

We adjourned via another champagne stop, to the reception which was held in a massive semi permanent marquee.

Great speeches from both Traci’s side of the family and also Andrew’s, from both his parents and his two brothers. Lovely food, more champagne and dancing to a great band who played non stop from the beginning until around midnight.

The party then continued in the Penthouse of the hotel, at which time I declared my innings over and went to bed. About half an hour later, when I was fast asleep, Elly decided she would bring Linda and Mark down to our room for another glass of wine!

I made feeble attempts to join in the conversation from my bed, but without any real success.

16 Oct

Out to the airport to collect our hire car to drive to Venice Beach to meet up with Bev and Andrew Gelbart to begin our journey through the National Parks.