Armadillo!

Some more wonderful wilderness outside the office! Kinda small, but he was running away as I was approaching with my 1.3 megapixel phone camera...

Vacation 2010 Part II - Welcome Aboard the Beautiful Diamond Princess!

Here she is! The Diamond Princess, the vessel that would ferry us from Vancouver, British Columbia all the way back to the U.S.A. at Whittier, Alaska!

The Diamond Princess was built in Japan in 2004 and services cruises in Asia during the winters and in Alaska during the summers. It is staffed by over 1200 crew members and can accommodate nearly 3000 passengers during each cruise!

We got to the port with plenty of time to spare, so Ed somehow thought it would be a good idea to try to act like gymnasts and do balancing moves. Of course, not having any experience at all, this turned out to be utter and complete failure and produced a lot of very questionable photos...


Before long, we were finally on board and exploring the various amenities. Of course there were pools:


Ping Pong:


Awesome staterooms, complete with room cleanup multiple times a day:


Great views of the port at Vancouver:


Singin' and Dancin':


Magic:


Prizes:


And of course, food. Lots of food. Every day!




And, with that, we were on our way on a sea voyage of over 1000 miles!

Vacation 2010 Part I - Vancouver

Thanks to some savvy VPN maneuvering, I was able to help Ed get his photos on Facebook despite his current China location! So, let the travelogues begin!

Our trip began in mid June. Cherry and I headed down to Boca to meet up with Ed, Melinda, and Dad, because we would be taking off to Vancouver from West Palm Beach. Mom was in Kansas City grading AP Chinese exams for the year, so she would take a different flight directly from Kansas City and meet us in Vancouver.

Vancouver, aside from being the site of the 2010 Winter Olympics, also features a very dense Chinese population (29.4% as of the 2006 Census). As such, we made several attempts to get some Chinese food in our system before heading out on our cruise to Alaska, where we would no doubt be pummeled with fine western dining for seven days straight!


We got to experience a bona fide night market, not unlike the many night markets that take place in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong every week!


We were also just in time to see the Annual Vancouver Dragon Boat Races. We have dragon boat races in South Florida, but it's nowhere near the scale of Vancouver's races! Teams were camped out all along the shore, traveling from all over North America no doubt!




We weren't in Vancouver very long, but we still got to see a few sights. Specifically, we went to Vancouver Island, where the capital of British Columbia is actually situated. To get there, we took the drive-on ferry (so that we would have our vehicle once we got to the other side of the bay).


On the boat, there is a full service cafe and mini mall, and of course you can go to the observation decks to check out some outstanding views and catch the occasional Killer Whale sighting! You'll have to believe that I really did see some orcas - but they were a little far to get a good photo!



On Vancouver Island, we first headed to the famous Butchart Gardens, a huge botanical garden. It's something of a photographer's paradise - a perfect opportunity for Ed to practice some of his skills. A few samples below:



Before heading back to the Mainland, we also made sure to cause some havoc over at the Parliament building:


On the last of our two days in Vancouver, we got to check out the aforementioned Dragon Boat Races and also the full size traditional Chinese style Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden, yet another artifact attesting to the huge Chinese population in Vancouver! Inside, it really looked just like several of the famous gardens in Suzhou and Shanghai that I'd visited before. We got to demonstrate some calligraphy, drink some tea, and otherwise absorb the atmosphere around us! There was even a couple (Chinese no doubt!) getting married in the garden!





And that concluded our brief stay in Vancouver! I lost a CD full of Chinese MP3 music that I had made for the trip in the van we rented, but it's a small price to pay - we got to see and hear real Chinese culture right here in North America!

Next up, we board the Beautiful Diamond Princess and head out towards Alaska!

Turtle!

Turtle hanging around the side of the road at the office!

Interlude

Well, I know I had initially promised travelogues from the land of the "$12.50 footlong" (seriously, Subway was *that* expensive in several locations in Alaska!). However, most of the good pictures from our trip are on Ed's computer, and he's currently in China now, where Facebook and Picasa are more or less inaccessible. So, I'm going to go ahead and wait for him to get back so the posts will be more visual.

In the meantime, an interlude. Our baby started moving quite a bit just before our trip - enough so that we can actually see her move (instead of just being able to feel light punches and kicks)! She seems to really like music. While on the cruise, during the song and dance shows, she would be bumping along with the music the whole time! Another curious thing is that she's made a habit of moving over to Cherry's left side whenever we are ready to go to bed... almost as if she knows it's sleep time and she goes to her room! At first, it wasn't that noticeable, but as Cherry swelled up (and she swelled up quite a bit during the trip - she couldn't even wear her sneakers by the end of it!) you could really tell when the baby decided to shift positions.

Some photos from this past month to whet your appetite for pictures from the actual trip:

Touchdown!

RAWR!

Bump!

Airboat!


Go Gata!


South County Regional Park

Ed, the Hunted Animal

Some fun from our trip to the Great North these past few weeks. Travelogues to come!