Spring Break 2011

We decided to catch some rays for spring break this year, so we headed down to Orange Beach, AL for the first part of our trip. (It's right next to Gulf Shores if that rings a bell.)

Orange Beach has really nice beaches. They're wide and flat with white sand that ends in dunes. We rented a condo, so it was nice to have a place with a kitchen and all the comforts of home. We spent a lot of time on the beach, and went back to the condo for the occasional snack or daiquiri. Outside of the beach, it's really touristy, with a lot of tee shirt shops and mini golf and the like. You can get an idea of the place by the big, purple octopus picture.

The weather was really nice - in the high 70's and sunny - so we were able to lie on the beach all day. I only got in the water a few times; however, since it was pretty cold.

After three days on the beach, we headed over to New Orleans. We stayed in the Quarter again, and went to a lot of our favorite places, but we always try new things when we go down there too. This time we went for a carriage ride which took us on a cemetery tour. We saw Marie Laveu's tomb, but the best part of the tour was just slowly clip-clopping through the Quarter, imagining what the city felt like a few hundred years earlier, and sipping on a bloody Mary from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop.

We tried a few restaurants when we were down there, notably Antoine's and Galatoire's. Both are really old places. Antoine's was founded in 1840 and they're famous for oysters Rockefeller, and a few other recipes. Again, it had that old New Orleans charm of a time that has long past. I could imagine getting off of a steamboat, and stopping into a place like that for dinner.

A lot of the last set of photos is from the St. Patrick's Day parade. We encountered it by accident last year, and it was so much fun we decided to catch it again this year. New Orleans has so many facets to it. This wasn't the genteel Southern facet, but rather the rowdy Bourbon Street facet.

That's what I like so much about that city. One minute you can be having a quiet drink at Hermes, and a block away, you can step into a mini Mardi Gras with beads flying and music blaring.

It was fun...here are some pictures of the trip.

+++ Click here for some photos of our trip +++

St. Croix

St. Croix was fun. It was a laid back island that makes rum. We stayed on the beach for the most part, but we ventured around the island a bit. Driving on the left hand side of the road took a few hours to get used to.

I labeled most of the pictures, so the captions should explain most of them. We drove through the rainforest, went on a rum tour, visited the botanical garden, and went to the two biggest towns - Chritiansted and Frederiksted.

+++ Click here for photos of the main vacation +++

I took a lot of seascapes and sunsets from our balcony.

+++ Click here for photos of sunsets and seascapes +++

I took a few pictures at the Botanical Garden.

+++ Click here for pictures of the Botanical Garden +++

New Orleans

Leslie and I headed down to New Orleans for spring break. We spent a day in Memphis to break up the trip.

In Memphis, Leslie got some Memphis BBQ, and then we stopped by Beale Street. They were having a St. Patrick's parade. We watched a bit of that, and had a few drinks.

The next day, it was time to hop in the car and finish our journey to New Orleans. The long bridge over the bayou brought back memories of the first time I went to New Orleans and signaled that we had arrived.

A little more driving, and we arrived in the city. We quickly found our way into the French Quarter and tried to cross the steady stream of pedestrian traffic on Bourbon. Luckily, a tranny in a miniskirt performing in the street was willing to help direct traffic, and we were able to get to our hotel.

We stayed in the heart of the Quarter (at the Bourbon Orleans). The rooms are a little small, but the location is great. We were seconds from Jackson Square and Bourbon Street. To me, the key is being able to walk around the Quarter, and then being able to go back to your room if you like. If you stay outside of the Quarter, once you leave, you generally don't go back, or don't go back for a while. Kind of a bummer if you get bored and just want to walk around and get one more drink.

"You gotta get out of the Quarter." This is a constant refrain you hear from locals and travel experts, but I'd tend to disagree in a way. Yes, New Orleans is a city rich in culture and diversity, but the Quarter is the most fun place to be. In the past, we went to the Garden District, Magazine Street, took a swamp tour etc., and they were all nice places to visit, but you always want to return to the Quarter. There's nothing like strolling through the streets, finding a bar, getting beignets, looking at the shops, sitting in Jackson Square, and repeating the process again.

Since it was nice weather, the NCAA tournament was in town, and St. Patrick's was going on, there were a lot of people in town that week. We thought about taking our car out a few times, but after thinking about it, decided to have some bloody Marys with breakfast and just walk around instead.

The day of St. Patrick's, there were a lot of people and parades throughout the city. A lot of green could be seen everywhere. That night, some loud engines of some dune buggies signaled that the parade was coming down Bourbon. Next came the floats. It was like a mini Mardi Gras. It was a fun surprise for our last night there.

The morning we left, we finally did get out of the Quarter, and went to Magazine Street for a while. We then made the long journey home, hitting famed Lambert's Cafe in southern MO for some "throwed rolls"

New Orleans is a fun city, and I'd go back again and again.

++++Here are some pictures from the trip++++

(The first few pics are Memphis, and the one beginning with the police station is New Orleans)

++++Here is a video of St. Patrick's in the Quarter++++

punta cana vacation

It was very beautiful in Punta Cana. The beaches are exquisite I am going to try to put our pictures, not bets.

***Click here for the first set of pictures***

***Click here for the next set of pictures***

Hawaii

Hawaii 2009

Leslie and I decided to go to Hawaii for our fifth anniversary. Mostly we stayed in Maui, but we did swing over to Oahu (Honolulu) for a Jack Johnson concert.

****Here's a link to the pictures****

I didn't label all the pictures; I figured I could explain a bit here and you could look at them.

Luau

We started off with a Luau on one of the first nights we were there. It was next to the ocean, and there was a stage where the dancers performed the hula, other Polynesian dances, sang, chanted, and performed native music. Upon entering, we received a lei and a Mai Tai (a nice touch), and because we booked our reservation so early, out table was right in front. As the sun went down over the sea, they began to bring out the food which consisted of four main courses, an appetizer, a dessert, and all you can drink. Each course and performance had a theme paired with one of the Polynesian islands (Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and New Zealand (Maori)) They brought out so much food each time (plus vegetarian dishes for me), that we could barely eat it all each time. At the end, they capped off the evening with a fire dance which was a pretty cool display of danger and concentration.

Haleakala

Haleakala means "House of the Sun". It is a big, dormant volcano with a crater at the top. We decided to make the trek 10,000 ft. up the mountain. On the way, we saw a lot of different things like free-range cattle that inhabit part of the mountain. Leslie liked the cows, so she took a picture. It got pretty cold up at the top, but the view was amazing. The clouds were below us, and we could see the island of Hawaii in the distance, which is over 100 miles away. Inside the crater, it looked like an alien landscape of barren rock.

When we went back down the mountain, we got some lunch, and I was playing with a wild chameleon. I also included a picture of what the land looks like at the bottom. Maui is big mountains with flat land at the bottom where most of the civilization lives. I snapped a picture of the sugar cane fields with the mountains in the distance.

The Road to Hana

Actually it's called the Hana Highway, but everyone calls it "the road to Hana" I guess because it sounds like a book title or something. The road to Hana is a very, very, very twisty, tricky drive. You cannot drive more than 5-10 mph in most places, and you pretty much have to stay in your lane going around the many hairpin turns in the road because there could be a car coming the other way that you cannot see. On one side of the road is a mountain and on the other side is a cliff that goes all the way to the sea. Getting to Hana really isn't the point of the drive, but rather you're supposed to stop off often at the many beautiful vistas along the way, and revel in the lush and diverse vegetation that spreads out across the mountain.

Along the way, there are people who run little stands and sell fruit juices, tacos, coffee, shaved ice (or as they call it "shave ice"), etc. We stopped, got some juice, took some pictures, and enjoyed the beautiful drive. When I read about the road to Hana, I heard it was so, so beautiful, and I guess when I hear that, I let my imagination run away with me. Don't get me wrong, it was a beautiful drive, but by the descriptions, I imagined some sort of tropical paradise with flowers everywhere and parrots flying all around. It wasn't exactly what I imagined, but there were a lot of different plants, and flowering trees, and fruit that littered the road, vistas of the ocean, and a few waterfalls. It took us over 6 hours to drive 50 miles that day in our white, convertible Mustang.

Beach

The beach was nice. The waters were really calm the first few days we got there, and people were snorkeling. Kaanapali beach is on the west coast of Maui, and in the distance we could look out and see the islands of Lanai and Molokai. It was a nice backdrop looking out at the ocean, and you can see the islands in several of our pictures.

On Thursday, the surf was way up, and all the surfers came out. What we thought would be another relaxing day at the beach turned into an exciting day of watching people surfing. It was an unexpected event to watch on our vacation.

Honolulu

We hopped over to Honolulu for a day to go see Jack Johnson in concert. He was playing a benefit for the Kokua Foundation at the historical Hawaii Theater. The venue was super small -maybe a few hundred people - and made for a great, informal concert.

We saw a bit of Waikiki beach and the main drag in the afternoon. Honolulu definitely has a lot to offer, but seems very busy and crowded, and we were happy to go back to laid-back Maui again.

Kula

The last day we were in Maui, we drove to Kula Botanical Gardens, and I finally got to see the concentration of exotic, tropical flowers that I had imagined before. All kinds of interesting flowers were around every turn, and it was just a beautiful place to be. It was a nice way to wind up the trip before we had to start on our journey back home.

Thoughts

Hawaii was a lot different than I thought it would be. It is such a complex layering of language, culture (both old and new), food, land, and vegetation. It starts to seep into you when you're trying to remember the difference between Kaanapali and Kapalua or street names that are 20 letters long. It is definitely something very different. I thought because it was an American state, it would be just like the U.S., but I came to realize that it was something very unique unto itself.

I left with images of cars that all have surf boards on top of them, and people whose main goal it to go to a beach park, surf, BBQ up some fish, listen to music, and do the same thing the next day.

Everything is a diverse, complex mix - from the people and culture to the many forms of life you can see from the tops of the mountain all the way to the sea.

All these layers form a tapestry and a society that is unlike any other place I have seen before. I went expecting cheesy re-enactments of historical culture and some nice beaches, but was really impressed with the uniqueness of the culture and the relaxed feel of a place where you drive with the top down and enjoy the day.

Mahalo Hawaii - It was fun.

Puerto Rico

Okay, I'll go first. Leslie and I went to San Juan, Puerto Rico at the end of summer. I got pulled into summer school, so we decided to take a vacation before I had to be back at school again.

It was fun. I was kind of expecting Mexico, but it was completely different. It had more of a Spanish feel, with a teaspoon of USA thrown in. The culture there is very friendly.

Most of what we did was the beach, but we did rent a car and go the rainforest - El Yunque. Thanks to our research on the 'net, we got there very early on a weekday and missed the crowds that take away from the rainforest experience. Nothing but a slight wet feel and nature.

The rainforest is basically a drive up a big mountain with places to get out and go on hikes or look at vistas of prehistoric plants. At one point, there's a big tower. I guess the Spanish put it there so they could see ships approaching the east coast. The fact that it's in the middle of the rainforest and on top of a mountain makes me think it took a lot of effort to build.

Old San Juan was another adventure. It's the old Spanish settlement at the opening of the Bahia de San Juan. The streets are paved in stone - but not rough stone like on Laclede's Landing - and they are very narrow. The architecture is Spanish, and everything is painted brightly. It almost reminded me of New Orleans, but a little bit better well-kept. There's a lot of shopping there, everything from touristy-type stuff to handmade hats and cigars. There are even contemporary stores like Coach and Burberry, and small shops of independent clothing designers.

The Castillo de San Cristobal was a Spanish fort built on a big hill in Old San Juan. We walked around it and saw some really nice views from the top. It was a lot just walking to the top, so again, I couldn't imagine building such a huge, sprawling, stone complex.

The rest of the time, we were at the hotel. The area had more of a neighborhood feel than a tourist area. There was a mix of hotels and condos, so there wasn't a continuous stream of restaurants and bars. There were a few restaurants within walking distance, so we'd stroll down and get some food. The surprising thing was that we never really got Puerto Rican food. We ate Italian, Mexican, Argentinian, etc. I guess this was the American influence on the city. They had a lot of outdoor dining which was nice with the pleasant weather.

It was a really fun vacation, and it was nice to be on the beach again. I was happy to be there, and happy to come home like on every trip. It's nice to have memories of being away.

***Here's a link to some pictures from the trip***