Category : Travel

in Life of Giang, Travel

Ze Trip

Pictures from the trip last weekend! It was a three day jaunt up the coast and back again:

Day One
Exodus from So Cal blaring “The Internet Is For Porn” – A stop by Santa Barbara (I actually felt a little nostalgic!) – Driving – More Driving – Oh! More Driving – Santa Cruz


Curt, reading a Lone Wolf book (courtesy of my bookshelf) in the car. This lasted about 15 minutes, until my driving nauseated him.

Curt drove the rest of the trip.

I am, admittedly, a bad driver. Bad! Bad driver! /slaps wrist

;)


A shot of the sky, near sunset, through my windshield, while we were driving on the 101, up around…uh…Santa Cruz? There were grapes fields everywhere. (Some people call them vineyards.)


My attempt at taking a picture of the Santa Cruz pier from our room. Those lights = the pier. (Those spots = dirty lens.)

Curt: “I love how you don’t know how to work your own camera.”

Me: “Shutup!”

Day Two
Santa Cruz in the morning – Winchester Mystery House – Monterey Bay Aquarium – Sunset on the 1 – Cambria


The picture of us that Curt likes better, as 1) his shirt has better exposure 2) it accurately portrays his mistrust of the scurrilous camera-at-arm’s-length-picture-of-self movement.


He’s a handsome fellow, eh? And I’m a ninja! NINJA!


The view from our hotel room balcony, after the gray had cleared a little – you can see the boardwalk and the pier!


A sea lion. It looks dead, but is, in fact, not. We listened to them barking under the pier.


The conservatory of the Winchester Mystery House.

Me: “I want a conservatory in my house when I grow up.”

Curt: “Darling, normal people don’t have conservatories in their houses.”

(pause)

Me: “I want a conservatory in my house when I grow up.”


The Oriental bedroom of the Winchester Mystery House. That’s a pretty kick-ass fireplace. NINJA!


Same house: The ball room, I believe. Look at the wood in here – good stuff. NINJ…no, wait. Sorry.

(The house was pretty cool if you are into funky architecture and the life and times of weird, short women. That is to say: I enjoyed it!)


We stop off at the Giant Artichoke Restaurant in Watsonville for lunch, having been seduced by the promise of sweet, sweet artichoke love from having driven through town the night before. It is to artichokes what Gilroy is to garlic (they have a festival for it, make various exotic foods out of it, sacrifice children to it). Had artichoke. On the way out, Curt made friends with the Giant Artichoke. Here is that moment, captured for all time.


The Monterey Bay Aquarium really is spectacular. Look, penguins! So cute. They’re like little inflatable flotation devices, with wings and beaks. Awww. /poke, poke


Jellyfish are mesmerizing up close…jellyfish are…mesmerizing up close…jellyfish…are…mes…


My favorite tank there: the tuna tank. Tuna, turtles, some shark, and a very odd faced fish at the bottom. They’re huge! That man there? He’s standing RIGHT next to the tank. HUGE!

Some coastal shots, driving down the 1 to Cambria at sunset:

Day Three
The Squirrel King meets his subjects – (I am naughty at) Hearst Castle – Searching For Mulholland Drive – Los Angeles – Home


A squirrel by the coast.

Me: “Hey Curt, catch me a squirrel!”

Curt: “No. They’re wild animals.”

Me: “C’mon.”

Curt: “No.”

Me: “Okay, I want to touch one!”

Curt: “Squirrels have rabies!”

Me: “Not all squirrels, c’mon!”


Curt does squirrel calls, and announces that he is The Squirrel King, which by default, makes me the Squirrel Concubine. Oh yeah? That’s Squirrel Concubine NINJA to you, buddy!


Hearst Castle: this is the part where they tell us “No Flash Photography” fifty times, and then the battery dies in my camera, and I change it, and forget to turn off the flash…but look at the nice picture!

I am 86% sure that my camera ate some of the pictures I took here – it was an amazingly opulent piece of work. I liked the idea he had, but overall the outside architecture was much more appealing to me than the inside. The rooms were just way too gaudy for my taste. And – no squirrels. WTF?


Lights in The Valley, from atop a Mulholland.

It was good. :)

in Life of Giang, Travel

FEHK

I dun wanna go to work today. It was a great weekend, and I’m suffering from medium-severe sensory/information overload. The thought of having to have a conversation with another human being leaves me slightly befuzzled – I feel like the best I could contribute today is a wild-eyed chirp or two.

Which is why, at 8:14 in the morning, I am sitting in a towel blogging, instead of getting ready for work.

Here’s a picture of some goofy people we saw:

Curt Monster!

She looks off, is all I can say. A little…squirrelly.

Alright. More later. Must force myself to clothe and brave the day.

(Dun wanna, dun wanna.)

(It was a lovely trip. ;) )

in Books, Poetry, Travel

Overlooking Llanwrtyd Wells

Overlooking Llanwrtyd Wells

6/7/2004. Llanwrtyd Wells dewey-eyed and misty. Taken after a climb up Spion Kop.

And…

“somewhere i have never travelled”
by e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

in Travel

Godzilla Vs. The UK

Lift a glass for me, everyone: the bag is packed.

Well, sort of. There are some odds and ends that I still have to get in – have to get a battery for the watch I’m taking, plug converter for the camera charger – small things. Otherwise, I am ready to go, and only have time keeping me from England.

And this is typically when the nausea sets in. Thus far, Alexis has taken the brunt of my characteristic neuroticism. Frantic phone calls bugging the busy nanny: “What happens at customs? What if the backpack gets wet? What if they laugh at my shoes? What if they make me check the bag? How do i get my plane tickets? Are the movies free? Where should i sit? Gah, i’m going to die, help, help, help!” And so on, and so forth. I mean, what if they find the dirty-laundry plastic bag I’m taking and accuse me of using it to traffic drugs? Help me, I will cave and confess to it all!

Anyone see how this trip is going to go yet?

Between the deep gulps of air, I see how this will be good for me. For once, I will be thousands of miles away from welcoming faces, and bereft of anything close to a security blanket. I’ll be forced to handle things on my own. It’ll be like Godzilla is attacking the country, and I am Godzilla. I will trample England underfoot, and breathe my mighty fire down on them all, and I will carry off some lovely Scottish lad, and beat back any other giant abberations, because it’s my movie, damnit, and I will win.

It will be good for me. It is good for me. I will not be found cowering and afraid the rest of my life, or even for three weeks in Heathrow, waiting for my return flight to come around. I will arrive, go through customs, get on a bus, and go to Bath, damnit, in a Beautiful-Gorgeous-Wish-You-Were-Here mindset, and enjoy myself for three weeks, and come back with a ridiculous, pretentious brogue in my speech.

I will do all these things, and come back better for it. I am Godzilla! I am Spartacus! I am Jerry Ma-Fucking-Guire, and that is what we do.

I’m off to toss some cookies now, tune in later for more pre-flight jitters.

in Life of Giang, Travel

Come And Knock On My Door

Four days left. Am I packing? Am I planning? Am I making a CD? No. I am sitting on my duff, watching the “Three’s Company”-athon on TV Land. My cable is ghetto, so in the background, I can see the outline of another show going on from the Spanish channel. So it’s more like…”Tres Companitos” or something. Haha, yes, I know I’m going to hell for that. ;)

in Travel

Random Musements

Countdown to Heathrow: 8 days. The pack is not packed because the shoes do not match.

Now what does it say in the book? What has everyone been telling me? If you think you don’t need it, don’t pack it. And do I need another pair of shoes? No. I could very well trounce all over the country with my boots, and be quite snug and comfy. But do they match? Let’s me turn around and check one more time…no. They do not match. They do not play well with the other children. Gah.

On a brighter note, my BritRail pass and my hostelling card came today. :) I am excited, excited, excited! I started putting together the music I would take two weeks ago, and it’s still in progress. It’s going to be a tough decision. Three weeks, and the only escape from my own psycho-babble (since we all know nobody talks to me – I’ve got that dangerous look to me, that’s why) will be music. What to take? Which one of my children will I not save from the boat?

Spent an insane amount of time reading some power-blogger blogs last night, and came across a couple of amusing things:

Your Movie Database – Like the IMDB, only personal. Still putting together mine, as if I don’t waste enough time doing useless things on the internet. ;)

Poem Tag – Neat idea. Looks like the page has not been updated in donkey’s years, but I made one anyway. Here:

And just cause I want to, here is a picture of World Of Warcraft, my darling time-sink. :) Happy trails, all.

in Travel

The Most Happy Sell-Out

Well, I finally did it. Despite my ravings about the evils of wysiwyg web design, I have given in, and behold. The moment I set eyes on the design and functionality of Blogger, I was hooked. I think I’m in love. Tee-hee! There will be rampant blog evil-ness, since I am no longer in charge of hand-coding my own pages. The giggling is getting most rambunctious – on to other things. ;)

I’ve run across a bit of a snag in my travel plans. It is a ridiculous problem, as most of my problems are ridiculous, but I have to tell anyway: the shoes that I plan on bringing do not match any of the clothes that I have. They are big ol’ Columbia “hiking” shoes, and I could almost justify that they do not match anything because they are hiking shoes, after all, and big, dirt-sod-like colored ones (with blue shoelaces) at that, and therefore should have a charm of their own in being just as they are: ugly. BUT. I can’t. Because I am me, Ridiculous Giang, and I can’t let it go. I’ve really only got three choices:

A) Buying a whole new, very brown-based wardrobe. As if I’m not going to be conspicuous enough as it is, I might as well go and dress myself up like a giant brown puff-ball. And hey, if anything charges at me, I can just lay down and hope I blend in with the surroundings.

B) Buying new and exciting, all-purpose shoes. Perfect for my night on the town play-going in Stratford AND my intrepid hike-some foray into the Scottish highlands. They will be wonderfully cheap, astoundingly comfortable, and come with a set of tweezers and a toothpick lodged into the heels.

C) Packing more shoes. Because I’m not already tempted by my weak-willed-packing genes to throw my cat into my backpack, and what is another pair of shoes, anyway? I can bring my loafers, my flip-flops, the hiking boots, my high heels, my supermarket foam shoes, and my Asics. You just never know.

Ah, what to do, what to do.

In other news, in search of bottles to hold toiletries in (I couldn’t be normal and just buy little bottles either – everything must be an ordeal), I emptied out one of my Bath and Bodyworks body spray bottles into the bathroom sink, and now it smells like I murdered a coconut in there. I will admit nothing, and lie like the devil when they ask me who did it.

Happy Trails. :)