Entries Tagged 'Travels' ↓

This year we didn’t meet up for coffee at 10.20am but no matter because we were IN NEW YORK! So so crazy that when we got married there 6 years ago we had a very serious conversation that we should do whatever we could in our lives to try and get back to New York for our 5th anniversary – who knew that a year on from 5 we’d be on our 5th visit and had lived there for a time. Lovely day exploring, drinking coffee and having dinner with a view over Central Park.

Very cool to get another trip to New York so quickly! Finally got there at a time of the year to see some fall colors, well the tail end of them. Spotted a few yellow or orange trees in Central Park and downtown, hung out drinking coffee (even got to a couple of new places!), had some family time and some nice long hours at the shops – I was in the mood for once!

Thanks so much Cousin Grant for having us to stay again.

Slightly more East than the centre of America – I know because I folded the USA map from the inflight magazine in half to determine just where our almost 4 hour flight was taking us. Also I was confused why that part of the country is referred to as the mid-West when clearly it’s mid or mid-East!

Kansas was home to another accountants’ conference where we sat at the back of a conference room for 4 days talking to people about Xero in their breaks. The conference was in the same 80’s hotel as where we were staying – still in the dark ages requiring us to pay for internet in our room and making us pay for each device … 2 laptops, 2 phones … $40 for internet? We had a cool view of the Liberty Memorial though which captured my interest when I was trying to fall asleep because of it’s orange ‘flame’.

It was cold in Kansas – 5 degrees in the morning and about 13 during the day, not that we got out much. There were some amazing autumn colors in the trees.

Some of the conference days were half days and after some research I found a coffee place to try – had to go on a bus where I don’t think anyone riding it on any of the days we went (several trips once we discovered how good the coffee was) had ever seen anyone in an orange coat judging by all eyes on me!

Here I am waiting for the bus.

In the evenings we went out with accountants and one night on our own for The Mister’s birthday. There’s a lot of BBQ in that town and no green vegetables. I got to try a proper pulled pork sandwich – not bad but it was the size of a truck!

No idea where the shops are or movie theaters – all out of town in malls I guess. Union Station was impressive and housed another cafe with really good coffee.

The airport is brown and small and old and we got a tiny Blenheim sized plane on to New York – it’s alright being in one of those planes for 20 minutes but 3 hours?

The day after the conference in Las Vegas finished we joined a day trip with some of the conference delegates to visit the Hoover Dam and take a trip down the Colorado River through Black Canyon. It was an amazing day – so different and so quiet and I almost relaxed (as much as one can on a raft especially when Xero had an outage and with one feeble bar of reception I was trying to tweet and email the team back home to keep our customers informed because I was on a river in the middle of nowhere!)

The dam is huge and we got to go on a tour inside the power plant – turbines and pipes are huge. I also got to stand with one foot in Nevada and one in Arizona as the State line runs across the middle of the dam.

We were given picnic lunches (and a life-jacket for me … embarrassing as it was for The Mister as I was the only one, and we were barely under engine power, we floated most of the way) and boarded the raft for a 2-hour trip down through Black Canyon. The guide was informative, a river traveller for most of his life telling us about the dam, canyon and wildlife – we saw a mountain sheep and a bald eagle. The bus met us down river to take us back to the hotel in Las Vegas – everyone was pretty cold by then, except me because the life-jacket kept me so snuggly warm!

Las Vegas – love it or hate it I’ve heard. After 4 days and nights there I might be erring on the side of hating it. Even though the lights are pretty.

We were there for a very full-on 3-day conference where Xero had an exhibitor’s/vendor’s booth which saw us getting up really early to be on form at our booth at 7am while the conference delegates wandered around with their breakfast, then manning the booth and nipping in an out of conference sessions (about accounting … just to keep up with the current thinking and trends) but always being on hand for demos on into the evening sessions then going off out to dinner with other vendors we’ve made friends with – laughing and telling stories about the lack of coffee and various booth visitors before snatching an hour or so to check email before falling into bed rather late. Repeat. Repeat. Rod was in town for the conference and made a couple of presentations which seemed to go down very well – excellent news given we were at a conference for people who belong to a group of experts and advisors for our biggest competition here in the States, QuickBooks.

So, aside from that, before I forget, here’s my random list of observations and experiences in Las Vegas outside of the conference:

Casinos

• smoking is still allowed inside at the casinos – which are in the lobbies of most of the hotels, including the brand new hotel we were staying in. My eyes and skin are suffering – you never get used to the smell
• lobbies are wall to wall slot machines, card tables, bars and a section for high stakes players. There really are people slumped over the coin slot machines waiting for their lives to change at any hour of the day or night
• it wasn’t really anything like the movies – I didn’t find it particularly glamorous and aside from the total over the top bling and enormity of the hotels I didn’t really feel any money in the room. No-one was dressed like a high roller, there were lots of tourists in multi-colored sweaters and groups of friends in the 20’s and 30’s.
• You’re not allowed to take photos inside the casinos … unless you grab one from a walk way

• some of the older casinos are gross – doors open out into the strip with girls pole dancing to entice you inside, sticky carpets, free booze, tacky palm trees

Hotel

• our hotel, the brand new Cosmopolitan (where the conference was held) was spectacular – I was like the little girl being taken into the fairy store – everything was shiny and big and our room was amazing

• we had a sofa/coffee table/desk area
• a huge shower with a seat in it that you could watch one of the 2 TV’s from
• clever lights with labels that said ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ and dimmed on or off the entire room lights
• there were orange accents everywhere – the hotel guide, trim on the robe and slippers, wall hangings
• we had a deck with a little double sofa and amazing view over the Bellagio fountain

• the closet knew when you were approaching, even before you opened the door, and turned it’s interior light on
• the hotel had a Pillow Butler and despite The Mister not enjoying any of his 4 huge dumpy fluffy pillows he was too nervous to ring the butler in the night to try out some other pillows

but

• the toilet door automatically closed which meant it could me stuffy and wiffy
• the Hello Goodbye dimming lights became a real nuisance because only certain lights could be individually controlled. And the ones that could didn’t have an on switch but rather repeated clicking of an up dimmer and down dimmer so you never knew if the light was one of the individually controlled ones until you’d spend a fair amount of time clicking
• there was a family sized microwave and a dishwasher in the room but not a bowl, cup or fork in sight. Just 2 tumblers, 2 wine glasses and an ice-bucket. You wouldn’t microwave anything in those but I suppose you’d put them in the dishwasher
• there were no mugs and no coffee maker and no kettle. They really want you to go to the expensive cafes and restaurants for your food and drink. We’d take our own travel grinder, filter papers and hario knowing that that’d be the only way to get decent coffee but making it was a challenge – save that for another blog post
• and the biggest downfall of all was the failed upgrade of their network in the wee hours of our first morning there. The upgrade was to be finished by 5am Friday to the system that operated the TV, phones, cable and wi-fi internet but it wasn’t – we were in a hotel for a reasonably large technical conference where the internet and cloud solutions like Xero were being promoted to 700 accountants and there was no internet. Until about 5pm on Wednesday when the conference closed. We had a portable Mifi device that we used when we could but with everyone having to use their phones and Mifis over 3G that network was flooded and gave very poor and unreliable connections. The hotel rushed out to the nearest Radio Shack and bought a whole lot more Mifis but that didn’t really solve the flooding problem. It was painful and shed Xero in such a bad light at times – how can we get these accountants who use desktop software to consider an online solution when their fears of downtime and inaccessibility were being played out right in front of them? Thankfully it was the whole hotel that was affected so there were some very frustrated people around so I don’t think anyone was too critical of our product

Outside

• You can drink anywhere and alcohol is free if you’re gambling so there were streams of tipsy people out on the street or in the shopping centers carrying glasses and other garish vessels shaped like some casino theme or yard glasses with straws
• People bundled up against the cold (yes it was cold this time of year there) were in oversized t-shirts and hoodies advertising girls were in groups on street corners handing out pamphlets and cards for strippers and shows – they had this knack of flicking the cards in your face to try and draw attention to them and pushing right into your personal space to take one
• If you weren’t drinking or gambling or spending your winnings in a lavish shopping centre (all the huge brands had individual stores there Prada, Tiffany, Tumi, Louis Vutton …) then you were being encouraged to buy girls. T-shirts, placards and mobile billboards being driven around on trucks advertised “Girls Girls Girls ready for you in 20 minutes”. Gross
• The fountain is pretty special – here’s a video of it

• Just a block either side of The Strip, the buildings stop suddenly and give way to a barren wasteland, brown land with rows and rows of houses where everyone who works in the casinos and shopping malls lives

Coffee

• None worth drinking – not around The Strip anyway. Take your own beans and machinery. Even if you have to make it at a conference table looking calm and not desperate and addicted

The place is kind of surreal. Over the top. I had this strange feeling of everything and everyone being kind of fake. Or full of dreams based purely on luck and will-power if they had any – although I’m told some gambling requires skill and knowing the temperature of the table.

The Mister did really well with his presentations at the Sencha Conference – he was a bit nervous – he wasn’t telling people about Xero or something they might not’ve know about – he was telling a bunch of hard core Javascript geeks how to do something different with their Javascript. He got some clapping in the middle of his presentation and he was named one of the top 2 presentations of the conference on Sencha’s blog!

I worked in the hotel and cafes but during The Mister’s presentations I knitted in the back row or out in the foyer while I waited for him to answer all the questions afterwards … Jif caught me!

Our first visit to Texas was to the city of Austin where the Sencha conference was being held that The Mister was presenting at. I was prepared for stinking hot weather but to be honest it wasn’t too bad – I think with it being autumn the heat wasn’t too muggy and really only got really hot in the afternoon (really hot = almost 30 degrees C).

Austin was a strange kind of city – the only city I’ve been to in America where there were barely any shops – never even saw a Walgreens or Macy’s or Dunkin’ Donuts. Just a FedEx (which had amazing long opening hours), a few boutique clothing stalls and drive through banks! We were staying and based in the downtown area, I think when the city wasn’t working in air conditioned office blocks with underground parking or going to drive through banks, they were shopping at air conditioned malls with underground parking.

The one thing the city did have a lot of was bars and barbecue and restaurants – mostly along Sixth Street but generally throughout the downtown area. The roads and sidewalks were hot and sticky and smooth from being melted in the summer – looked and smelled disgusting like a perpetual night after a huge street party – each time I got back to the beautiful marbled hotel lobby I was embarrassed by the sticky squelching my shoes made traipsing sticky dumpster dribble and god knows what from the streets I’d just walked along! The streets were really wide too – I guess people in that town mostly drive everywhere to escape the heat so in general the town seemed quite sleepy because everything was in doors or underground. Every now and then you’d come upon a steaming parking lot with some food trailers in it or see great mirrored sky-scrapers shooting up in to the sky.

Their state Capitol building is pretty majestic – pinkish during the day and white at night.

Found a few great coffee places, more on that in other posts, but otherwise not a lot to do other than hang around the conference. One night we did go and watch the bats that live under one of the bridges across the river come out at sunset and swarm around before flying off into the night.

Couple of interesting things out the window of the plane as we flew over Texas for our first visit to that State.

Jet streams are black! Well, they look black. Always so striking and white when you’re looking up from the ground.

Fields below are full of round circles. Why is that? Something to do with irrigation machines I’m sure but those circles are mighty big!

Someone asked us for a top 10 to do in New York – The Mister came up with this amazing list of a dozen things in a few minutes – just had to share it. It’s a great list.

• Shake Shack in Madison Square Park
• Wine & dine at Eataly
• Broadway show (at least one – and do one near Times Square since you obviously need to go there as well)
• Sit in Central Park and people watch (make sure you visit the Bethesda Fountain and maybe row a boat on the pond)
• Go to a Yankees game (Mets suck)
• Go up Rockefeller Center (you’ll want to do the Empire State but the Rock is cheaper and gives you views of Central Park and a view of the Empire State)
• Go on the Staten Island Ferry (it’s free – takes you past the Statue of Liberty and gives you great views of the Financial District)
• Visit Ground Zero – make sure you book for the memorial site – you can’t just go there (I believe it’s free to book)
• Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (and then have dinner at Henry’s End in Brooklyn Heights)
• Walk the Highline (in Chelsea) and then visit Chelsea Market for a coffee (Ninth Street Espresso is amazing)
• Do a Circle Line boat tour around the whole island (not just a half tour – get the full Manhattan experience)
• Shop (5th Ave, Tiffanys, Macys, Bloomingdales etc)

Oh, better post a nice memory of New York while I’m at it (July 2010)

Yesterday we had a great day of mostly drinking coffee and sitting in parks people watching – this is one of the busiest cities in the world yet we seem to find plenty of time to relax, sitting on park benches and taking an hour to travel from one coffee spot to another. I know we’re essentially on vacation for a few days, but we did a fair amount of sitting on park benches when we lived here as well.

First stop after brunch with Cousin Grant in Tribeca was Saturdays Surf – great to see the place hadn’t changed much although the plants out the back had grown heaps. We drank our coffee and watched a hairy caterpillar scurry around for a while (video here!).

Spent a couple of hours eating a sandwich and watching people wander along The Mall in Central Park. We still haven’t seen The Mall in fall colors but I took another photo from the same spot as ones last year to add to the collection – you can see them all here tagged The Mall.

Then it was back to Shake Shack in Madison Square Park for burgers, fries and a shake. Man the burgers tasted better than I remember. I was so great being back there sitting under the lights with bits of acorn falling on your head from squirrels in the trees above snacking.

We visited Eataly afterwards – it’s Mario Batali’s Italian indoor market that was being built when we lived here last year. The place is huge and has every Italian food and ingredient you can think of – a pasta section, cheese section, gelato section … wines, fish, fresh pasta, coffee, chocolates, sweets, books, desserts, meats, pizza and lots of restaurants or standing bar places where you can get food to eat.

There’s a ‘vegetable butcher’ too – after you’ve selected your vegetables you just give them to him and he’ll wash and chop or prepare them any style you want – 3 pounds of carrots julienned please … we got a small tub of gelato and sat in the window looking out at the Flat Iron building for a while.