We enjoyed the food and drinks (and promoted SpelletjesOverzicht.nl).

We enjoyed the wild life.

We enjoyed the wild life We visited cultural exhibitions.

We enjoyed Trogir, close to Split.

And set it on fire.

Jasper and I

Nice

The Royal Palace in the background, us in a relatively ordered fashion in front.

Ernst was so occupied with women… he lost his passport… and was lucky enough to get an emergency replacement on time.

Jasper and Armida risked falling off a 20 meter cliff for this one.

Going out was lots of fun. Britons don’t dance but drink loads.

A mural.

Warnings on sigarette packs get more explicit: “Smoking can cause a slow and painful death”.

We got quite a distorted image, because we achieved two virtually impossible things in London:
- We had great weather throughout our stay, and even wore short-sleeved shirts for a while…
- We stayed in a spotlessly clean hotel with friendly staff (two thumbs up for the Premier Travell Inn, located in the former County Hall)

London is beautiful and has a center full of majestic and authentic building with lots of space between them. Walking through Amsterdam’s Kalverstraat makes you feel more packed than Picadilly Square – despite London having some 8 – 12 million inhabitants.

Some pics, the others are in the picture section.

Houses of Parliament – accross our hotel

Picnic-accessoiries for your ascot-party. Find both Sanne and me on this picture! The big basket is on sale for only 1000 pounds…

London has no fear of putting old building and new advertising next to each other. Wannabe Times Square?

Tate Modern – nice building accross the millennium bridge

One of the very few expressions we came across with regards to the London bombings.

Our hotel and the ‘London Eye’ – don’t enter if your affraid of heights…

The magnificent Rosetta Stone. Really remarkable and quite prominently positioned in the British Museum (for good reasons).

Pretty California babe on the beach in Santa Cruz

Wild Dolphins

and Humpback whales!

Stunning views around every corner along Highway 1 from Monterey southwards to Los Angeles

Highway 1…

A pool with a view at exorbitant Hearst Castle

Sanne is smiling because she managed to get Rogier in an attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood involving a 84-foot drop into a water basin. Rogier is smiling because he survived the ride.

Americans pack light when they go out for a picknick in La Jolla

A real killer whale – although Sea World San Diego prefers to call him Shamu… why would that be?

A sight not often seen by mankind

Yosemite’s beauty

Halfdome

Bathing in Yosemite (or the lack of showers)

A Bear at 4 meters!!!!

Fun on the water

Sanne and Rogier in Death Valley – yes, our planning sucked and we arrived there after nightfall…

Fabulous Las Vegas with gondoliers at the Venetian?? Sanne and I found out they actually have small electrical motors for thrust hidden underneath the gondolas!

Crazy gambling… and it is not allowed to make pictures.

At Yellowstone our tent almost broke down… we didn’t know it yet but there would be two days of Heavy rain ahead of us. In miraculous way our tent managed to keep us pretty dry at night.

Lake Yellowstone just outside our camping ground

Beautiful hot springs in Yellowstone

And geysers like the crowded Old Faithful which erupts every 90 minutes… still quite amazing.

How romantic … yes, but you don’t know how tough it was to hike up there!

Falls around every corner

Butterflies abound when you’re off the main road.

We made it to the top! We were proud

Cutchie, cutchie

Enter : Bison country

Amazing colors at this fall – check out the very very small people standing at the upper right of the fall

Looks like photoshop or Sanne in front of a painting – but it’s not

Don’t anger the Gods at Mt Olympus

Steaming hot water from the left and cold from the right – bathing here is really perfect!

Driving back through Nevada Sanne hit the Jackpot!

San Francisco… unfortunatly our city of departure back to the Netherlands

Yellowstone is vast and feels much more rough and raw. More like nature intended it. One of the treats to the park is the ever increasing numbers of visitors, but you wouldn’t know it in the park. Sanne and I did one 10 miles hike (I’m very proud I finished it) and we saw a total of two (2) people on the trails in total – while the hike took us 5 hours. Two people in five hours! Not really crowded, no.

Together with Highway 1 from Monterey southwards, Yellowstone was probably the most impressive thing we have seen this holiday. The park has beautiful hills and we saw amazing wildlife, among which Bison (loads!), Moose, Elk, Deer, Wolves, Pronghorn and special Swans. Very very impressive.

It was a 2 day drive getting there and a 2 day drive going back to San Francisco but is was definitely worth getting there for 5 days. As I was saying everywhere all holiday long to Sanne : “We don’t have anything like this in the Netherlands”. “True”, said Sanne in Yellowstone.

Nevada is quite crazy anyway, with loads of slot machines at the gas stations and local laundromats…

In Las Vegas, we stayed at the fourth-largest hotel in the world located on the strip : the Luxor. It has a Sfynx (larger than the original…) built in front of the hotel-casino complex just for decoration. That right there is Las Vegas for you. The hotel-casino complex itself is built in the shape of a huge Pyramid. The Pyramid is ‘hollow” from the inside while the hotelrooms are built on the sides of the upstanding walls of the pyramid. So inside, you have this enormous open space, with the casino in the middle.

Our hotel is very very easy to find as on top of the Pyramid there is a GI-GAN-TIC beam of light in the sky – the world’s most powerful lightsource of 315.000 watts. Amazing. And the hotel staff even ‘dares’ to put a card in your room saying that they care tremendously for the environment and request that you take some action to help them with that (like reusing towels etc.).

Confused already? Check out the pictures…

Sanne and I gambled… Sanne lost on the slots but I could make it up with blackjack . We have a great picture of Sanne standing next to a slot machine saying ‘bar-bar-bar’. $3.75 in profit for Sanne .

Sanne and I also went on a helicopter flight of the Grand Canyon – in hindsight a great choice. I had quite some problems sleeping the evening before… but found out at the helicopter-companies’ headquarters that there was a couple far more terrified than I was . Unfortunately you’ll have to believe us since the memory-stick of our camera broke down, but the trip yielded truly amazing views of Lake Mead, the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon and the Bowl of Fire (some area with different and deeply colored brick). Sanne even saw wild horses walking around. It was still quite scary on our trip to the Grand Canyon. Our helicopter flew THROUGH the Grand Canyon under the rim itself and even landed on a spot near the west rim. We had a glass of champagne and some light snacks there and enjoyed the great views for some 45 minutes. Afterwards we flew back – and I found myself more accustomed to helicopter flights already.

If you go to Las Vegas – don’t spare the money, just do it. We flew with Maverick in their most modern helicopters – highly recommended.

We sat up our tent and had to put all our ‘oderous’ stuff (deodorant, toothpaste) and food in a ‘bear box’. That is a metal container outside your tent with a special lock on it that bears can’t open. That we really were in bear country we would find out the next day on our first hike at 100 meters from the car… A brown-looking bear (but species-wise a black bear) popped up right in front of us just 15 meters on the right side the road. The bear was quite big and looking very healthy, strong and confident. There was a small bridge between us and the bear and the bear was slowly but surely coming towards us through the tiny river. I tried to take some pictures. The bear didn’t seem very interested or bothered by us, but kept coming closer. Some 50 meters behind us, other people were walking – heavily involved in some discussion. We made sure we were not blocking the bear’s path and just waited to see what he would do next – we didn’t run away as bears can easily outrun you. The bear probably was annoyed by the sound of the conversation of the guys behind us and decided at 4 meters from us to turn away from us and walk into the woods. The people behind us didn’t see mee waving repeatedly… and were pretty shocked when they finally saw us… and the bear! Wow… this was only our first 100 meters of hiking!

At our campsite at Wowona (highly recommended!) there were very friendly people who supplied tons of valuable information for us to get started in Yosemite. It is very nice to have such neighbours – we were even invited to stay with them at their house near San Francisco!

Although it can become crowded in the ‘Valley’ of Yosemite park, if you’ll travel some 100 meters from the mainstream path, you’ll find a lot of peace and tranquility.

We also did some very relaxed rafting… as it was over 40 degrees Celcius. In winter the river can be quite challenging, but as in summer the river dries up, it is a walk in the park. Nice though.

San Diego has a famous ‘Gas-Lamp District’, which is completely packed with beautiful people at night who are enjoying dinner/drinks outside. The weather is great here.

We went to Sea World – and I actually thought it would be an sea life-experience with an educational flavour to it. Forget it. Sea World is a theme park and it happens to be – quite a coincidence – that there are some animals of the sea nearby. So as in any theme park you trip over the eating options, you have screaming and spoiled kids everywhere, there are waiting lines and best of all… you have shows! In such a show, the ‘host’ makes you sing all kinds of songs and informs everyone extensively that the first couple of rows will get wet (cosily named the ’soak-zone’). Then you will see dolphins for a couple of minutes who will do jumps and do a special movement in which they soak the people in the front by splashing with their tail back and forth near the surface of the water. Then you can leave again.

One show made up for the whole entrance fee, though. Shamu – a giant killer whale but that probably doesn’t so nice for the kids so they call him Shamu – performs a show at night together with 3 smaller killer whales. It’s called House of Douse and it is amazing to see such magnificent creatures from up close. They are very impressive and beautiful at the same time. They command respect from their onlookers. Surely, they swim all around in their pool while the host is doing a dance in front of it and everybody has to mimic her. It strikes me as rather bizarre to do the cha-cha-cha with a complete audience while there is a rare and threatened killer whale just 10 meters away…

Afterwards one of the hosts stood on Shamu and made a complete tour around the pool carrying an American flag. We watched fireworks for a couple of minutes ‘in honour of our heroes’.

Animals come second place here.

We drove through Hollywood (trashy!), Beverly Hills (definitely not trashy!!), Venice Beach (weird people), South Park (many homeless), Financial Center (NY’s atmosphere) and Pasadena (CalTech and nice).

Locals kept stricking up conversations (why we weren’t married, for instance), we went to the movies (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!), the beach and… to Universal Studios Hollywood! Universal Studios is a themepark with amazingly fat people with horrible children, but amazingly fun rides. Sanne pushed me in the Jurrasic Park-ride… which meant we made 84-foot fall into the water with our tree-carriage. Nice.
The Waterworld Show is definitely the most spectacular. A great show with real actors who soaked all the audience and had a lot of fun in a big bowl of water. You really have to go there to believe it.