We left the London hotel around 9 am and headed for the airport. Guess what? It was raining. Again. We caught a taxi to the Paddington Station and took the Heathrow Express to the airport. All of this was uneventful.
Paris!
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Tag Archives: Hyatt
The Asian Detour
The Asian Detour
Yes, yes, we went to Asia on the way to Europe. Why? Justin explains the reason in his last post. Anyway, we did it. Once again, we flew in style.
Cathay Pacific First Class Take 2:
Once again, Cathay Pacific doesn’t disappoint. Even though I knew exactly what to expect, I am always amazed by the level of service and attention to detail provided by this great airline. If you want a more detailed review, see our previous post (about a year ago). My flight experience basically went like this:
1. Get on the plane
2. Eat a 4 course meal
3. Ask the flight attendant to make my bed while I change into my pajamas
4. Sleep for 8 solid hours
5. Drink some hot tea while watching TV
6. Eat again
7. Get off the plane
Seattle August 2013
Seattle 2013. My first extended trip without my better half. What happened? We were in a huge fight and…Not really. I had a work conference. I’ve been travelling more for work related reasons lately and that trend looks to continue increasing.
The COPRI Ports 2013 Conference was located in Seattle this year. It only happens once every three years, and the next one will be located in New Orleans. So no fun work related travel courtesy of the Ports Conference until 2019. But work agreed to send me and my coworker/supervisor to this conference, and I was in.
The conference itself was fine. It was kind of surprising in that some of the things I thought would be interesting were not…and some of the things I was least interested in ended up being the best topics.
Other than the conference, I tried to experience as much of Seattle as possible, but it was still very different than my ordinary vacation. There were conference things during most days and semi-work related stuff at night. Still here is my initial take on Seattle:
Maldives Wrap Up
Maldives Wrap Up
The Maldives were the last addition to our trip (along with the corresponding transit stop in the UAE). I was pushing for some stops in Africa and Europe; Alyce reigned me back in and said enough…probably for the best.
Still, I had one last bullet left to fire…The tropical paradise known as the Maldives.
Alyce was resistant at first, like most things with the trip. But, she opened up to this addition relatively easily. Our final itinerary was set.
The Maldives are a chain of island atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean. There are 1192 islands in the chain, 192 of which are inhabited. The entire country’s population is just over 300,000 people and about a third of the population resides in the capital island of Male.
Melbourne, Australia Wrap Up
Oh, hello again Australia. We’re very exci……Let’s be honest. At this point of the trip, all of the traveling was starting to wear on us a little bit – some more than others.
We loved New Zealand and were sad to leave. Just about everywhere else we went we were going someplace completely new, so you weren’t sad to leave because you had something new and exciting to look forward to. Not here, we were back to Australia…Not to say we didn’t enjoy Australia the first go around – we loved it too. I think we had just hit a travel lull.
Still, the show must go on. Melbourne is the second largest city in Australia (4.25 Million people) and is the capital of the state of Victoria. It was the biggest/most prominent city for most of Australia’s history, but only in the last 40-50 years has Sydney surpassed it.
The cities are similar in many ways, though I think Melbourne has a more “hip” vibe (for lack of a better term). Melbourne also lacks the iconic landmarks that Sydney possesses. Basically, Melbourne plays a Chicago or San Francisco to Sydney’s New York.
Sydney Wrap Up
Well…We’ve been home for about 2.5 months, and I’m finally getting around to finishing up my “wrap ups.” As one might imagine, taking 3 months off tends to put you behind the 8 ball at work, so – needless to say – I’ve been pretty busy in that regard.
Fortunately, I kept good notes and have Alyce’s blog posts to look back on. Plus, I have a decent memory, so I should be able to recap things almost as well as if I had wrote this while we still on the trip. On to Sydney…
Sydney is the largest city in Australia; its metropolitan area population (4.7 Million) would put it between Detroit and Seattle in the US. So it is a big city, but not huge. The city was pretty clean—maybe slightly less so than some of the Asian cities, but still very clean. I also found Sydney to be very safe, as was the case with most of the places we visited.
Sydney’s downtown – at least from a tourism perspective – is located around a little cove off of Sydney Harbor call Circular Quay. A quick note: Quay is pronounced as “key” (like you lock/unlock things with)…something we did not figure out until our last day in Sydney.
The Maldives In Pictures
We’re back home and still getting used to it, but it is great to get back to some normalcy. We do still have a bunch of stuff to post – including getting to the rest of my wrap ups and some other posts…I’ll probably try to do one on some of the tricks we used to book all the stuff. So keep checking back every now and then if you are interested in any of that.
In the Maldives, we stayed at the Park Hyatt (Hadahaa Island). It was incredible. Check out the pictures to get an idea of what it was like.
http://justinandalyce.smugmug.com/Other/Maldives/28643728_qhkrRk#!i=2429762420&k=K7zwhfv
Maldives
We made it to the Maldives yesterday around 5am after 20 hours of traveling. As I was sitting in a boat in the middle of the night after three flights, I was thinking “this better be worth it.” To be perfectly honest, if someone told me that I could go to the Maldives or go home, I would have chosen to go home…..without hesitation. I just wasn’t sure that I had another long day of travel left in me. I was so terribly exhausted by the time we got here. We collapsed into bed and looked forward to seeing the beautiful beach and water in the morning.
When we woke up, all the hours of traveIing immediately became worth it! It looks like we stepped into a postcard: clear water, blue sky, and white sand. It’s hard to describe and better than it looks in the pictures.
