Irv’s Journal

No big detailed post.  Just wanted to say Alaska was AMAZING!  Highlights:

• Aleutian Ballad (Deadliest Catch) Crab Boat tour.  WOW I would say if you had to choose one excursion to do, this would be it.  From showing us their fishing techniques, to telling fishing stories, I don’t think I had any dull moments on this tour.  Plus you get to meet people you’ve seen on TV, and they’re really nice guys.  The topper on this trip was when they took us to a native American reservation, where they were actually allowed to feed and bait the eagles!  I swear there must have been 30-40 eagles  swooping around right next to the ship!
• Eagle Preserve raft tour.  Being an “Eagle Preserve” I would have thought we would see some eagles!  Unfortunately I guess the majority of the eagles were off flying somewhere because the weather was so nice.  During the 1.5 raft ride I would say we saw about two or three eagles total.  However the river raft tour was nice, and we got to see some great views.
• Food on the ship was excellent.  Luckily dessert wasn’t always a great hit.  I managed to not gain any weight on the trip! Woohoo!
• The ship is REALLY smooth while in the protected waters.  It rocked slightly on the last day or two when we got out to open sea.

Highly recommended trip, especially if you get a good deal!  I would probably wait and do one of the later ones, even though we were really lucky and had sun every day.

I must say that this trip was much better than I had even expected.

Esther and I packed late into the night on Friday.  We then had to get up extra early to get to Steven and Jennifer’s wedding on Saturday morning.  This really led to a really frazzled exit from the house.  The wedding was at a golf course in La Habra, it was a very nice and scenic setting, and seemed to go off without any major issues.

Of course, thanks to Virgin America for changing our flight time to almost two hours earlier than scheduled, without any notification!  We didn’t find out about this small issue until we were about to check-in for our flight.  This meant we had to skip out on the wedding early and rush over to the airport, so we ended up missing out on the cake cutting and other activities after lunch.

Luckily, our flight to Seattle was on-time and pretty smooth.  Amy and Sean picked us all up and took us to an interesting Korean restaurant for dinner.  The rest of our Saturday was pretty much spent settling into our rooms (and doing a bit of extra laundry on my part) and relaxing.

Sunday started off at a cafe for brunch.  The food at this place was definitely hearty – I don’t think anyone finished their food!  After brunch, the whole family decided we needed to get out, so we took Kayla for a nice walk to the park.  The shocker of all was that Seattle was nice and sunny, so a couple of us got a bit slightly sunburned.  We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the Lakers game, then most of us napped and got ready for Esther’s birthday dinner at Ginza.  This place is a cozy little Japanese restaurant with really fresh fish.  Pretty much every time we’re in Seattle we end up at this place, and as usual, we weren’t disappointed.

We were all rather full and tired, so after finishing off the evening with a little birthday ice cream cake, we all pretty much called it an early evening, since on Monday morning, the cruise awaited!

We’re leaving this Saturday for our cruise!

Wow, it has certainly snuck up on us pretty quickly. I’m pretty excited, since this will be my first cruise.

Gotta get packed, since we’re going to Steve and Jen’s wedding on Saturday AM and then heading straight to the airport for our flight to Seattle. Hopefully we get a nice and relaxing weekend at Amy and Sean’s before our drive up to Vancouver to catch the ship.

Bringing workout gear and plan on using it this time… I definitely do NOT need to gain the weight on this trip that everyone is seeming to warn me about…

Work trip number one for the year.  Heading off to Japan next week.  Hopefully back by 2/2.  Woopie I’m spending my birthday in Japan!

Nothing really too exciting to talk about…

Just catching up here.

As you may already know, Esther and I were forced to evacuate our house two weekends ago due to the Yorba Linda/Anaheim Hills Fire.  There was much excitement to be had, but we escaped with all three cars and lots of our belongings.  The evacuation was lifted on Sunday, but we didn’t return home till Monday.  Thankfully everything was okay, just as we had left it.  I believe the closest point of the fire was about a mile and a half or so away from the house.

The following weekend I headed out to Germany for a work trip.  While I had never been to Germany (besides the Frankfurt Airport), I wasn’t too excited about this trip.  I ended up having a white Thanksgiving in Germany (snow started early this year), and since the trip ended early, I was home on Black Friday evening.  With temps in the low 30s, i realized yet again that I am seriously lacking in the warm winter coat department.  Yeah, I never really think about it since I live in sunny southern California, but generally when I go on my work trips it can be REALLY COLD!

One of the nice things about being in Germany is the month long Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) that takes place in most of the cities starting the week of Thanksgiving.  Basically it is a giant fair that pops up in the town squares and people sell crafts and other random stuff.  It’s a place to get your Christmas shopping done.  And to go along with being a fair, there’s tons of fair food to sample, such as rostbratwurst (grilled bratwurst on a roll), kartoffelpuffer (potato pancakes served with apple sauce), giant brezels (pretzels), and of course gluwein (hot spiced red wine).  I managed to try most of the food, which was definitely good.  Tried a non-alcoholic version of the gluwein (hot spiced grape juice) and must say it was pretty tasty as well.

Now I’m back, and just counting down till the holidays!

Just spent a weekender in Seattle at Amy and Sean’s with Esther, Sarah, and Janet.  It was a really fun trip.  Highlights included:

• The Seattle Underground Tour.  I highly recommend this to anyone visiting Seattle for the first time as a tourist.  Who knew that they totally rebuilt seattle after a great fire in 1888 and re-graded the city with fill from the mountains?  Some buildings lost a whole story… the dump was between 8 to 35 ft worth of fill!
• Salmon hatchery tour.  Wow.  I guess I never really thought about how salmon hatcheries worked.  Did you know that salmon fought their way back from the ocean, back up the rivers, just to get back to where they were born so that they could spawn/fertilize eggs and then die?  I didn’t.  This hatchery has a salmon ladder to simulate jumping up creeks and whatnot, it was crazy the amount of fight these fish had at the end of their journeys and how torn up they were.
• Pumpkin Patch.  We had a whole lot of fun going to a nursery with a real live pumpkin patch.  We got to pick and cut our own pumpkins straight off the soil, unlike here where most of the “patches” just have pumpkins sitting out on hay bales.  It was pretty wild as a few of us got competitive and looking for bigger pumpkins.  The biggest one ended up being nearly 33 lbs!!!
• Pumpkin carving.  Believe it or not, this was my first time carving pumpkins.  It was super messy, and I picked the hardest pattern to follow, but in the end it was totally worth it to see my pumpkin lit up!
• Food.  Yeah, how could a trip be completed without food?  Pretty much every place we went to was a plus in my eyes (and mouth).  Duke’s Chowderhouse, 3rd Floor Fish Cafe, and Green Leaf Vietnamese Cuisine were all very tasty.

The only lowlight for me was that Kaila, Amy and Sean’s Alaskan Husky mix, managed to forget who I was again.  I was encouraged that she seemed to accept me upon our arrival on Thursday, but all of a sudden on Friday she was back to her old ways, hiding from me and growling at me.  Oh well, maybe it’s just not meant to be for her and I.  Who knows.

Of course you might be wondering where the heck my pictures are.  Well of course we had a little camera snafu during one of the days, and in general aren’t big camera bugs when it comes to touristy stuff.  Luckily, Sarah definitely is, and she has posted her pictures on flickr.

http://flickr.com/photos/sarahderd/sets/72157608199328563/

Sunday

Of course, every trip has to have an end.  On Sunday, Craig, Esther and myself were scheduled for a return flight at 3.  This means we had enough time to have a brunch before going off to the airport.

We got up pretty early and wandered over to Farmer Brown.  On the outside, it is a dingy little downtown shop.  On the inside, it is a dingy little downtown shop. Hehe,  actually, the decorations lent themselves to (I think what they intended to be) a more urban type of establishment.

Once the brunch started, everything was on the rise.  Homemade pancakes, fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, cheesy scrambled eggs, yummy!  The food was terrific, if not artery clogging!  I definitely recommend their weekend brunch if you are ever up in San Francisco.  Will try to go back next time I’m in town.

After brunch, we grabbed our bags at the hotel and made our way to the airport.  Bye bye SF!

Saturday

Woke up and went across the street to the 24 Hr Fitness.  Didn’t do too much, just trying to keep the gym progress going (woohoo, I managed to push 175 on the bench!) and burn off some calories in preparation for the chocolate festival.  There was one problem at the gym though… apparently some people don’t think they need to wash their gym clothes.  I mean, WTF we knew it wasn’t BO, but there was seriously some nastiness going on with this one guy.  And no matter where we went, there he was… aiya.

Anyway, we spent a good hour and a half, and then headed back to the hotel and prepped for our afternoon of chocolatey goodness.  Left the hotel at about 12:30, and proceeded to get lost (no thanks to the hotel front desk lady!!! argh) trying to find the bus stop that headed in the direction we wanted to go.  After about 20 minutes of wandering around, we came across a bus depot (yes, handy indeed) and asked a nice bus driver who pointed us in the right direction.

The chocolate festival was… much smaller than it looks on Food Network.  There were probably about 80 “booths” available (most vendors took up either 2 or 4 spots, so there weren’t as many as you would think), all with various chocolate-based samples to try out.  Before gorging on sugar, we all decided it was best if we ate an actual lunch.  Alas most of the restaurants in Ghirardelli Square were packed, so we ended up blowing a bunch of money on ripoff fair food.  In this case it was Asian chicken skewers with either fried rice or chow mein.  Not too shabby for fair food – it was expensive, but they certainly piled on the food.

After lunch, we headed over to the main stage, where the Earthquake (8 scoops of ice cream, three different toppings, and whip cream) eating contest was about to start.  We picked a random older asian guy to root for and started a *clap, clap, clapclapclap* chant, which got a lot of the nearby crowd on his side as well.  It was all for naught though, the returning champ that they showed on last year’s Food Network coverage defended his crown.  Our guy did manage a close second, however.

We started on the journey into the vendor samples.  Ice cream sundaes from Ghirardelli, chocolate jalapeno gelato, chocolate beer, chocolate martinis, and chocolate malts were amongst the choices.  I don’t think anyone managed to spend all the pre-paid samples from their tickets, so most of us went ahead and blew our remaining tickets on Ghirardelli chocolate samples…

Chocolated out, we headed back to the hotel and rested for a while (watching the US Open, mostly) since we were pretty pooped and had to wait for our dinner reservations.  We hit the House of Prime Rib.  Can’t really explain too much except to say that it’s pretty much exactly like Lawry’s.  Except I really like Lawry’s salad better, and enjoyed the Creamed Corn at the House of Prime Rib.

What’s another night out on a Foodie trip without ICE CREAM?  Following dinner we headed to Mitchell’s, which is apparently a filipino-owned ice cream shop.  Holy crap people were parking/double parking like there was no tomorrow.  Double parallel parking with hazard lights on? No Problem!  And police drove by without a care, so I guess it’s a generally accepted practice.  Ice cream wasn’t too bad either.  Lots of asian flavors available, like halo halo and jackfruit, etc.

After dessert we drove up to Coit Tower.  I had told the crew that the city view was really nice at night.  Er, I guess I had an obsolete memory because they had allowed all the bushes surrounding the view points to overgrow!  What’s the point of those pay binocular things if all you are going to see is the bushes?!?!?!

There went another day, already!

So a few of us went up to San Francisco this past weekend.  I would have to say this whole trip was caused by Food Network.  Yep, you guessed it, this weekend was the annual Ghirardelli Square Chocolate Festival!

Friday

Craig, Esther, and I met up at LAX and flew Virgin America to SFO.  I must say that this time around on VA was much more pleasant and ON TIME.  Once there, I took my first trip on BART, then hiked a few blocks to our hotel.

We didn’t have too much time, since we were scheduled for an Alcatraz cruise/tour, so we quickly jumped piled into Eugene’s rental Trailblazer and headed out.  Since the ferry site was near Fisherman’s Wharf, we parked there and ate at Chowder, one of the local clam chowder joints that isn’t named Boudin.  I must say the chowder was pretty tasty, as was my crab sandwich.

Sufficiently filled, we headed for the cruise to Alcatraz.  I have to say I enjoyed touring this place.  The audio tour that takes you through the cell house is definitely interesting.  The view of the city from the island is very scenic.  They do offer night tours, but no way am I spending time in the darkness in a prison.

We topped off the night with dinner at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher, followed by Marco Polo, a chinese gelato shop that has a host of asian flavored gelato to choose from.

So, I just got back from a little two week trip to Chincoteague, VA.  It’s basically a small town near the VA/MD border.  Work was really boring and really so was the town.  It had one main street (the other being the road into town) and one traffic light.

Funny thing, here in California we can drive hours and still be in California.  On the other hand, on one of our free days we took a drive to explore.  In an hour or so of driving, I passed  completely through Maryland and a few miles into Delaware.  I can check those two states off of my “states to visit” list.

During our drive, we passed through what looked like a pretty large vacation spot right near the Delaware and Maryland border, called Ocean City.  Basically it is a large main street with hotels on both sides, right along the coast.  I’m talking about maybe 30+ hotels in a 5 or 6 mile stretch.  And it was pretty empty.  One of the coworkers had been there on the weekend and said it was totally packed, so it must be a weekend getaway type of town.

I was kind of lost, so I fired up the good ol’ Google Maps on the blackberry and look what popped up on the map:

I know these are Native American types of names, but I certainly got a kick out of it.

Anyway, we managed to finish work a few days early so we headed back to Washington DC and did a quick afternoon walking tour of the National Mall and Smithsonian Institute.

Back to the grind…