Once again, time slips

Sorry to anyone who continues to check this blog! I have been lax of late, since my return from Japan, not because I have not been doing anything towards my 101/1001, but because I have been doing so much else besides as well that it has been difficult to update this blog. I need to build some time into my day/week in order to do this more. In fact, I have some half-written posts about the end of my US Road Trip that I should finish soon, and lots and lots of pictures from that trip to upload to Flickr too.

Why has it been taking me a long time to write? Well...

...I got engaged!!! So my time has been invested instead in thinking about engagement party planning, wedding planning, life planning, work planning - lots of planning! It's all good, and sooner or later I will establish some rhythm to my life - at the moment there is not so much rhythm to my days, hours and weeks as there is freeform happiness.

Life is very good, and I hope to continue sharing that in the near future. 'Til then, take care, and do check back.

Oh, hello!

It's been nearly a month since I wrote on here, and so much has happened, as I'm sure you can guess from my last posts. I went back to Japan! So I have a lot to tell you about regarding that, details of the trip, the wedding that I went to, the culinary delights (and others) that I tried, and so on and so forth. I had a really great time, and am still feeling slightly tired from it all.

I still have to finish writing about my time in America, which I think I need to do soon in order to make sure that I get everything down. I want to have finished writing about both trips before Nanowrimo starts, and October and November are going to be quite busy with work as well. Busy busy busy!

In the last few weeks I've read a couple of books and seen four films as well - and just like that I am within a stone's throw of completing two of my goals - to read 101 books and see 30 films at the cinema. I now have only seven more books to read and one more film to see at the cinema! I want to read those seven other books before the end of the year (which sounds immediately doable, but remember that I won't be reading anything during Nanowrimo, and I have a stack of magazines that I subscribe to I need to read), and it's entirely possible that I will go to see that final film some time in the next week or so.

(not that it will be the last film that I see until I am thirty! You know what I mean)

Anyways, this post is an update and a prelude: in the next few days I am hoping that there will be a deluge of posts that will hit this blog. That's what I am planning for anyway. So, you'll hear all about my trip very soon I hope!

Thing 39, Japan, about to begin

I know that I haven't finished writing up my American Road Trip (or even uploading the pictures to Flickr), but time has rolled around, and tomorrow I leave for Japan! In fact, I leave home tonight as am staying at girlfriend's this evening as she lives closer to the airport.

It may be three weeks until I blog again, unless I get something down while I'm travelling. As with the USA trip I will be writing notes as I go, so there will be a series of posts when I get back.

So, until the next time I'm back, I hope you take care, keep well and do amazing things!

Thing 65: Done!!!

It's only in completing this goal that I realise just how straightforward it was, I mean, 101 pictures is not very much, right? But consider: before this I would only ever take my camera with me on a holiday. I would never think to take it on a night out, and I certainly wouldn't think to take it out with me during the day time, what would the point of that be?

Now my camera is part of my mental checklist, part of the kit that I try to remember to have with me when I am going out. It doesn't mean that it is always in my bag or my pocket, but I am getting better. And I'm really excited about sharing photos with people! I'm not sure that I would ever get so far along as to have a super-fantastic amazing camera, but I think that I will be taking photos more and more as time goes on. Perhaps for my next 101 things my goal will be to take 1001 pictures and share them on Flickr?

Enough about the future, I still have to try and accomplish as many of these 101 things as I can. For now, I hope that you enjoy my photos over on Flickr, my photostream can be seen by clicking here.

That makes 19 things done!

Road Trip: Colorado to Nevada, Part 2

It was a few moments after the fact that we realised we had crossed the border into Arizona; we had started the day by breakfasting on corn dogs and other savouries that we were able to get from a nearby gas station, and so neither of us was feeling in a particularly great mood - perhaps that is why we were suddenly so surprised to be in Arizona. As we realised it we tried to rack our brains, but neither of us remembered passing a sign announcing the different state.

No matter though, we were headed for Flagstaff, our old friend the I40 and Historic Route 66!

Like Utah, Arizona surprised us with its beauty. How did we not know about the beauty and majesty of the deserts and rocks before we left? Were we that clueless, or was it that we were so fixated on the "landmarks" and "destinations" on our trip that we really hadn't thought about the places that we would be driving through? It's a shame to say that due to our lack of knowledge, we spent many drive days just chatting along the way, stopping every few hours to stretch our legs while walking around a shopping centre or outlet mall, when there were probably many lovely natural attractions that we could have seen but for our ignorance.

Once again, our supply of coupon books helped us out when we arrived in Flagstaff and we found a good price at a Howard Johnson. It was a nice room, but we hadn't paid as much attention to our surroundings as we perhaps should have. Why was the restaurant next door (which incidentally served a great dinner and breakfast) decked out with so much train stuff? Again, we were clueless, and the answer made itself known loud and clear half an hour after we checked in, as a cargo train went past on the trainline not thirty metres from the motel. The trains that ran on the line were so long that we stopped counting the cars after a few minutes. At least they stopped running through at about 11pm...

...only to start again shortly after 6 the next morning...

Oh well. After a hearty breakfast we set off along Route 66, trying to soak up the atmosphere of the many travellers who had gone before us. We stopped in Seligman at the Roadkill Cafe for a quick drink and two games of pool (both of which Dave won easily), and then went on to Kingman, our goal for the day. The motel was basic, but comfortable enough, and although we could find nothing noteworthy to go and see in the local area there were plenty of shops! (of course)

We passed the afternoon looking around various malls, and Dave spent a happy half an hour in a 'Boot Barn' trying to decide just how cowboy he really wanted to go. Again we rested up in the evening, because although the next day had comparatively few miles for us to drive we would be spending some time at the Hoover Dam before heading on to the number one place that we had both been looking forward to on the whole trip, Las Vegas.

The day started well with a delicious IHOP breakfast, and though Dave and I might have disagreed about quite a few things on the trip there was one opinion on which both of us are agreed and will not be swayed from: we need International House of Pancakes to establish itself in the United Kingdom. The drive to the Hoover Dam was fine, although of course it was very busy when we arrived there. The size of it, and reading a lot of the information at the visitors centre, one can appreciate just how incredible a feat of engineering it really is. Sixteen tons of cement dropped every ninety seconds for two years!!! Wow. We stood and gawped with the masses for some time, but the siren song of Las Vegas was calling us, and so we set off again.

Traffic was busy, and I know that it took a few hours, but it seemed like no time at all that we were hanging a right on to the Strip, and driving past all of the sights and sounds that we knew so well.

We had arrived.

TO BE CONTINUED

Road Trip: Colorado to Nevada, Part 1

Fort Collins had been a lovely stop for both of us, but we were both eager to get on the road to Las Vegas, and our proposed stop for the day was Grand Junction - no short distance from Fort Collins. After a hasty breakfast and a quick jaunt on the internet to book something very special for the end of our time in Las Vegas we were on the road south to Denver again.

The changes as we were driving through Colorado were sometimes abrupt; one minute we were headed towards this city sprawl, a sudden right turn to get on to the interstate that we wanted and we were going past mining areas; ten minutes more and we were headed uphill, uphill, uphill... The scenery was quite literally breathtaking at times - mind you, the altitude that we were at might have had something to do with that impression. At the highest point that was marked with a sign, we were at 11,000 feet above sea level, and at that point we noticed that the car was struggling to do over 40mph; for a moment we were very concerned, but then looking around we noticed that many other drivers seemed to be having similar difficulties.

Winding our way along with the Colorado River, me frequently nervous about cliff faces and Dave frequently moaning about not having the opportunity or time to go rafting, we saw so many amazing rock formations and areas of natural beauty that it made me wonder why I had never ventured into the USA before. Already we had seen so many amazing and wonderful things on the trip, that I knew (sadly) I would never be able to remember them all, and yet there was still so much before us.

Grand Junction was a great place to stop at for the night, not far from the border with Utah, not least because we had had a long drive that day (over 300 miles). Once again we were blessed as the motel had a restaurant (meat loaf, mashed potatoes, beans and gravy, served with their 'famous' - and delicious - flowerpot loaf), and breakfast was included in the cost of staying at the motel too. We were exceptionally lucky the next morning too, as shortly after breakfast the power went off in the area. From our room we could see people wandering around the street outside to different gas stations, trying all of them to see if they had power, and looking increasingly confused when the answer was "No" every time.

After the previous day's wonderful scenery, we were really just looking forward to making our way to Bluff, Utah, our proposed stopover point for the night, We thought that desert driving would be pretty, sure, but nothing compared to the wonderful mountains and rivers of Colorado. How wrong we were...

The deserts of Utah, long hot roads and incredible valleys, were totally different from Colorado, and beautiful, indescribable in comparison to the sights that we had seen the previous day. And Utah had mountains too! And rivers! We were spoiled for choice that day in our drive down to Bluff; the scenery was so spectacular that we cut short our afternoon in Moab so that we could take our time driving from there on.

I don't know which one of us noticed it first, but after a time we noticed some storm clouds ahead. The road veered this way and that, but it soon became clear that we were going to be driving right through the middle of it. Ah well, no matter, it didn't look that bad, not like on the TV with all of the hail. It was, however, to be one of the strangest moments of the trip... Utah is really hot, and the digital readout on the car had been sitting at about 105 degrees since late morning. I happened to glance at it.

"Look Dave, we're down to 95! The cloud cover must be really thick..."
(remember, dear reader, that we had the air-con maxed out here, so we couldn't feel the external temperature)
And a few minutes later, after we had been talking, I happened to glance, did a double take and exclaimed:
"Dude! The gauge is down to 80!"
Dave and I looked at each other, both of us had said only a few days earlier how much we liked The Day After Tomorrow.
And a minute later:
"70!!!"
In the space of ten minutes in total, the temperature gauge dropped over 40 points, eventually settling on 59 degrees for five or ten minutes as we cleared the rest of the cloud cover, before steadily climbing back up. The rain itself wasn't even that heavy, but the incident made quite an impression on us, and was something that we were both still talking about when we got to San Francisco.

Bluff is a lovely town, small, but with a lot to offer. The Desert Rose Inn was not cheap compared to many of the motels that we stopped off at on our journey, but its log cabin style and wonderful setting made it one of the nicest places that we stopped at on the road. Dinner was taken care of by the Cottonwood Steakhouse just up the road, and we felt great at the end of the night.

We slept well and rested up: the next day we would head on into Arizona.

TO BE CONTINUED

New Moon & Eclipse

The second and third books of the Twilight saga took me four days to work my way through, which is a strange way of putting it because at no time did it feel like a chore or hard work to be reading them. Not that the books are "easy to read," as Meyer is doing some quite interesting world-building in her books, mixing a real world setting which jumps out at you as real with supernatural characters that walk off the page just as naturally as the Washington State setting.

Romance is the order of the day, and in case there is someone reading this who hasn't read the books and is spoiler-phobic, I'll try to stick to plot points that don't give too much away. As with Twilight, Meyer continues everything from the first person perspective of Bella, and for the most part this works wonderfully; Bella is a real person, full of passion and emotion and contradiction - she changes her mind, she wants one thing one moment and then the next her mind is in turmoil as she realises what that means. In some ways she is not a very likeable character, and it's to Meyer's credit that you continue to feel so engaged by her heroine.

New Moon and Eclipse build to a love triangle between the lead and her two beaus, Edward and Jacob, who are on opposite sides of a feud started long before Bella was born. This has developed some way in New Moon and by the start of Eclipse you can see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, and know that someone is going to end up hurt, no matter what happens. Running parallel to this, and for my own taste perhaps not shown enough, is a conflict that is brewing all the while; it takes a long time to come to a head, and even then I was left feeling perhaps that not enough was done with the continuing plot thread from Twilight regarding the vampire Victoria. But as I said at the start of the previous paragraph, romance is the order of the day; Meyer doesn't neglect the action and suspense, but you are in no doubt from the start as to where her focus lies.

Books two and three of the Twilight saga in no way diminish from what has gone before in the first book; Eclipse especially is a fantastic read, really drawing you further into the supernatural world that Bella has found herself belonging to. I don't have the fourth part, Breaking Dawn, but I know that I will read it before too long. Given the ending of Eclipse and the plot threads left dangling I have absolutely no idea where the story is going to go, or what is going to happen, but I am sure that it will be an entertaining and interesting read whatever happens.