Thursday 30 January 2014

The fridge says it all...


2013 comes to a close, and doesn’t my fridge know it… 

So now that we’re well into January and hopefully all recovered from the “New Year, New You” marketing ploys (and instead have focused on Cadbury’s Crème Eggs being 3 for £1 in Tesco) I thought I’d take this opportunity to reflect on 2013 and look forward to my next post… The Vegas.

2013 saw me hit my 40-flight record. If you asked me to list all those flights (please don’t) I’m pretty sure I’d struggle, but my fridge sums it up quite nicely…





As you may know, I have a friend who works for an airline (I told you I hadn’t slept with a pilot. I also have a friend who works for Formula One. Between us, we had a competition of who would bank the most flights. I came in second; Mr F1 came in first (with 46 flights so far and two more to squeeze in before NYE) and, alarmingly, the one who actually works on the sodding things (planes) was way behind. She also gets ‘mini holidays’ each time she travels, but enough about that as it’ll depress us all.

This is more of a cathartic experience for me really, but whilst I’m at it I thought I’d give you the run down of my highlights and lowlights, as I appreciate that I haven’t, at most times, been keeping this blogging malarkey up-to-date.



Vegas – January, 2013:





As much as I hate Las Vegas (I find it soulless, involving very long days working and in meetings, and I have little-to-no interest/attention span/patience for gambling or neon lights), I also am quite intrigued by the place. I met Danny DeVito there in 2013, which certainly helped my spirits as he was lovely. Back in January, I made a promise to myself on the flight over, that I’d try to embrace the spirit of the place…

… This lasted all of about six minutes because the turbulence was horrible and I swear my fellow passengers started eyeing up my thighs as we passed over Greenland, but I suppose I can’t blame Vegas for that.





The first thing you’ll notice when you land in Vegas is the slot machines. This should come as no surprise. They’re in the arrivals hall of the airport, before you even reach Customs. Pretty much everywhere you want to go in Las Vegas will involve you walking through a Casino before you get there. All of the major hotels have Casinos on the way in. Some have nicer carpet than others (this is how I judge the gravitas of a place).

If you go to Vegas on holiday and are on a budget, I’d recommend staying in Circus Circus or Excalibur. If you're not on a budget, then the sky’s the limit really. Mr Wynn has done a fantastic job on the place, which has resulted in Las Vegas becoming a mix of the very tacky and the very classy, with hotels such as the Aria, Cosmopolitan, Wynn and Encore all giving off a very modern feel alongside the ol’ classics such as the Bellagio, New York/New York, the Venetian and Paris.

(By the way, I’ve been to the real Venice, Paris and New York, and the Vegas counterparts aren’t far off, but I highly recommend the real thing if you actually want some culture).



I’ve recently returned from Las Vegas again (I liked it slightly more this time too, which is hopeful) and stayed at the Luxor. You can read all about it (the trip, not just the pyramid hotel with a laser shining out the top of it that costs $2,000,000 a year to light!) just as soon as I've written a post about it.



Berlin – I can’t remember when, 2013: 

With work, I often don’t get to see the actual place that I’m visiting (I could give you an in-depth review of about 70 different hotel rooms though, if you’re interested) so a while back I got into the habit of getting up early each morning and running to a landmark nearby. This enthusiasm usually only lasts a few days, however, as after the work really kicks in it’s practically impossible to fit anything else in (when you go to bed at 3am the last thing you want to do is wake up at 6am to jog to Brandenburg Gate… I did it though. See below):





San Diego – January, 2013:

California is my favourite State in America, without question. I think I’m fairly OK to make this statement as I’ve been to about 30 States all in all, but California really ticks all the boxes for me. As a massive sweeping statement, I find that the people on the west coast seem to be more laid back than those on the east coast, the food is pretty good and the weather always seems to be sunny. Except in San Francisco in my experience (the weather, not the people), but then San Francisco is by far the greatest city in California so we can forgive it a little.

Anyway, this is about San Diego…

I stay in the Ocean Beach area at a ridiculously twee B&B called Elsbree House. The owners are lovely – It was my second stay this year and they left me flowers to welcome me back (they even spelled my name right, so they’ve practically adopted me now).



 
They also made me packed lunch if I missed breakfast (a regular occurrence, don’t tell my mum). Nice touch.




And they laughed at me when I got a parking ticket (for being parked the “wrong way round” on the street – ridiculous rule) chortling, “it’s because they can park anywhere in Italy!” – I’m still none the wiser on this one.

Ocean Beach is, you guessed it, on the beach and is a good place to do a bit of people watching and work with a nice view. The Gas Light District is great for eats and drinks. San Diego is also only about a 3-4 hour drive from Big Bear mountain range, so if you’re into this sort of thing (which I am), you can go skiing. It’s not as impressive or as vast as the Alps, and there are trendy Californian snowboarders EVERYWHERE, but it’s what I know as my “Vegas-Rehab” if you just want to stare at some natural beauty and reassure yourself that all is well in the world.

 


France and Spain – February, 2013: 

So I think, from what I remember, that I spent a lot of February in France and Spain. I went skiing in Courcheval, which is amazingly beautiful. For work reasons, I found myself in La Coruna (one of those work trips, which sees 48 hours of travel for a 20 minute meeting) and Biarritz.

Biarritz is a bit of a surfers’ paradise. I do not surf. I tried it once, but the waves beat me up so much that I found the whole experience thoroughly exhausting (although very funny). The brand I meet out there is very well known for skiing, snowboarding and surfing. I’ve met with their Californian office too and was invited to go surfing with them one lunchtime, but politely declined on the basis that we’d probably lose their business (and my upper arm strength) forever.

I just remembered that I went to Austria and Munich too in February, but not a lot happened from what I recall, although Munich was beautiful and I’d love to go back on holiday some time.



Jersey – March 2013 

I’d never been to Jersey before, but my friend was working over there for Easter weekend and asked if I wanted to join her and I did so I did. Just a short flight (about an hour) from London Gatwick, one of the pilots on the flight took great joy in telling me that the runway is about 300 metres shorter than most others. 

I found that what Jersey mostly had to offer were cows (and all their lovely produce), potatoes, seafood and a very pretty town. We arrived on Good Friday and decided to head out for a few drinks... Only to be told quite quickly that it’s illegal to play music on Good Friday so it’d all be fairly low key until midnight.

Once we’d gotten all the Footloose jokes out of our system, we headed to a local bar and, much to our amusement, at 11.59pm, we experienced some sort of New Year’s Eve style countdown to which the DJ played, in amongst a sea of dry ice and Bacardi Breezers, C&C Music's "Everybody Dance Now!", which goes down as one of my top 10 funniest moments of 2013. Particularly when shortly after this outburst he announced that the bar would be closing at 12.20am. Brilliant.





May/June 2013 – China and Hong Kong 

I make no secret on here that I’m not a massive fan of China, but that I do love Hong Kong. I need to give China some credit though… I only ever go there for work and I never see any of, what I’m sure it must have (statistically, given the land mass if nothing else), the nice bits.

I’ve written a few posts about China and Hong Kong before so I’ll leave you to sift through those if you really want to. But, in short, I think that Hong Kong is like the Jetsons. If a car flew past up above, I doubt you’d do a double take. China is grey and smoggy. Hong Kong is grey and smoggy too, but they have shiny lights and lasers to distract the tourists.

My ramblings about China and Hong Kong can be found here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. Good luck with that.



July 2013 – Dominican Republic 

So this was a holiday with my beloved, which opened up the “every day’s a holiday” can of worms with my friends, but it honestly was our first holiday together, just the two of us, for over three years.


I obviously enjoy travelling or else I wouldn’t be keen to do it so much, but it does take it out of you (jet lag, loneliness, lots of meetings…) and although it sometimes sounds quite glamourous, it often isn’t and really just involves sitting on a plane for some hours before you get to a meeting and then pass out in a hotel and then sit on a different plane for some hours and then drive home.

I’ve said this before, but if you start to think of it as just a really long commute to work, it helps to paint a picture of the reality. That said, I know that I’d go insane if I was chained to a desk every day and for that reason, this isn’t by any means a moan. I generally like what I do.

I found the Dominican to be really quite beautiful and really quite Caribbean. This was my ignorance, but I didn’t realise how close (actually attached) it was to Haiti.





The difference between the two countries is immense and speaking to the locals (which I try to do always) there’s definitely a sense of divide between the two. A local man told me that if the Haitians want work, they go to the Dominican to get it. If the Dominicans want work, they go to Miami.

We spent much of our two weeks in the Dominican not moving. My other half locked my phone in the hotel safe and I was only allowed to look at it once a day. We didn’t have wifi (which, in contrast to some people who break out into a cold sweat if they can’t check Facebook every five minutes, I absolutely loved) and apart from the one moment of terror a couple of days in when I accidentally clicked the Mail app icon on my iPad to reveal 1,000+ emails, I managed to switch off from work pretty successfully.




If you were thinking of going to the Dominican (and yes, I’m aware that this is starting to turn into a bizarre travel guide) then I’d recommend staying in Punta Cana, but getting out to see a few things whilst you’re there. I’d never usually go for the long haul, all-inclusive, sit by the pool type of holiday really (that’s what Spain is for), I much prefer to see the actual country, but as I’d seen enough countries by July 2013 and was well up for some sleep, we treated ourselves to being pretty lazy. We did go to see some local villages and schools though. And spent the day on a floating island they’d made. I’d recommend both.



 (Our Concierge service. Carlos was a touch of a button away from bringing us whatever we desired... Except, being British, that was far too awkward a situation so we just got it ourselves anyway).

 (Our "Swim Up" room in Dreams Resort, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic). 

(If you're thinking of flying Thomson Airlines for the catering, don't). 


Iceland, St Lucia, Sri Lanka 

Towards the end of this year I started to get my arse in gear a little better with regards to uploading blog posts, so if you’re interested in what Iceland, St Lucia and Sri Lanka are like, you can see here and here and here. 

Other than that, my top 5 places to go now include (in order):



1.     Bali

2.     Iceland

3.     San Francisco

4.     Sri Lanka

5.     San Diego


Let’s see what the rest of 2014 brings.

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