Australia - Sydney

If you have to go to a city for vacation - Sydney is a great location. Apparently, Sydney is known as a beach city, but I loved it. Our hotel was near the wharf area, the botanical gardens, harbor bridge and opera house.

I have too many pictures of the Sydney Opera House. We did of tour of the inside - no pictures allowed, but great. Below is a close-up picture of the tiles on the roof of the arches. 1.5 million tiles, especially made for the arches to self clean when it rains.

We also went to the Sydney Zoo - of course the highlight was the animals from down under.

Okay, the giraffes have one of the best views of the harbor with the opera house in the background.

Yes, Priscilla is now a musical. I took my parents. My father even liked it. It is campier than the movie and suppose to come to Los Angeles this summer.

Okay, so we are suckers for a good garden. The fox bats covered many of the trees in the middle of botanical gardens.

I had to put this picture in for Rodney - Shangri-La hotel. Who knew?

Australia - Cairns

We stayed in Cairns to visit the Great Barrier Reef. The resort we stayed in was all of these small huts (nice on the inside) surrounded by lagoons and "jungle."

We visited Aboriginal cultural park learning about native culture and gave my parent a chance to try trowng a spear and boomerang. Okay, it is not as easy as it looks.

We spent a day at the Great Barrier Reef. The highlight for me was going as a small group to the edge of the reef and having a white tipped reef shark swim with me for a little bit.

White tipped reef shark. This is not the picture I took, but I do have two pictures to prove it. ;-)

The marine stingers, jellyfish, were at the beach, so no swimming.

New Zealand

After a week in Australia, we spent a week in New Zealand. Now, I didn't really know that much about New Zealand - except that Lord of the Rings was filmed there.

New Zealand was great. Auckland - ehhh, just a city. But the rest of the country is beautiful with some of the most amazing landscapes I have seen.

The Maori are an amazing people - rich in culture, active and vibrant.

There are more cows and sheep than people in the country. We visited a cow milking farm... New Zealand proves Pizza Hut with most of its cheese and then the old cows end up at McDonalds and Burger King. We also went to an agricultural center and met about 14 different varieties of sheep.

New Zealand is one of the most geothermicly active places on the earth. Below is bubbling mud pits, plumes of steam, and an active geyser.

The tree fern is the national symbol of New Zealand and grows everywhere. The landscape if very lush.

This is mirror lake.

We took a private plane through most of New Zealand. During the trip from the top island to the middle island, you can see many glacier lakes.

Of course, when it is time to land - more sheep.

We did a cruise of Milford Sound. Pictures don't do it justice. You can get an idea of the heights of the walls of the sound from the large boats, that you can bearly see, in the pictures.



From Milford Sound, we flew to Queenstown. Queenstown is full of adventure activities.

The jet boat where we sped along the river where people used to white-water raft.

Then a hellocopter ride to Queenstown and over much of the area where they filmed Lord of the Rings.

In Queenstown, we had to go to the Kiwi center.


After two great weeks, I was back on the plane for the 11 hour flight to Los Angeles. My parents went to Fiji for another week before returning home.

New Year's In Palm Springs

For the second year, the boys have rented a house in Palm Springs for the new year. It is just a great way to end the year and start anew with friends.

Last year, Andy mentioned something about dressing up for New Year’s day and it eventually turned into all of us walking down Palm Canyon – the main street in Palm Springs – in high-heeled shoes. Palm Springs is the largest gay resort in the United States and, amazingly, some people never realize the large gay population that lives there. The heels were a way to raise the level of awareness.

This year, the entire group tromped down Palm Canyon. We were even interviewed by the local news station and on the 6 o’clock news.

I think we were all amazed how many people noticed that we were wearing high-heeled shoes. So they get to see us in Palm Springs and go back to the Midwest and tell their friends. Hopefully, it desensitizes people and normalizes the blur in gender roles in society.

Okay, so we like trying on all of the hats.

Daniel, David and I did a nice hike to the hop of a summit behind the house were were staying in. You can see most of the valley from the summit.

This is one of my favorite pictures of David.