Trips to LA and Florida
17 June 2002
It's Summer here which for us means fog pressed against the windows in the morning and hot sun once we walk down to sea-level. It's also the season when the new anesthesia trainees start at UCSF so come the first of July I'll be very busy at work as they are given one-on-one supervision for the first month which means a shortage of attendings (like me). A month of one-on-one seems a little rough compared to the year of supervision I had at Geelong Hospital as a first-year registrar.
At the start of May we visited Los Angeles for the weekend as we had promised months earlier that we would come and stay at the house at Topanga Canyon where Richard, from whom we rent, lives. We flew down and rented a car to get around.
They didn't have what we reserved so we got the local equivalent of a Mitsubishi Pajero ("Montero" here) which had the size and handling of a boat.
We stayed with Richard and Alfredo and were kept busy seeing Spiderman which had just opened and visiting Gold's Gym in both Venice and Hollywood. We also were invited to visit friends we had met on the cruise in January, Bruce and Billy, who had a pool party on Saturday afternoon at their house in Beverly Hills:
Two weeks later we went sailing for the afternoon on San Francisco Bay. It was a birthday surprise for a friend, Sam Peterson. It was sunny but the wind was quite strong so we spent three hours holding onto things on the boat at a 30 degree angle and getting sunburnt:
This was an attempt at a group photo just as the boat tilted a little more sharply. The Bay Bridge is in the background and beyond that Angel Island on the left and Treasure Island (not the R.L.Stevenson one) on the right above Robert. Sam is in front of the middle of the wheelhouse in a red cap.
The following Friday, we went to "Paramount's Great America", a roller-coaster park in San Jose, about 35 miles from San Francisco. Gina and Erica, whom we had met in Palm Springs in March but live in San Francisco, had arranged free tickets for us. We went with Dwain Skinner, one of the anesthesia trainees from UCSF, and Bill Simpson.
Here Dwain is pretending to be tall while we are waiting for a ride on "Invertigo".
There were a lot more roller-coasters in Orlando. We took the first week of June off to visit Florida. We flew into Orlando, a city built on drained land in the middle of the wetlands which seems to exist for no reason other than to service the large number of amusement parks there.
Of the dozen or so major amusement parks in Orlando, we visited Disney's Typhoon Lagoon waterpark, the Magic Kingdom and Universal's Islands of Adventure as well as the kind of open-air shopping malls run by Disney ("Downtown Disney") and Universal. That was enough for us. I may get to visit some of the other parks if I go to the ASA Conference in October.
These sorts of signs are commonplace on the freeways there. I didn't take any pictures at Typhoon Lagoon since the digital camera isn't waterproof, but the next day at the Magic Kingdom we took a few:
Here we are in front of Cinderella's castle from which Tinkerbell flies out at 9:30pm and lights the fireworks. Ther rides here were more for young kids: we went on the spinning teacups and a few others. The following day we went to Universal's Islands of Adventure which had much better rides but was less manicured than Disney.
On Tuesday we drove to the Kennedy Space Center to look at the Space Shuttle before it took off the next day. We weren't allowed very close, but the information displays they had and the 3-D IMAX movie of the International Space Station was very good.
We spent the rest of the week staying by the beach at Fort Lauderdale. There we caught up with a few other people we had met on the cruise. The water was very warm and the beaches were white/grey:
Once I had been back at work a couple of days, however, it was as if I had never left. Windowless operating rooms seem to have that effect.
The next thing coming is visiting Australia in July if my visa paperwork is ready (which seems increasingly unlikely, so failing that, in late August or early September). Meanwhile thank you to those who have e-mailed.
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At the start of May we visited Los Angeles for the weekend as we had promised months earlier that we would come and stay at the house at Topanga Canyon where Richard, from whom we rent, lives. We flew down and rented a car to get around.
They didn't have what we reserved so we got the local equivalent of a Mitsubishi Pajero ("Montero" here) which had the size and handling of a boat.
We stayed with Richard and Alfredo and were kept busy seeing Spiderman which had just opened and visiting Gold's Gym in both Venice and Hollywood. We also were invited to visit friends we had met on the cruise in January, Bruce and Billy, who had a pool party on Saturday afternoon at their house in Beverly Hills:
Two weeks later we went sailing for the afternoon on San Francisco Bay. It was a birthday surprise for a friend, Sam Peterson. It was sunny but the wind was quite strong so we spent three hours holding onto things on the boat at a 30 degree angle and getting sunburnt:
This was an attempt at a group photo just as the boat tilted a little more sharply. The Bay Bridge is in the background and beyond that Angel Island on the left and Treasure Island (not the R.L.Stevenson one) on the right above Robert. Sam is in front of the middle of the wheelhouse in a red cap.
The following Friday, we went to "Paramount's Great America", a roller-coaster park in San Jose, about 35 miles from San Francisco. Gina and Erica, whom we had met in Palm Springs in March but live in San Francisco, had arranged free tickets for us. We went with Dwain Skinner, one of the anesthesia trainees from UCSF, and Bill Simpson.
Here Dwain is pretending to be tall while we are waiting for a ride on "Invertigo".
There were a lot more roller-coasters in Orlando. We took the first week of June off to visit Florida. We flew into Orlando, a city built on drained land in the middle of the wetlands which seems to exist for no reason other than to service the large number of amusement parks there.
Of the dozen or so major amusement parks in Orlando, we visited Disney's Typhoon Lagoon waterpark, the Magic Kingdom and Universal's Islands of Adventure as well as the kind of open-air shopping malls run by Disney ("Downtown Disney") and Universal. That was enough for us. I may get to visit some of the other parks if I go to the ASA Conference in October.
These sorts of signs are commonplace on the freeways there. I didn't take any pictures at Typhoon Lagoon since the digital camera isn't waterproof, but the next day at the Magic Kingdom we took a few:
Here we are in front of Cinderella's castle from which Tinkerbell flies out at 9:30pm and lights the fireworks. Ther rides here were more for young kids: we went on the spinning teacups and a few others. The following day we went to Universal's Islands of Adventure which had much better rides but was less manicured than Disney.
On Tuesday we drove to the Kennedy Space Center to look at the Space Shuttle before it took off the next day. We weren't allowed very close, but the information displays they had and the 3-D IMAX movie of the International Space Station was very good.
We spent the rest of the week staying by the beach at Fort Lauderdale. There we caught up with a few other people we had met on the cruise. The water was very warm and the beaches were white/grey:
Once I had been back at work a couple of days, however, it was as if I had never left. Windowless operating rooms seem to have that effect.
The next thing coming is visiting Australia in July if my visa paperwork is ready (which seems increasingly unlikely, so failing that, in late August or early September). Meanwhile thank you to those who have e-mailed.
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