Category: Travel

Well its close to 5am, Ive been drinking a few beers, eating some pizza and
playing a lot of halo 2 (Cat: I need a weapon). Im horribly bad at halo,
laurels brothers keep wasting me, even though they are trying to be nice and
let me win. But its a lot of fun.
My bodyclock is fully messed up, im waking up at about 11am, going to be
round 3 or 4am .. ill have to try sleeping round 10pm tomorrow, see if that
can get it back in sync.
St Patricks day here tomorrow, so that will be interesting, I’ll do an
update afterwards

I think we will be going to frys today … which is kind like dick smith but
about a million times better. So that should be fun, but now it must be time
for breakfast.

Well we made it to LA .. yesterday actually, but I was too busy eating
mexican food and sleeping to write anything. We are here for Laurels
Grandma’s memorial service, plus a little bit of a break.
The flight was ok, but if I see Bridget Jones : The edge of reason, one more
time I think I will go insane.
Not sure what the plan is today, but you can be fairly sure if im involved
there will be donuts at some point. Speaking of which it must be time for
breakfast.

Well back to the only slightly cooler Wellington, with a lightly sunburnt
neck. Sydney was fun, but I’m glad to be back home again with Laurel and the
pets.

Well its taking a bit longer than usual to get back my body back into NZ
time, either its being away for a month and fully getting used to the US
timezones or im just getting
old thats the cause. Consequently I havent been hugely productive the last
few days. I think i’ll just call this week a right off and start fresh next
monday. I’ll just do some more reading today to try and catch up so I
can get right into it next week.

I added 2 more states to my list of visited states this year, no new
countries though, its still the same

We spent the morning talking with Laurels grandma and great aunt. Then after
lunch we headed off towards Joshua Tree, about halfway there we decided to
head into Palm springs to spend the last real night of the honeymoon
somewhere fancy. And fancy it is, I think us two are probably the only 2
guests in this fancy Hyatt hotel that havent had ‘work’. We are staying in
Indian Wells, right by where the play the tennis and just down the road from
Arnold Palmers private golf course.
We went to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner courtesy of Joe. YUM

Tomorrow we are off to Joshua Tree park and to the Meerkat farm, should be
tons of fun, then sunday we start on our way home. We wont arrive back till
tuesday sometime (nz time).

17256 steps since day 7.

After an earlyish start we headed off to Morengo valley to visit with the
Meerkats. We stopped at the Funky Monkey cafe for breakfast which was
suprisingly good. After that we had a little while to kill so decided to
take a little nap and then we drove out the unpaved road to where the
Meerkat sanctuary is.
Its a fantastic place well worth visiting. They only have meerkats that
other zoos have had problems with, they dont breed them just provide a home
for ones that have no where else to go. As well as the meerkats there were 2
super friendly dogs and a bantam rooster that thought it was a dog. Im
pretty sure there was a cat around too. The money we donated will be used to
buy some more galvanised steel mesh for cages.
After feeding meerkats and talking and generally having a fantastic time we
hit the road back towards Fullerton, CA. About halfway there Laurel yelled
out “holy shit” and I looked up just in time to see a car flip over 2 times
and stop. Laurel thinks it rolled at least 8 times in total. We slapped on
the hazard lights and pulled off to see if we could help. Laurel grabbed a
blanket and we tried to see if we could get across the freeway to help. But
it was 6 lanes with a lot of traffic, so as soon as I saw the driver crawl
out, we decided to stay on our side and wait for the police to arrive. Once
they did we figured we should drive off before someone tailended us. Scary
as hell but at least the guy walked away from it.

We got back to Fullerton and watched some baseball and an odd movie, then
hit the hay.