Christmas is Cancelled

This post should be coming to you from a riverboat cruising down the Rhine river in Germany. But, as you've probably guessed, it's not.

We had a 4-day Romantic Rhine Cruise booked, which was supposed to begin on the Sunday before Christmas Day - including stops at Christmas markets in gorgeous German villages, a European-style Christmas Eve feast, plus a traditional English-style 5-course Christmas Dinner the next day! This had been booked for quite some time, but Bec started getting worried when our promised itinerary and tickets still hadn't arrived with a week to go.

Then the tickets did finally arrive on Tuesday, but only thanks to some outstanding Christmas Spirit from one of our neighbours. The tour operator had completely mangled our home address, omitting our house number completely! Luckily the random recipient, Barbara in Number One, was kind enough to call up the tour company and find out where it was supposed to get delivered.

Our relief was short-lived though, with Bec receiving a phone call from them on Thursday with bad news. Apparently the boat was having "some technical problems" which meant that while the "cruise" would still go ahead, there was a strong chance that the boat would remain moored in the same spot for the duration!

Finally, on Saturday, a chat with a friendly taxi driver alerted us to the fact that the tour company had actually gone into receivership the day before! Sure enough, later that day we got a call confirming that our cruise was cancelled. We would get all our money back, but a quick scout around t'Internet showed us that even the most last-minute of the last-minute holiday deals weren't going to help us this side of Christmas.

So Christmas this year for us will be with Johnny's Granny again in Kent, just like last year. And that's certainly not a bad thing - it should be lovely, relaxing, cosy - and maybe, just maybe white!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone, have a fantastic festive season and a great 2008!

Toy Time - Being Car(bon) Neutral

As of last week, we are now a zero-car household. Being in London, there is just no practical need to have a car, let alone two! The Tube, for all the criticism levelled at it (crowded, tiring, at times unreliable) is still an absolutely amazing network that gets the job done. And we haven't even scratched the surface of the bus system.

Gertie the Golf was sold very quickly to a family friend while we were living with Johnny's Granny in Kent. For £300 - exactly the same as she was bought for! In fact, thanks to an insurance cashback deal and a refund on cancellation, she actually made £7! John will retain very fond memories of that car; puny engine, vague steering and weak brakes included. When a car's abilities are very limited, even the tamest English country road becomes a driving challenge, which Johnny loves. Bec only drove her once, which was apparently quite enough - her memories are not so fond.

Beatrice the BMW was more challenging to sell, as we were wanting ten times as much for her. With Bec's extended daily commute and several lengthy road-trips, her mileage was high and although she was still fabulous to drive, she'd had some technical problems - all fixed of course. A stint on eBay was unsuccessful, but at long last a classified ad on AutoTrader got the desired result.

The moral of the story would seem to be "buy cheap, sell cheap", but Gertie was an incredibly lucky find, and would have been horrible to take to France, Scotland, and all over England as we delighted in doing with Bea. She really was Sheer Driving Pleasure. We'll miss her.

Los Angeles

Hmmm. The less we say about Los Angeles the better. So here are some pictures of the best of it, with the shortest possible comments we can manage:

Day 1: Disneyland®. Here's Bec in front of the (surprisingly tiny) Sleeping Beauty Castle™:


Space Mountain™ is probably the coolest thing in Disneyland®, which means it's probably one of the best things in L.A. When a dated 80's ride which mostly takes place in pitch darkness is considerably more enjoyable than an entire city, that city needs to take a good hard look at itself...


Teacups™. Fun.



The Big Parade™. More teacups™:



Day 2: Universal Studios®. Spidey™ tries to activate Bec's WebShooter™, forgetting that neither of them actually has one:



Getting some ogre-love from Shrek™. (He's the one in the middle):



Day 3: A grind through various unsightly, overcrowded freeways, peering at smog-encrusted, distant "sights" of dubious interest. Oops, sorry, a guided tour of Los Angeles.

Bec discovers Johnny Depp's excitingly-large hand prints at Grauman's® Chinese Theatre™:



Bec discovers Hollywood™'s disappointingly-small letters are extremely hard to get close to:

Viva Las Vegas - Part 2

Returning back to Las Vegas, we checked into The Stratosphere, a Hotel/Casino complex at the absolute northernmost point on The Strip. Compared with Mandalay Bay (which is the southernmost hotel), things were decidedly lower-rent, so we didn't hang around long before heading southwards to wage an assault on previously-unexplored casinos. Bec had picked up a "free gaming" voucher for one of them, so we made our way past the Bellagio Fountains (good):


... and the strip-show touts (bad) to the Monte Carlo, a fairly middle-of-the-road place. But that was the scene of our Great Gambling Turnaround, as we converted our ten virtual dollars into twenty real ones. Johnny became obsessed with the "free money" potential of the various "Club Membership" schemes offered by the casinos - almost all of them offer a similar voucher upon joining - and converted ten virtual Monte Carlo dollars into real ones, before we headed back out to some of the most exorbitant places on The Strip.

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur now, as the free drinks took hold and the gambling euphoria escalated. We had dinner in Paris, where we were amused by the waitress asking if we'd like to be seated "inside or out?":


We also took in the amazing Venetian, entering via the completely unnecessary travelator through a replica of the Rialto bridge. There on the second floor (yes, the second floor!) is an indoor canal with gondoliers, bridges, Venetian architecture and the same amazing sky painted on the ceiling as we'd seen in Paris:


Of course, no trip to Vegas is complete without a visit to Caesar's Palace, arguably the hotel/casino that started the opulence arms-race which is driving all the hotels to ever-greater levels of lunacy:


After also passing through the Sahara (where Johnny is now also a member!), we finished the night back at the Strat, where the (very cheap) Pontoon table was very kind to us, guaranteeing that we would leave Las Vegas in almost the same financial position as when we had arrived. But with considerably more toxins in our livers...