Viva Los Angeles (Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016)

We have decided to fly into Los Angeles a day early.  We have learned from past travel that if we arrive a day early into our departure city, we get a good nights sleep before taking off on the long flight ahead of us.  It helps us immensely with our adjustment to the new timezone and the confusion that is likely to occur on the other end.

I entitled this post Viva Los Angeles, because while we were in Lake Havasu City a few weeks ago, they were experiencing a lot of seismic activity in the Salton Sea area of California.  This is the area where the San Andreas Fault meets with many other faults, and is an area of great concern when any of those faults become active. 

From October 1st to October 4th, the City of Los Angeles, and all of the surrounding cities were on earthquake alert. According to the news in Havasu, an earthquake has not occurred in that area for around 300 years, and do to this increase in in seismic activity, they raised the chances of an earthquake from 1 in 6000 to 1 in 100.   But after a few days, the seismic activity slowed down, and we haven't heard any more about it since we returned home, so I guess the countdown continues.  And as far as we know LA is still in tact!

Steve's parents drove us to the airport and we went in to the counter to check our bags.  They have a new process, where you have to log into machines and print out your own luggage tags. It's really easy, and saves a lot of time at the counter.  It was just confusing today because no one knew about it, so everyone went to the counter and got turned away to go get their luggage tags before they could return to the counter.

When we got off the DIA train between the main terminal and concourse C, we noticed a man who looked very lost, so we approached him and asked if we could help. He showed us his ticket which said he was on flight 1404 to Houston, so we took him over to the departures sign to help him find his gate and to our surprise his flight didn't show up on the board.  So we looked more closely at his ticket to make sure he didn't have the wrong day.  He had the right day, and his ticket said gate C25, so we walked him over to that gate to see what we could find out.  

As we were walking, we asked him where he was from as he said Chihuahua, Mexico.  He was on his way home.  When we got to gate C25, they affirmed that we had him at the right gate, so we left him there to wait for his flight.  He was so appreciative of our help, and we are just hoping that if we get that lost on our journey someone will have mercy on us and help us out as well. 

As we headed to find our own gate, we noticed that there was a new restaurant on the C concourse.  It was called Tamales by La Casita. 



We ordered a tamale plate and a steak burrito bowl.  They were both good, but the tamale plate was amazing, and it was only $6.75. They had even smothered the tamales with green chili for us at no extra charge.  We loved it!  We'll have to remember this place for our next trip through DIA.

What's left of the tamale plate.  It was great!

We got our order to go and and filled our water bottle in the airport after we got through security, it's a good thing we did.  The flight was so rough that they were never able to do the in-flight service, so we never got any snacks or drinks for the whole flight.  

I'm sure everyone around us hated us as we ate our Mexican food and drank our water on the plane, but we were very happy to have it.

We left Denver at noon and landed in LA at about 1:30 pm and caught the shuttle to our hotel.  We took a short walk and then enjoyed a Tecate by the pool as we tried to make this day in LA count as the start of our vacation.



When dinner time rolled around we decided we just wanted something easy, so we walked around the corner to the Sizzler Steak House.  

As we were walking over, we noticed a truck parked on the street and Steve said "That truck was there last November when we were here."  We thought that was kind of strange, so we took a picture. We'll see if it's still here next year.

It's a pretty memorable looking truck

When we got to the restaurant, we each ordered the salad bar.  We didn't set our expectations very high, but were pleasantly surprised. They had a really nice salad bar with a large variety of items as well as a lot of pre-made salads.

Salads we made from the salad bar

Pre-made Sweet potato pomegranate salad, Yum!

They brought us garlic toast to go with our salads, and kept clean plates and soup bowls coming.  They also had a soft serve ice cream bar for dessert.  

We're not usually big buffet people, but the salad bar really hit the spot tonight.  

When we got back to the hotel, we took a quick dip in the hot tub and then went back to our room to watch the Country Music Awards and the final game of the world series on TV.  We had to keep flipping back and forth so we wouldn't miss anything.  Right now the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians are tied at 6-6 in the 9th inning.  Yikes!

Although this was just a quick stop on our way to Cambodia we really tried to get our vacation started right. Now we'll call it a night and start out early tomorrow morning on the next leg of our journey.

Preparing for Another Trip (Thursday, October 27th, 2016)

We're on our way to Southeast Asia, to visit the countries of Cambodia and Vietnam.  We are very excited to learn about the history and culture of these countries, the food, and of course to spend the time getting to know the people.  

Both of these countries require visas for entry, so the first step was to go get international passport pictures taken.  They are different from U.S. passport pictures, and are much more expensive (very few local places take visa pictures).  Once we had the pictures, we filled out the application for a Vietnamese Visa and sent our passports, applications, passport pictures and self addressed prepaid envelopes to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington DC. It took about 5 days for them to complete our visas, and then they were returned them to us in the mail.  

It was an easy process, but a little unnerving to send away our passports about a month before we would be leaving on our next trip.  When we got our passports back, they contained our Vietnamese Visa that we were praying would be in them.  

The Cambodian Visa's have to be purchased in the airport when we arrive in Cambodia, so hopefully it won't be too long of a process since we arrive in Cambodia late at night.

The next step was getting some money to have on hand when we arrive in the countries.  On Monday, October 24th we went to Wells Fargo and ordered a small amount of foreign currency for both Cambodia and Vietnam.  It usually takes them about three days to get the requested currency in.  
Two days later we received a call from Wells Fargo saying that due to the volatility of the Riel (Cambodian currency) to the U.S. dollar, they were not able to provide us with any Riel.  So we'll just have to take our chances when we get to Cambodia that they'll accept the U.S. dollar, or we can find an ATM when we get there.

One of the things we decided to change in anticipation of this trip is our cellphone.  T-Mobile's One-Plan provides unlimited data and text in 140 countries, which includes Cambodia and (we think) Vietnam, and calls from those countries are only 20 cents per minute, so we decided to give them a try.  

Instead of completely switching over to T-Mobile, we decided to buy service on just one phone, so that we could try T-Mobile out in all of the places where we spend time and see if it is comparable to Verizon.  So far, T-Mobiles coverage is not very good in Lake Havasu City or Red Feather Lakes, where we spend a lot of time, so it has been disappointing to say the least.  

Last time we were in Lake Havasu, we went in to the T-Mobile store and asked them about the questionable service, and they said that they are in the process of upgrading all of their cell towers in Lake Havasu so the service would be better by the end of the year, but only for I-Phone 6 or newer.  So we'll have to see next time we're down there. 

One thing we learned by visiting the Lake Havasu store is that all of the T-Mobile stores are independently owned, which helps to explain why we get inconsistent answers from different stores. 

Over the last two days while I have been working, Steve visited two different T-Mobile stores to make sure that our service plan would for sure cover us while we are on our trip, and both of the stores told him that he would only be covered if he bought the "Stateside" plan, so after the previous discussions with them that he was told he would be covered under their "One-Plan", he ended up buying the "Stateside" plan that they said he needed for an extra $15 per month.

When he got home, he was still confused, so he pulled up T-Mobile's plans on their website, and the website said that the "Stateside" plan is for people in the U. S. that need to call people in foreign countries.  This is not what we need.  We need to call people in the U. S. from the foreign countries we are visiting.  So now we were even more confused.

We decided to give T-Mobile a call.  He reached an agent named Christine, who talked through the plan with us in great detail.  She assured us that what we had read on the website was correct, and that we did not need the "Stateside" plan.  She said that we would have free unlimited data and text from Cambodia and Vietnam, and that calls would cost us 20 cents per minute with the "One-Plan". She also said that she would cancel the "Stateside" plan that the guys at the store told us we needed.  She did an excellent job of explaining our plan to us, so we are now quite confident that our plan will cover us in those countries.  She also gave us a code for turning roaming on and off as we enter and leave those countries.

Trying to figure out phones in foreign countries is never easy, but we're hoping that we finally have what we need for the trip ahead.  

We'll check back after our trip and let you know about the currency and the phone.

House Warming Party (Saturday, October 22nd, 2016)

Our oldest daughter and her husband are throwing their house warming party today, so we are very excited to head to Colorado Springs and enjoy a fun day! 

We decided to head out a little bit early and take the back roads since it is such a gorgeous day.  This has been an unusually warm fall, with so many beautiful days.  We have only had one frost so far, and no snow at all, which is very unusual.

As we left the Denver area, we headed out through the little town of Sedalia, and into the Perry Park area.  There we found this beautiful little spot to pull off and enjoy our lunch.  It was so serene and peaceful!

 When we got to the kids house, we were the first ones there because we had a few things we still had to help them put together. But once our work was done, we got changed and ready for a really fun party. It wasn't a huge party, just the right size with close family and friends.

After everyone had left, the kids took a few minutes to open the present that they got from our youngest daughter, who couldn't be there.  She gave them a beautiful hand-made gift, directly from the heart.

On the back, it listed all of the important dates from building their house.  What a great way to remember all of the details.

We all enjoyed great weather and even better conversations on this perfect house warming day.  We're so happy for both of them as they continue their lives together in their beautiful home.

CSU Hockey (Friday, October 21st, 2016)

Our youngest daughter's boyfriend plays hockey for the Colorado State University Rams, so we enjoy going to his games whenever we can.  Their game tonight was an away game against the University of Northern Colorado at the Greeley Ice Haus.  His parents, and some of his old high school friends all came to watch his game, so it was a fun night for him!

This great statue is outside of the ice haus

 We made plans ahead of time with our youngest daughter to meet her up there and spend some time with her.  One of her CSU friends is the goalies girlfriend, so they drove to Greeley together.

warm-ups

The players are getting ready to head onto the ice

One of our nieces goes to UNC, so she left home-coming early and met us at the rink for the game.

The UNC Bears were doing a special breast cancer awareness game, so they were all in pink, and dedicated their game to many breast cancer survivors who were in the audience.

A little celebration by CSU after their first goal

A blocked shot by the CSU goalie

Our niece and our youngest daughter

CSU's second goal!

The inevitable fight, when you're playing your rival school

Looks like it's going to be a win for the Rams

In the end, it was a win for the CSU Rams!

What a great night for hockey!  We had such a fun time hanging out with our daughter, her friends, and all of her boyfriend's family and friends.  And we're especially glad we were able to capture a few of the moments that made this night so special!