West Maui Day: 02

I know this seems to be all at once - and there are a bunch of pictures for tomorrow's post - but here are some of the good things from this morning. First off, even though we slept for what seemed like an eternity, it was only 6 a.m. when we finally decided we couldn't sleep anymore. One of the advantages of being this far east. We may be closer to Japan than we are to Ontario right now - but I'm not geographer.

The hotel here is very nice - and we've only seen a small bit of it. Our breakfast buffet was fantastic, full of more than enough choices, and they were all very tasty. Tomorrow we'll have the Ocean-side buffet so we can see the water while we sip on coffee and eat Eggs Benedict.

Not unlike other hotels, there are plenty of nice birds and fish all around that fill the ponds and pools with life. The parrots and cockatoos will say "Hello" without much prompting, but also say "Aloha," which is cute. After breakfast we took a stroll along the beach for a while, and the water was fantastic. We didn't get in, I was carrying a camera and wasn't in my beach shorts, but we sure wanted to. On the right is a nice shot of our footprints in the sand.

This may not be a peak vacationing time, which means that there are lawn chairs still available by the pool even though it's the middle of the day. How nice is to not be caught up in the crowds while you're on vacation. No lineups (so far) and nobody bumping into you. It's just the way I like it.

West Maui Day: 01

So here are some of the first pictures from our first day of travels on our honeymoon. Now, some of you may not know (or yet realize) that Hawaii is far from Toronto. Travel is like kryptonite to me and it basically will kill me if I spend too long exposed to it. Yesterday, I was almost dead after 20 hours. So it feels good to be alive.

Our first stop in the trip was in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, where I left a small blog post from a terminal in the airport while we had a 3-hour layover. It was an alright spot, and we even had a chance to have some breakfast.

On the right here, you can see my Texas breakfast. My new wife also had the largest Chicken Tenders I'd seen ever. They weren't that good, but it was lucky that there was so much left over, because we were in the 36th row of the airplane, and they'd run out of dinner's to serve by the time it was our chance to eat. We weren't happy with that. We were starving. It made the eight hour flight feel even worse.

So we had the left-over chicken tenders to satisfy us later on.

Flights also seem longer when the in-flight movie is Paul Blart Mall Cop. We mistakenly rented this a few months ago - and it's no better the second time around. Again, travelling slowly kills me, and so do inescapable bad movies. Grooaan.

But when it was all said and done, finding where to go next was no trouble. We were found by someone holding a sign with my name on it who then dowsed us both in flowered necklaces. These are heavier than you'd imagine they are, believe it or not.

Then we easily took a shuttle to where we rented a car from Dollar, and they gave us fine directions to our hotel.

To help you get the feel for where we are, this is a map of Maui, and you can see the airport we flew in to is on the North side of the middle of the island in Kahului. We drove south west from there to arrive on the West Side of Maui at our resort in Ka'anapali where we're staying at the Westin Resort and Spa [2365 Kaanapali Pkwy, Lahaina, HI 96761, (888) 625-4949 room 1053 if you'd like to come visit us. We're here all week!]

Ka'anapali is on the west side of Maui, near the "T" in "West" on the above map. On the drive up to the hotel we took these shots. We have a few photos of the water, but they were taken from a moving car (while I was almost dead from travelling, remember) so they are so great. Then we got our hotel room and slept for 12 hours straight - someone even showed up to deliver champagne - because we're on our honeymoon - and I can hardly remember it. The bucket of champagne on ice is now filled with only water, the bottle completely uncorked (for now).

More updates will follow during my wife's naptime. I'll keep you in the loop. See you all in a few weeks.

Honeymoon starts now

It may have technically began when we left my parents' house at 4 a.m. (EST) on Monday morning - but it actually begins now that we've woken up in our hotel room. We checked into our room around 11:30 p.m. (EST) which was only like 3:30 p.m. here.

then we fell asleep until about 3 in the morning, and slept some more until about 6 a.m. here. So we tried to get some rest with about 12 hours in bed. Now me, I was out cold, had absolutely muddle dreams and I think someone came into our room (sure enough, we not have champagne in a bucket of melted ice waiting for us) and was basically a walking zombie for the last few legs of our trip - I don't travel well.

Anyhow - we've got a breakfast to get to, so I'll leave you with two items. 1) a picture from our balcony of the resort below;

and (2), if the Leafs win while I'm in Hawaii, I guess I'll have to stay in Hawaii until the end of the season to ensure their success. I'll take one for the team.

Also, if you were in attendance at our wedding - drink lots of liquids, get plenty of rest, and have vitamin C while you have the chance. All those people from all over the place all suddenly shaking hands and hugging - don't get the flu!

More Extent promo stuff

See more at www.extenttv.com

Extent promo poster

Just click on this sucka to enlarge it. I'm getting excited about this. Won't be long now before we can start watching this.

Zombie Triceratops

I had this finished ages ago, but for some reason didn't post it.

Here's a Zombie Triceratops:

[Click to enlarge.]

Neat anecdote

The other week I was being set up for a new assignment with In Business magazine when I received a call from my editor, and he had been tipped off that I like dinosaurs. And it just so happened that they were interested in assigning me the "Dinosauria" human interest piece at the Detroit Zoo - hence why I was at the zoo the other day.


One of the features at Dinosauria is an actual paleontologist named "Paleo Joe" or, by his parents, Joe Kchodl. Joe happens to be an expert on marine invertebrates, particularly the trilobite, but recently he has helped uncover an enormous bonebed in Utah that has been unearthing a tremendous amount of animals. And I've had the chance to interview him. That's cool.

The trilobites are my area of expertise, however since I discovered the camarasaurus I’ve been doing a great deal of study on him, so kind of like a dual specialty. [...] And we actually in that one site last year and this year discovered an apatasaurus, a brachiosaurus, barosaurus, all of those are sauropods, in one formation. To find that many sauropods in one location within maybe about 100 yards of each other, that tells us that area back them must have been fairly decent as far as vegetation goes, a great habitat for them. Otherwise, these guys ate tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of food. Well, to have that many in one location, seems to tell us that the area was quite hospitable to sauropods. [...] [They're from] the Jurassic and middle-Jurassic period, and we actually have found an allosaurus as well, and we found a carnotaurus, too. So we do have some meat-eaters that were in the area, and we believe we’ve found a stegosaurus, as well. It’s a fantastic site, it’s going to be a rich dinosaur national site in Utah. It’s the Hanksville Burpee site.

Pretty neat, eh? I got to interview a straight-up paleontologist, rather serendipitously, while working on another project.