Last month Melanie and I took a weeklong trip to south Florida for Mel’s spring break. After flying into Fort Lauderdale, we stayed in Boca Raton at the Renaissance Hotel the first night. Tired from traveling all day, we started to settle into our room, but we were disturbed by an odd buzzing noise. We searched all over the room for the source before finally concluding it must be coming from an adjacent room. After a while we decided the buzzing was too much to bear, so we went back to the front desk and complained. They very politely gave us a new room, but on the way there we still heard the noise! Fearful that we were going crazy, it finally donned on me that the noise was coming from my suitcase. Immediately I knew what it was; my electric toothbrush had turned on and was making a racket in my bag. Oops.

The next day we hopped in our bright yellow Pontiac G5 coupe (which seemed appropriate for Florida and was actually a pretty nice car, if a little gutless… RIP Pontiac) and headed for the Florida Keys. It’s a fascinating drive. First there’s Miami, filled with huge condo high-rises and crazy traffic, then the suburbs, then open land, then marshes, then the bridges start. Some are short, some are long, and one is seven miles long. They string together the keys all the way to Key West. As is typical with Florida, there are some really beautiful parts to the keys and some really trashy parts, but overall the experience is totally unique. We drove about halfway down the chain and stayed a couple of nights at the Continental Inn, which was a little dated but nice and in a great location. While there we visited the Bahia Honda State Park, which is a beautiful place, and also went to Key West for a sailboat snorkel/kayak tour. The snorkeling wasn’t great, especially with Portuguese Man o’ War in the water, but the kayak trip around a mangrove island was a lot of fun. Key West itself is a huge tourist trap and we didn’t stay long.

After our stay in the keys we headed up to the Everglades National Park. Like most national parks, this was an amazing place. There are many diverse ecosystems, from marsh to swamp to river to lake to hardwood hammocks (islands in the marsh basically), and so much wildlife to see. I’ve seriously seen less animals at a zoo than I did in the everglades: osprey, huge fish, turtles, herons, anhinga, alligators, oh my! Just an amazing place.

After our visit to the Everglades we stayed in a Travelodge in nearby Florida City. It was the quintessential cheap motel experience, but to their credit it was clean. That’s about all than can be said.

For our last night we went 180 degrees from Florida City and stayed at the Highland Beach Holiday Inn, which is in very fancy area near Boca Raton. There we met up with some friends of Melanie’s and spent some time relaxing at the beach and checking out the area. The next day we played some mini-golf and ate PF Chang’s with our friends then headed back home. All in all a great trip!

Check out the photo gallery.

Back in February Melanie and I took a quick trip to Las Vegas. I’ve posted a few pictures to the gallery from this trip. Once again all pictures were taken with the Panasonic DMC-LX3. This is a great little camera.

While there we stayed at the South Point hotel, which is really a great deal if you don’t mind being a 10 minute drive from the strip. The place has nice rooms and fun stuff like a huge bowling alley. We also saw the Titanic exhibit at the Luxor which was simply amazing and is very highly recommended to anyone remotely interested in the Titanic. Well worth whatever it was we paid.

Wow, it really has been a while! I took a bit of a hiatus from Seansense, but I’m back. I’m working on quite a few updates about the various things I’ve been up to for the last few months, but I thought I’d start here since it’s simple. Back in March, Melanie and I needed a quick escape so we took a road trip to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. I only took a few photos, but I think they turned out pretty well. All are handheld with my Panasonic DMC-LX3. Gotta love 24mm and f/2.0 in a cave! Check out the gallery.

A few weeks ago, my job gave me an incredible opportunity: Travel solo halfway around the world to meet with a customer in Israel. The catch? The meetings would last just two days. If I wanted to stay longer it would be out of pocket. Since brining Mel along was not financially plausible, I decided to go ahead and set a personal time-distance record: 16,000 miles over 5 days.

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Back in July, Melanie and I went on an awesome camping trip with Marc to Montana De Oro State Park, near San Luis Obispo, CA. The park has a normal campground, but we opted for one of the “environmental” campsites. Instead of being packed together in a typical campground loop, the four environmental sites are spread throughout the park. Our particular site involved parking at the bottom of a hill and hiking 1/2 mile up a dirt road. Once there the site had a very clean pit toilet, a nice picnic table, and plenty of space to spread out. It also had a sweeping 360-degree view of the ocean and surrounding hills. Notably absent from the view were other people; unless you were looking through binoculars, you couldn’t see anyone else. We literally had a whole hill to ourselves. It was wonderful!

We camped for two nights, spending a lot of time soaking in the view and enjoying nature. We also went for a great hike along the coast on land owned by PG&E for the adjacent Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. (Pleasant name, eh?) The PG&E folks were very nice; they simply asked that we signed in and out and agreed to stay on the trail unless we wanted to get shot at. Sounds like a good deal to me! The rugged coastline is amazingly beautiful. None of my pictures do justice to the place, which really must be experienced in person.

We also found time to entertain ourselves with kites. See the photo gallery for a play-by-play account. While we mainly fed on the mountain of food we packed up the hill from our cars, we also headed over to Los Osos for a great burger at a little place called Sylvester’s. If you like a good burger and are in the area, you’ll love this place.

Overall the trip was a blast; I came home wishing I could spend more time out in nature enjoying the beauty of it all. It also renewed my interest in backpacking; I’d really like to do a big backpacking trip one of these days. I think it would be a great experience.

Click on the picture above for the full gallery.

Melanie and I save up all year to take one annual “big vacation”, and this year we decided to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. This was our third trip to Hawaii together (we’ve also been to Kauai and Maui). What can I say? The place is addictive! The fact that we had a free ticket thanks to frequent flier miles sealed the deal.

We stayed in an awesome condo at the Fairway Villas in the Waikoloa Resort area north of Kailua-Kona. This turned out to be an excellent location, as just 20 miles south in Kona the weather was not nearly as nice and suffered more from the vog. The area also had some awesome beaches, our favorite being Waialea Bay just up the road. The sand was nice, the water calm, and the snorkeling excellent. We liked it so much we’d get up early in the morning just to be among the first to arrive. One morning we had it all to ourselves for a while. Paradise!

We also went on a helicopter ride from Hilo over the volcano. We opted for the “doors off” flight, which was wonderful if not a little windy and cold. It made for some excellent photos and video and was quite exhilarating.

The big island certainly is big; it’s over 220 miles to drive all the way around. We did a lot of driving and saw a lot while we were there, but really we just scratched the surface. There was a ton of stuff we didn’t do, and we had such a nice time there that I wouldn’t hesitate to go back and do the rest.

Click the image above for the photo gallery.

A video is coming soon!

Last week I turned 30. I’d think of something clever to say about this milestone, but now that I’m so old such extravagances are out of the question. I get tired just stirring my Metamucil. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging… You can look forward to such exciting posts as “All this progress — phooey!”, “By gum! 2nd BM this week!”, “An Open Letter To The Dog Who Shat On My Lawn”, and “Has Anyone Seen My Reading Glasses?”

Last week was also Melanie’s birthday, so to celebrate our mutual birthday week we headed out to Vegas. Figuring that it was a somewhat major birthday milestone, we decided to live it up and stay a night at the Bellagio and a night at Mandalay Bay. The Bellagio was awesome, great room, great service, nice atmosphere. The pools were great too. The Mandalay Bay had a great room but it was way too busy and crowded… We got to the pool at 9:30 AM and couldn’t find a single chair. Blah. But we got to see Penn & Teller, eat good food, and gawk at the ridiculousness that is Vegas. Good times.

Click on the image above to see the gallery.

Mel and I had been looking forward to heading out to the Wild Animal Park all week so we could try out the new video camera, so this morning when we saw big dark clouds coming we thought for sure our day would be ruined. But we pressed on, making it to the park in time to beat the majority of the crowds. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the clouds from the coast seemed to scatter and dissipate before they reached the park, so we wound up having a beautiful sunny day. We saw lots of animals, I took lots of video, and we ate a tasty (but pricey) lunch at the park.

This afternoon I spent a lot of time editing the video in Final Cut Express (FCE). iMovie ‘08 (which I had previously been using to edit videos) is a great program that is easy to use and produces good results, but I was already starting to feel a little limited by it. Making the jump to FCE is huge; it is the same basic program as Final Cut Pro, which is used to edit multi-million dollar movies and TV shows, just missing the more advanced features. Think of it as the Adobe Photoshop of video editing. At first it comes across as a very complicated program, but after spending some time reading the user manual (an 1152 page PDF document) and watching the tutorials on Apple’s website I started to get the hang of it. I can see why people like this program; it allows for a huge amount of control and has some very nice features. It’ll be fun to work with it more in the future. I still have a lot to learn!

And so here it is, my first video from the Sony HDR-SR11 edited in Final Cut Express:

‘Twas a good easter weekend. The weather was phenomenal; it felt just like summer. It was probably in the mid-80’s both yesterday and today. We kept the windows and curtains closed in the house part of the day because it was so hot… We haven’t done that since September.

Yesterday was our monthly top-to-bottom house cleaning day. (We try to schedule a certain day, otherwise we’ll find a good reason to keep putting it off.) Today we started things off with a tasty breakfast. Last night I put the ingredients in the bread machine for the super easy and tasty Amish Bread, and this morning I awoke to tasty bread aromas. We sliced the bread and made french toast and scrambled eggs, then ate out on our patio. Delightful! The scent of flowers was in the air and it was a really warm and pleasant easter morning.

After breakfast we headed out to the Santa Margarita River park in Fallbrook. In all my years of living down here I’d never explored this place, which is a shame; it was great. A nice flowing river (more like a creek by non-Southern California standards) with a great trail beside it shaded by lots of bit oak trees. Overall a very peaceful and relaxing place that reminded us both of places farther north. The grass was nice and green by the river, but it seems that the flowers are past their prime and the grass is starting to turn brown everywhere else. Spring happens quick down here… It’s a good thing easter came early this year.

Hope everybody else’s easter was nice, and you all were lucky and got those tasty round little brown chocolate balls that the easter bunny scattered around my yard. Mmm mmm!

One of the best parts of living in Southern California is the multitude of climate choices it presents; this time of year there are snow-capped mountains and warm desert valleys within 30 miles of one another. Being quite fond of warmth and sunshine, we took a quick overnight trip to the Palm Springs area last weekend.

The weather was awesome (mid-70’s and clear blue skies) and the drive out was beautiful. The areas ravaged by fire in the fall have risen from the ashes in the spring, with beautiful California Poppies and other varies of flowers carpeting the formerly blackened hillsides. I also got to stretch my car’s legs a little on the back roads; a welcome change after slogging through commuter traffic every day.

While we did enjoy the typical lazy escapes of lounging by the pool and eating tasty food, we also decided to try The Living Desert Wildlife and Botanical Park, which was a pretty awesome experience. Living in the zoo capital of the world, you’d think we’d be tired of them, but this place had enough of a different spin on things that it was really refreshing. There were lots of great garden exhibits with cacti galore, plus some pretty interesting animals. I made a short video of the park, which you can watch below.

(Music is the rather inaptly named “Rain in Vancouver” by Teru.)