ucantblamem

So you should be well aware by now that I was in the U.S.A for two weeks. I did journal the trip, but until now I hadn’t posted anything on this blog. Well, I thought I’d be lazy and just paste the whole lot straight in here - I hope you don’t mind. I warn you now that while I didn’t document every second of the trip or anything, you’ll notice that it’s still some pretty heavy reading. To those who take the time to read, I hope you enjoy it. ;-)

Saturday 28th July 2008

Brisbane time: 6:40pm
LA time: 1:43am

It was interesting at Brisbane airport, to be put through two seperate security checks on the way through; The obvious customs check and a pat-down before boarding the plane. It’s at moments like those that you wonder why you decided to bring a laptop on the flight… I had to pull the laptop out of the bag, take off my watch, bracelet and belt. Meh…

We’re 7 hours into the journey so far and just flying over Honolulu’s latitude, all the lights are out and some people actually seem to be sleeping which I find hard to believe. I feel tired, but it’s a bit choppy and I think I’m just excited about the week ahead.

The in-flight entertainment is great, there’s plenty of current/new movies available like “Shooterâ€?, “300â€?, “Zodiacâ€? and “Breachâ€?. I’m having trouble getting Breach to play, but I did sneak in an episode of “Mythbustersâ€? and “Top Gearâ€? which sufficed…. :P

The food wasn’t too bad actually – There was your typical choice of beef and chicken; I chose the chicken which had a tomato-based sauce with saffron and steamed veges. I’ve heard some people complain about plane-food not being so good, but I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. Food prepared by someone else is always good food in my book. Hehe.

I always wondered how you could go to another country without organising Visa’s etc… Well, it turns out you fill-in this “Visa waiverâ€? form while in-flight, which is pretty simple and straight forward. Then, supposedly, we just hand that and a customs form in when we land.

Once in LA we were “shuttledâ€? to the hotel, which was probably also the most scary car drive I’ve ever been in. This guy could barely speak English, clearly didn’t understand the concept of lanes and surely couldn’t read speed signs. Thank God we made it alive.

First order of the new day was to head out for (second) breakfast at Macdonald’s, where I also discovered the “Angusâ€? burger! Hehehe, quite amusing indeed. There I met Mark, Tiffany’s dad, who is a really nice guy – super knowledgeable and always keen for a chat.

We then headed back to the place where he and Tim were staying to catch some shut-eye, as 2 of our hotel rooms were unavailable until 3:00pm. I woke up after about 2 or so hours to finally meet Tiffany and to discover how truly Jet-lagged I was.

We jumped in Mark’s “Suburbanâ€? truck (Mexican style) and headed back to the hotel where we assembled the posse and made our way to “Red Robinâ€? for some real American grub. The burger was amazing, but I think I filled up on the never-ending fries and bottomless Coke. :S

After that we stopped by Target to pick up some essentials, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a power adapter, which I neglected to buy while in brissy. So, I’m currently typing this on my last 20% of battery power – let’s hope I find one in Colorado.

Sunday 29th July 2007

LA Time: 4:09am (30th July)

Today was all about Disneyland. I didn’t get a great deal of sleep, but I had enough to make my way through a very long day in the most well-known theme-park in the world. The one thing I can definitively say about Disneyland is that all the prop-dressings are amazingly well done. You know, it’s very like Dreamworld really (a super-size one of course), but clearly a LOT more money has been sunk into the place.

We went on some very impressive rides, including the Indiana Jones ride, Space Mountain and we even saw Aladdin the musical – very cool.

Unfortunately, Tim, Tiff, myself and Mark headed off at about midnight for Colorado via the cabin in the hills. From the top of this Mountain, which is about 5000 feet high, all we could see was the lights of LA – which was just so beautiful. There really was no end to it and massive just isn’t descriptive enough a word.

Oh yeah, the cars here are HUGE! Mark’s Chevy Suburban is a very regular site and most people own an equivalently large truck. Which is such a contrast to Australia, considering I’ve seen a Suburban like twice in my whole life… :P

While I’m still vaguely on the topic of the Mountain – I should probably mention that we half-filled the truck with wood, which is some kind of pine starting with “pâ€? (kinda reminded me of “Prosepineâ€?) :P It was cut in fairly large pieces and was super light; like balsa-wood light; Made me feel strong for once in my life.

Monday 30th July

Traveling through the night didn’t grant me much sleep, but I did get a couple of hours before waking to see some amazing landscape.

The entire trip showed me some of the most amazing scenery I’ve ever experienced. Photos really don’t do it justice unfortunately and they certainly don’t show the scale of the mountains.

Passing through Las Vegas was very cool, we didn’t get there at night time unfortunately, but seeing this amazing city in the middle of the desert was so interesting.

We stopped at MacDonalds for breakfast and I was seriously about to vomit while eating it. Clearly I just can’t handle large amounts of fatty food, cause I really was feeling ill at this point. Thankfully, it was my choice where to stop for dinner and I chose the one thing I’d been craving since I arrived; Subway.

Coming into Colorado my jaw dropped at the beautifully green mountains and expansive scenery. Things started to cool down pretty rapidly as we came up to about 8000 feet above sea level. Denver itself is 5000 feet above sea level, in a massive canyon.

We arrived at the Mitchell’s house and I got to meet Tiffany’s dog, Rusty and her mum before taking the most desperately needed shower of my life.

Tuesday 1st August

I slept SO WELL! Finally, I managed to have a solid 10 hours sleep, which made me feel tonnes better.

We washed and groomed Rusty, who is a very smart dog, but unfortunately quite blind.

We headed out to grab lunch and a whole lot of stuff from Walmart for the wedding. For lunch I had a Fajita wrap with a whole bunch of salad on it – I can’t tell you how good I felt to eat that kind of food.

Walmart wasn’t overly amazing, but we did head through a “Self-checkoutâ€? on the way out, where basically you would scan all your own items and pay for them etc… I thought that was pretty cool.

Later in the afternoon we picked up the rest of the Burstow’s from the airport and headed over to “Casa Bonitasâ€?, which I gotta say is the most amazing restaurant I’ve ever been to. It’s basically a multi-level Disneyland that sells food as well. The Mitchell’s reckon it’s not very quality food, but my Fajita was amazing.

After dinner we headed back to Carol’s place. They had shopped for us and filled the fridge with amazing food and even baked cakes and muffins for us – it was so sweet.

I was lucky enough to score the downstairs double-bed and own room.

Wednesday 2nd August

After a reasonably good sleep, we were woken up by country music playing over the house-intercom. So, we all got up, ready and headed out to a huge shopping mall here in Denver.

On the way in I saw the one thing I really did want to see while here in the U.S; An Apple store. I didn’t do too much investigation of the store itself as the iPhone was sitting on a front-table in all it’s glory. Tim and I played around with it for a while – boy it’s nice; and super fast to, which surprised me.

The Mall itself was really beautiful inside, with natural wood everywhere – it actually felt quite yuppy.

We checked out a bunch of really nice shops and I only bought one shirt! :P I had seen a really nice jacket at the Armani shop, but it was $195 US – OUCH! So, we continued shopping for a couple hours etc and met up with Cathy and Megs. Tim had seen something that caught his eye at the Armani shop so we swung back by it to get a second opinion and just for fun I showed them the Jacket I liked. Well, they convinced me that it was too good to pass up and I bought it! :S

We left the mall in a bit of a hurry to catch our “America VS Australiaâ€? soccer match, which ended up being “America VS the Commonwealthâ€? as John, our Canadian friend joined our team which was cool – he’s quite good. Unfortunately, the U.S team won on a “last goal winsâ€?, but it was fun times all round. My poor and completely un-fit body struggled all the way through… :P

We walked back to the Mitchell’s house, met a bunch of other relies and had an amazing BBQ for dinner. It was really great fun, we sat out under a pagola at the back of the garden, which was adorned with fairy lights and just chatted for hours.

Later in the evening Rusty showed off his incredible array of tricks and we finished the night with a great game of “Up the river, down the river� (cards).

Thursday 3rd August

Today I got up and took a trip with Tiff and Tim to return the silly power adapter I had bought yesterday that didn’t end up being the right kind. After that, we all headed to their equivalent of a DFO, except that this was the size of a small town (and even had it’s own streets).

I bought a new running getup from the Adidas store, a belt, some socks, a new bag (for work) and some nice collared/button-up shirts for work. After a very successful day shopping we shot off to Colorado Springs to experience the “Flying W’s Ranchâ€?, which is kind of an American “Jondaryan woolshedâ€?, but ten times better of course. The main event of the evening was a traditional American -cowboy dinner, which included roast beef/chicken in BBQ sauce/gravy with roast potato’s, scones, baked-beans and a very strange cinnamon cake thing. After tucking down the food, the “Flying W’sâ€? came on and put on a really amazing show for us. While we had been eating dinner at the very back of the building, Tiffany had some contacts working at the Ranch who helped us get front-row seats for the show. I’ve never been a big fan of Country and Western music, but these guys blew me away. The guitarist was a state-chamption and the fiddle player was a 5 time national champion, so you can imagine that the musicianship was pretty incredible.

After getting home, we did a little parade amongst ourselves to show off all our purchases, which ended up with me in high-heels (don’t ask) and I finally managed to get us online – hurray!

Friday 4th August

We were instructed to be up and ready early, but the Mitchell’s didn’t rock up until about 11-ish. First order of the day was to check out “Red Rocksâ€? which is a massive natural amphitheater on the edge of Denver, it is amazing and quite a bit bigger than anything I’ve ever seen in Australia. We were up quite high and poor old Megs was starting to show signs of Altitude sickness, so we slammed down a fair bit of water and headed back down to the gift shop. On the wall they had photos of all the famous bands that had played here, from the Beatles to Dave Mathews and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. A lot of the souvenir’s were pretty gimmicky, but I grabbed a handful of magnetic rocks which were pretty cool.

After leaving Red Rocks, we basically headed over to the other side of Denver (and beyond) where we had lunch at Georgetown train station. It’s an old steam-engine track right next to Colorado river – very pretty. After ignoring the signs and feeding the chipmunks to grab some closeup snaps, we packed up the gear and started our journey up the hill to Mt Evans. This mountain is above the clouds at a whopping (15000ft / 5000m) and made breathing pretty difficult at the top. But, the view was beyond words and at 8 degrees was a shock to all of us who were in shorts and previously enjoying the Colorado summer in Denver below. It was so strange to see ice randomly formed around the mountain and the point where the Air was too thin for trees to grow.

As us Aussies started to get tired and the clouds started rolling UP the mountain, we decided to high-tail it and make our way to Beau-jo’s Pizza. Now, if ever you want to try a restaurant that makes you never want to leave, this is it! We ordered a range of flavours, but I got stuck on the BBQ pizza, which had the most incredible hickory/BBQ sauce I’ll ever taste in my life along with Skim milk mozzarella which left me still feeling quite healthy by the end of my third piece. One of the weirdest things about this pizza is that it has MASSIVE crusts, which we were told you leave till the end and then eat with honey like damper. Tim, Tiff and I did run up the road to grab some quality root beer, but after my first sip I realised it had citric acid in it, which could have ruined me if I’d kept going. It was awfully tasty though.

We had really good times at the restaurant and I myself had some great chats with Tiffany’s aunt “Janâ€?, who is a teacher from Canada. Tim, Tiff, Megs and I jumped in the car and had planned to swing by Tiff’s quickly before heading back to Carol’s. Unfortunately, Tiff hadn’t realised just how much stuff she needed to pack for our 6am departure the following morning, so Tim, megs and I limped our way back to Carol’s and I started putting all my stuff together ready for the next day.

I hadn’t done a wash in at least a week, so I through all my dirty gear in the washer and used the waiting time to upload a few photos to flickr. Once that was done I threw my clothes in the dryer and tried to goto sleep without much luck, which led me to catching up on my Journaling! :P

Saturday 5th August

Well, my alarm went off, but I fell asleep again while waiting for my phone to turn on… I woke up at 5:40am, which barely gave me enough time to fold my dried clothes, shove them in a bag and throw it in the car. I did, luckily, manage to squeeze in a 15 second shower before Tim and I bolted over to Tiff’s, only to find that not all of our passengers had arrived.

We packed the truck and headed out by about 7:00am, passing through Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, which as expected was a particularly boring drive. I did see the St Louis arch late at night, which was very cool and it was interesting seeing how foggy Tennessee can get late at night, considering how warm it is.

Sunday 6th August

We finally arrived at the Smallbone’s ranch at about 2:45am, where waved goodbye to Tiff and Cynthia and stumbled our way upstairs to a cozy little room at the end of the house.

As you can imagine, we slept forever and got up just in time to down some breaky, shower and jump in the car for church. The service was incredible; The music team was likely made up of session musicians and the communion service was very thought provoking and spite my lack of sleep kept me focused for the entire service.

We met a couple of Tiffany’s friends and rendezvoused with the rest of our posse (who had gone to a different church) for lunch.

The food wasn’t too bad, but all went sour when Kels found a maggot in her pizza; a live one at that too! I can’t say that the restaurant did a good job of damage control, but Kels is a fairly modest girl and she didn’t seem to care too much.

We headed back to the ranch for some nap time and later ended up at a beach volleyball court for an all-boys game. Most of us were shirtless and I was hoping that a) my sheer whiteness would put off the other team and b) that I might actually catch a tan. Unfortunately, I didn’t achieve either of those goals. It seems that our sun burns the skin quite a bit quicker than it does in Tennessee.

Towards the end of the game Tiff came by to pick us up for dinner at the Fuches, who are some good friends of hers. They had 3 hilarious kids that decided we were great enemies and needed to be brought down, continuously, by lightsabres. It was good fun, but I ended up with a bit of headache from all the crashing to the ground.

Monday 7th August

Dragged out of the bed again, we headed to a local mall while the rest of the boys got their hair cuts. I was pretty well shopped out after our many stints in LA and Colorado and came away with an American power adapter and a Chinese massage, which left me a little dizzy. I had had it drilled into me over the past week that I needed to try “Dairy Queen�, which is kind of a baskin and robbins style joint – which I must say was impressive, but still quite sugary as I have, by this point, come to expect from all American food joints.

The girls had been working on some print work for the wedding and as I had little planned for afternoon, I went with Tiff and Rachel to print and guillotine them ready for further cutting and dressing, before we scooted over to Mellow-mushroom (pizza joint) for dinner.

Tuesday 8th August

As the Rehearsal dinner was to take place in the barns up the back of the ranch, we really needed to do some cleanup and preparations, so a few of us boys spent a couple of hours pulling down the poison ivy and cutting out as many weeds as possible.

Tim later picked us up to go and size up our suits, which we ended up taking with us. We had some quick food at Chic-fil-a, which I must say is quite good, before heading back to the ranch to tie ribbons and cut out a whole bunch of stuff. I spent the rest of the night catching up on emails and playing xbox with the boys, before crashing into bed.

Wednesday 9th August

Today was just a nice day to chill out and do as little as possible. Timmy and I found a baseball bat and a tennis ball in the shed and laughed ourselves silly while we tried desperately to make something of our lack of baseball skills.

We got an opportunity to meet the very sweet and talkative Vikki Beaching, who is an up-and-coming Christian artist, in case you didn’t already know.

The real highlight of the day was the paint ball in the afternoon. The Smallbone’s have a TONNE of paint ball gear, which I couldn’t figure out, considering there was only three kids left at home. I later found out that a couple of years earlier, one of the boys actually wanted to start a paint ball business. In anycase, it meant that there was plenty of gear to go around.

They warned us fairly heavily about these crazy little microscopic spiders called “chiggersâ€?, which can get in your pours and cause all sorts of issues, so we covered up fairly heavily, drenched ourselves in insect repellent and drank a table-spoon of vinegar straight up – which supposedly seeps out through the pours creating a natural repellent and also brought most of us close to vomiting…

The game itself was a lot of fun, but the intense humidity fogged up my mask pretty quickly and I bowed out of the game as a consequence. We finished up the afternoon by ganging up on Tim and slaughtering him with the paint ball’s, he did put up a pretty decent fight however and I think Trevor has the bruises to prove it. :P

We spent the rest of the night playing 4 on 4 halo and FIFA 2007.

Thursday 10th August

The rehearsal dinner was to take place later this evening and we still had plenty to do, so again us boys headed up the hill and shouvled horse poo (literally). We covered the ground with straw and saw-dust, setup Kerosene lamps everywhere and got stung by wasps – yay!

We later jumped in the car and headed out to a place called “Lebanon�, where the wedding was to take place, for a quick run-through of the ceremony. On the trip I got a chance to meet Tim Bruns who is another rising star in Nashville and also just a really great fella.

After the run-through, we jumped back into the car and cruised back to the ranch for the big party. By this stage I was pretty hot and sweaty, so I quickly showered, through on some new clothes and headed up the hill for some really good food and bush dancing. I think everyone had a pretty legendary time and after some speeches, presents and a whoppa cleanup, the girls headed out for their “hens nightâ€? and we went back to xbox, Indiana Jones and a few D&M’s.

Friday 11th August

Everything up until this point had been so casual and laid-back, but I think being the whole point of the trip, today was a little more tense. Not Tim however, you could really see that he knew exactly what he was doing today and he was fairly well relaxed and looking forward to it.

When we finally got to Lebanon, we did a bit of setup stuff and then headed into the air conditioned rooms to get dressed. Tim and Tiff had decided that they didn’t want to see each other at all, right up until she walked down the isle, so we had to be cautious to make sure those two never bumped into each other.

We did a whole bunch of photos before the ceremony, which seems to be customary in the states (in fact, the actual photos of the bride were done on Wednesday). I think this was a great idea as it meant we didn’t have to leave everyone at the reception on their own for hours on end.

The ceremony was just beautiful, I couldn’t wipe a whopper smile off my face the whole time and my facial muscles really payed the price for it, but it was so lovely. Tim’s vows were very biblically-based and had a lot of meaning, but Tiffany made many a grown man cry – her vows were like poetry and were straight from the heart.

The reception was a true party, lots of people laughing and dancing and just having a great time. A few quick toasts and an incredibly yum cake (Why do we Australians insist on Christmas cake for a wedding anyway) kept the fun times rolling. Unfortunately, the event was tarnished slightly by the MC re-breaking his arm and having to be taken to hospital. It didn’t seem to effect the bride and groom so much thankfully and they finally jumped in the car (donated and decorated by Tiff’s uncle Drew) and drove off into the distance, coke cans in tail.

From that point on, I started to feel a bit down in the mouth, knowing that the climax was over and I’d be heading home tomorrow. We said goodbye to Tiff’s family who I’d gotten to know quite well over the past week and a half and headed to Macdonald’s for some food on the way back to the ranch. I managed to have myself one Krispy Kreme on this trip at the servo next to maccas, which was one of my goals (I know, it’s kinda lame…) and Timmy and I shared some great chats about life, love and God on the 45 minute drive.

Saturday 12th August

I had made a point of doing packing most of my clothes the day before and basically did a double and tripple check that I had everything accounted for before we jumped into a hire car and headed off to pick up the girls. David Smallbone was gracious enough to give Timmy and I a copy of Rebecca’s latest CD and reminded us how good Tiff’s vows were.

Danielle, who’s family house the girls had been staying at, had told me a couple of times about her dog Boche, which I finally got to met while we waited for the girls to finish packing. She was a cute little dog that apparently is best friends with Cody, the Smallbone’s Maltese, who also became one of my good friends at the ranch. :P

We met up with Daniel, who took us to the Grand Ole Opry, which is pretty much the centre-piece for country music. We had a look through the museum and bought some last minute gifts from the souveniar shop and finally said goodbye to Nashville.

The four hour flight to LA was a little boring, but I got a window seat and really enjoyed seeing the mountains as we came into LA. Went through a million security checks, saw Guy Sebastian on our way to the Qantas check-in and had a quick meal before going through another million security checks and finally onto our flight.

I got to watch “Fracture� and “In the land of women� on the flight, which had about 100 spare seats, two right next to me. This meant I could spread out and I ended up getting about 6 hours pretty solid sleep.

Coming into Australia was a sight for sore eyes and the 10 degree weather, while sunny and not overly windy was a real shock to the system. LA airport is really old and crappy, so it made Brisbane airport seem brilliant.
I said goodbye to my travel buddies; Scotty, Jeff, Kels and Megs and went out to flag down mum and Eliza who had come to pick me up.

I was alive with energy and telling all sorts of tales of the trip, showing off photos and handing out pressies for everyone up until about 1pm when I crashed and slept right through till about 7:30. I ate some dinner and then slept right through the night, before heading back to work.

Final thoughts

• Everything about America is big and ugly. They have no European or Asian influence and the majority of their design is just plain boring.
• 90% of people drive an F-truck or GMC suburban or similar-over-sized SUV. I personally think they are also lazy/bad drivers.
• They are incredibly patriotic and every third house had an American flag blowing in the breeze outside their house.
• Their food is very sugary, salty and cheesy. Way more than my body would care to consume anyway.
  There’s also quite a lot more Mexican influence than I had imagined. Not only in their food, but just generally. In fact, LA’s population is made up predominantly of Mexicans.
• America isn’t my ideal holiday destination, but the trip was outstandingly supplemented by great people and endless amounts of fun.

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