On Saturday Chris and I returned from a (too short!) holiday to Aitutaki, Cook Islands. Aitutaki is a group of small islands within an atoll about a 40 minute flight from Rarotonga.

The basic itinerary was one night in Rarotonga, 7 nights in Aitutaki, 2 nights in Auckland, then home. So we stayed in the airport for the night in raro after reading the "Sleeping in Airports" guide to Rarotonga (ALL LIES I TELL YA!!!), and the last two nights with my brother and his wife in Auckland.

During our time in Aitutaki, we stayed in Are Tamanu Beach Village Resort. It was really quite lovely and luxurious. Our villa was right on the beach overlooking some amazing snorkelling and kayaking areas, and consisted of a massive deck area with table, chairs and day bed, a lounge room with bar fridge (unstocked with anything except water) bed room and bathroom. The bathroom was huge and had a gigantic shower alcove built with glass brick on the internal wall. It was really quite striking.

There are two sections to the resort. We stayed in the more recently built part, named the Manea suites. By all accounts, this is the nicer section to stay in, although we didn't get a chance to look into the older villas to make the comparison for ourselves. They all looked very nice!

We did, however, get to some of the other resorts around Aitutaki and had a look at some of the rooms for potential future visits. We found the following:

Etu Moana Boutique Beach Villas were built around the same time as where we stayed. It offers cheaper accomodation (around $400 - $500ish per night), and more useful facilities (in my opinion). Like Are Tamanu, these villas had a massive deck, bedroom with king size bed, big shower. But they also had a full kitchen (new and very functional), and running filtered water (whereas we had to run back and forward between the bar to get drinking water for our villa, or wait for it to be restocked in the mornings by the cleaners). Etu Moana also has an outdoor shower attached to each of the villas - totally fenced off and surrounded by lush gardens. These villas were really cool! We would probably stay here next time should we return. The only downfall for Etu Moana is that they do not have a restaurant of their own onsite, whereas Are Tamanu does.

Pacific Resort is the higher end of luxury on the island. These villas range from $700 to $1500ish per night. Looking through the rooms you can definitely see why. The more expensive of the villas had a separate lounge room, bed room, massive robe and the biggest bathroom that I think I have ever seen, where the shower was a gigantic glass wall looking out onto gorgeous lush (and very private) gardens. If I had a few million bucks hanging around, I may just stay here for the shower alone. But I don't, so for now I'll just store it in the ideas box for when we design and build our own house. All villas at Pacific Resort are beach front, however the more expensive ones are high on a hill with far more magnificent views. They have gorgeous decks with day beds and tables and chairs, and stairs heading straight down to the beach. Absolutely stunning. Pacific Resort has two restaurants onsite.

And now for a bit about the what we found on the island apart from the accomodation!

Almost every restaurant has at least one cat. Most have three. We didn't see any at Pacific Resort restaurant (although there were lots of geckos wandering around on the ceiling). The cutest by far was the one at the restaurant where we were staying (he was just a baby!!). The best trained was at Samade Beach Village restaurant (although I can't recommend the food or the waiting staff at Samade). He could stand for long periods on his back legs and beg like a dog. We were told he was also quite a successful fisherman (fishercat??), and if people didn't feed him in the restaurant he just walked down to the beach and started getting his own dinner.

The snorkelling was amazing just a short way out from the beach we steped out to from our villa. It is quite shallow and you could walk out for miles and have the water go no further than up to your shoulders. Beautiful, colourful fish swimming around everywhere in the rocks and coral distributed around the lagoon. There are also snorkelling day trips you can go on where they take you out to the deeper water in the atoll. Here the water goes to around 10m or so in depth, and is teaming with amazing fish and clams (including some giant clams!). Everywhere you are, you are surrounded by fish. Just incredible.

The little islands are called "Motu"s - motu meaning "cut away from" or something to that effect, and named such because they are cut away from the main Aitutaki island. We visited four of these motus during our snorkelling day trip. Very beautiful and un-spoiled. My favourite of these was called "Honeymoon Island". According to our skipper (Captain Fantastic!), this was a sand bar connected to the nearest island until only recently when it started sprouting greenery. It now has beautiful, tall coconut palms and other plants everywhere, and has a huge tern and hermit crab population.

We also met the local high school Information Tecnology teacher, Larry. He's a wonderful man with a very interesting life story with MANY years in the IT industry (starting from punch cards, way back when). It seems that Larry retired and moved to Aitutaki so that he could live in paradise while volunteering at the local school. After our chats with him over dinners and breakfasts at our restaurant, I think he has some very lucky students.

Pictures from our trip are available here. Also, for more (surely amazing) views of Aitutaki, wait until the next Survivor series. When we were there they were preparing for the next series. Some of the smaller islands in the atoll are about to be stricken from the day trips due to filming of the new series. I know we'll be watching just to see this paradise again!

Well, it's happened... It wasn't as painful as I'd believed, but I still claim that I will age as ungracefully as humanly possible. I am 30 years old in decimal. Don't even ask what I am in octal... In Hex I am 1E (I know - just doesn't look right), so my base of choice is 13. That makes me 24. Old enough to drink in the US, not yet 25 (when everything starts creaking and grey hairs start appearing). I'll review base of choice every two years until such a time as I reach 21 in hex - then I may consider sticking with hex a while.

I had a wonderful weekend mostly in Melbourne... Caught up with a few wonderful friends who I have not seen in a while, and spent lots of money. It would be redundant to list everything we did here, seeing as you can read it all on Chris's blog

One good thing that came out of the weekend was finally being able to give my brother his birthday present! It's been harder to catch up with him since he moved to Auckland a few months back. I've been holding onto some super hot (Spontaneous Combustion is the brand) chilli sauce and a few CDs that I purchased while in the US. The main attraction was a CD by a band called Spookie Daly Pride. Dan sure seems to appreciate the lyrics (available for viewing on the website, I believe).

On a side note, Gizzy had another vet visit yesterday for what we thought was an infection from playing a bit rough with Pipe and getting munched... Turns out my boy has typical teenage acne (about right - we worked out he would be about 19 now with the conversion from human to cat years)! So now he's on another round of antibiotics along with some anti-bacterial cream to rub under his little kitty-cat chin =)

Chris has finally managed to upload the photos from our trip to the US and Canada!

Chris and I are sitting in LAX at the end of our holidays... Our flight leaves in a few hours, and we're sitting here on our laptops, talking via IRC rather than vocalising (as per the norm), and waiting to find out if one of the persons whom we have been placed next to for the flight wishes to swap with one of us so that we may have side-by-side skybeds for the trip home =)

We've had a fabulous week-and-a-bit, featuring a wonderful dinner with Bdale Garbee and family, drives through some stunning scenery in Denver ( Mount Evans was a highlight!), a trip to the Zion National Park, Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, and finally the last two days in Disneyland, Anaheim, CA! =)

My favourite ride in the park was the Twilight Zone's Tower of Terror, and chris thinks I'm absolutely bonkers because I spent large portions of cash on merchandise from one of my favourite cartoons - The Nightmare Before Christmas.

It's almost a shame that it has all gone so quickly - I needed a holiday and a week just doesn't seem like enough - but it will be wonderful to get home to the children, I know we have both missed them HEAPS! Having been keeping an eye on the videos, we can see that they've been keeping themselves very busy.

It's Friday the 12th of August, almost 2pm here.

I'm sitting at the airport in Portland. Earlier in the week I caught a cab from the airport here to Beaverton to spend some time in the Beaverton office. The cab driver was insane. I got out of the car feeling thoroughly car sick, and didn't even begin to recover for about 2 hours. The cabbie followed me into the hotel as I was checking in and asked when I needed to get back to the airport, and promised me faithfully that he'd be back. I'm scared at this time, but too sick to argue.

As promised, he was back at the hotel at midday today (Portland time). This time I'm equipped. I've got some Target brand motion-sickness tablets, which I was pretty sure wouldn't be very effective. I also have a fresh, cold bottle of coke. Health tonic. Cure-all for travel sickness. Lo and behold, no sickness at all on the journey back, and I didn't even need the coke!

The cabbie asked me if I would allow him to deviate from the highway because of bad traffic congestion. I said sure. So he's taken me through these back streets, past shops and houses, and then into the forest. It's a beautiful, winding mountain drive through magnificent trees and other greenery. Really beautiful... After about $35.00 showed up on the metre suddenly we're driving right into Portland itself (which is good - at this stage I'm wondering if he's going to find some dodgey dirt track somewhere and slash my throat). A while later we're on another highway with signs declaring the direction of the airport. We're going the right way!

So we arrive at the airport. The fare is close to $60, so I add a tip and make out my credit card slip for about $67ish. To this he declares that he's giving me a $10 discount for being such a special person. I've done nothing but sit here looking out the window and hope he wasn't planning my murder. Nice guy!

I get to the check in counter, and the lovely girl there seats me right near the front of the plane. 4A - window seat. Very happy. Then I find free wifi here!!! AND I'm on my way to the love of my life (LOML). This is a good day =)

Just checking the time according to my mobile telephone... It's 6:40am. I'm sitting in the Austin Bergstrom International Airport, and have been here for about an hour. Do you really wanna know about my day thus far?

I packed my suitcase last night, and was all done by 9pm, ready to go to bed early because I knew that I had to be up at 4:30 to get fuel, drive to the airport, return my rental car, get ticketed and catch a flight. The people in the room next to mine had different ideas, however, and spent ALL NIGHT (I say all night because my night ended at 4:30 am, which was only an hour after they decided to shut the hell up) banging doors, arguing, and cooking something (?!?!) in the microwave - it must have beeped about a hundred times. As such, I've had absolutely NO sleep. None. Zilch. Nada.....

I've stopped for petrol and gotten the pump that has credit card facilities in the pump to avoid going inside, only to find that the printer is out of paper. Fine... I had to go inside and get a receipt.

I'm tired... I'm really tired... So I go to drop off the rental car and end up driving through the car park for fifteen minutes because my lack of any good sleep for three days brain is too confused by the railing across all the hertz entrances to figure out that the have a further (unmarked) entrance that I'm supposed to use at this time of the morning. All good, got it sorted in the end....

I go to the ticket booth. I am standing in queue behind this old couple who must surely have been moving house by plane for the amount of luggage that they had. Seriously, between the two of them they had 4 massive cases and another 3 very large soft bags, and a couple of carry-ons. They held up the queue for quite a while, although it gave me the opportunity to look around in my dazed state and notice that the flight has been delayed. By 2 hours. This gets me into Dallas about 45 minutes after my flight to Portland is due to leave. Great!!!

The lovely lady who ended up helping me out at the counter managed to move me to the 6am flight, which was currently scheduled to board at 8:10am and leave sometime shortly thereafter. Should arrive at 9:10 or so, which is the boarding time for my connection to Portland. She says I *might* be able to make it - not to sure about my bags though! I ask her to check the next connection to Portland, and it's at 11:30am. It is fully booked. Overbooked. My only chance to catch that plane is to hope that some of the people on it are also delayed, and there is space available. The only flight with available seats that is scheduled to leave after my "6am" flight arrives in Dallas is not until about 3pm or sometime thereafter. I keep my 9:10 boarding time flight and suddenly have a religious experience... I'm praying REAL Hard that I make my connection!

I'm having a great day! =)

so I'm here in Ottowa for OLS. The Ottowa Linux Symposium. It still seems so unreal to me - although that *may* have something to do with not sleeping in approximately 60 hours or so due to sheer excitement!

The flight over was excellent - love the new Qantas Sky Beds. Not overly comfortable, but excellent gadgetry value! The others may say the flight was hardly worth a mention, however having only flown a very select few times I'm still excited about it =)

My first experience of Ottowa as a city involved arriving very late at our hotel (due to a rather annoying delay in Chicago that almost caused me to lose my excitement in flying), and having to go walkies through the city centre looking for food places that are a) open after midnight and b) NOT McDonalds. We finally found pizza, which tasted great at that time of night/morning.

Looking forward to spending the next few days surrounded by approximately 700 geeks - should be fun =)

Trip to Ottowa Linux Symposium (and thereafter) plans set out below - for my information as much as anyone else's!

• 18/07 fly to Ottowa via Sydney, Los Angeles, Chicago, attend Ottowa Linux Symposium
• 23/07 fly to Toronto, spending time with Chris, sightseeing (niagara, etc)
• 26/07 fly to Minneapolis via Chicago, visit Mirror Image Recording Studio with Snitram =), then Rochester to spend a few days with IBM fellas!
• 30/07 fly to Austin Texas via Dallas, spend some time in Austin IBM offices
• 09/08 fly to Portland Oregon via Dallas, spend some time in Beaverton IBM offices
• 12/08 fly to Chris!! Denver. Direct flight. YAY!!! Do touristy stuff, drive through the mountains, etc
• 16/08 fly to Las Vegas, driving to Grand Canyon =)
• 17/08 CALL DAN FOR HIS BIRTHDAY!!!! remember - NZ date and time
• 19/08 fly to Los Angeles, hop a bus immediately for DISNEYLAND (because I never wanna grow up)
• 21/08 fly home again
• 23/08 arrive home!! Cuddle Gizzy and Pipe =)