So the conference in Chicago was a big success, ended up being a lot more informative and fun than I imagined. 🙂  I won’t get into the work aspect of things (I never do) but I will talk about the personal time I spent in the city.  It’s downtown is beautiful with many old buildings which look like they date to the colonial days.  There are tons of shops but that’s something Maggie would appreciate more, myself I liked the architecture.  While I was walking around looking like a tourist, this guy walks by me and asks “hey man, you want some cocaine?”  LOL seriously?!?

LOL almost every taxi, Uber or Lyft vehicle was a Prius so as I was driving around I’d notice people looking at me thinking I was their ride lol.  Early Wednesday evening I decided to drive home instead of the morning after as I would prefer to drive in the dark than the heavy rain that was being forecasted and yeah I got home around 3:30am in the morning.

I topped up about 30 minutes outside Chicago and kind of wish I didn’t as I drove the rest of the way home and ended up doing 780km while averaging 4.1l / 100km (57 mpg)!  To be fair I drove behind quite a few tractor trailers but they were flying down the road at 70+ mph!  Still I was really happy with how efficient the Toyota Prius is, it cost me about $60 in gas to go to Chicago and back, that’s simply amazing.

Back to the grind today, lol I’m blogging while I’m in the office so if there are serious grammatical issues then well meh that’s how it is. 😉

So I’m sitting at the table in my room at the Virgin hotels in Chicago because I’ll be attending a 2 day conference tomorrow and Wednesday.  Chicago is relatively close so instead of flying I decided to drive and I had a great time!

I got most of the way to Chicago on a single tank of gas and that’s freaking amazing.  I could have gone further than 760km, the computer said I still had 50+ km left available but being in an unknown area I didn’t want to push it too far.  After filling up, it was another 110km to the hotel and I averaged 4.4L / 100km (53.5mpg), I had to drive faster than I normally would as the limit on the interstate highways were 70-75 mph (112-120 km/h) and the Toyota Prius looses efficiency at that speed. Oh and gas is so darn cheap in the US!!! That much fuel in Canada would be $10-15 more.

The drive took 8 1/2 hours, after I checked into the hotel I went for a walk downtown and took some pictures.  I don’t know any of the landmarks but it was fun.  Thought the picture of the buildings and traffic would look better B&W, I think it turned out pretty well.

Tomorrow I have some real work to do then well we’ll see what the evening brings. 🙂

So finally the long awaited post about the trip I took with my family and extended family.  Estelle, Imran, Georgia, Frank, Megan, my mom and of course my family went to Europe for a 10 day get away that had us fly into Rome.  While we’ve been there already it’s a beautiful city and we didn’t mind going there again.  While they did some touristy things, one of the days Maggie, Brandon and I went to one of the outlet malls so Maggie could shop.

We had dinner together as a group which was always great and little Georgia is super sweet, I miss very much seeing her on a daily basis.

On the 3rd day, we went to the port which was about an hour away from the city and got on Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas, it’s a mid sized boat and we all had balcony staterooms. Needless to say the Greek islands were beautiful and while I’m not religious, it’s about as close to paradise as I could imagine.

Enough talk, I think the pictures will say enough themselves and note there are a lot of them.

Unfortunately the last 20 or so pictures are actually from Santorini which was our first stop (went to Mykonos, Athens & the island Olympia is on).  There’s simply too much to sum up, it was a very rewarding vacation and one that I will cherish for the rest of my life.  Brandon was great, little Georgia, it couldn’t have gone better in my opinion…  To top things off we saw dolphins swim next to our boat on the last cruising day, it was absolutely amazing and I’m so thankful the people I love came with me on this wonderful adventure.

Sigh my 10 day adventure in Europe with the family is over and we arrived back in Canada yesterday around 5pm.  To say the trip was amazing is an understatement, I have over 2400 photos to look over and will post those as soon as possible.  As an aside, I’ve always thought of myself as a highly connected person who needs internet access but during those 10 days, I rarely cared about going online.  Also the Greek islands are as close to what I imagine paradise would be, man so many photos to edit but I’ll start tonight and write up a summary soon. 🙂

Hehe I know I haven’t posted too much in the last recent while and that’s just because I’m but on Friday, we took a quick trip to Southern California to get away from things here. 🙂

Our flight was I think around 6:30pm and we left the house around 3, it was starting to snow and well we wanted to get to the airport early and it’s a good thing that we did because it was very busy.  Unfortunately the flight was delayed for about an hour so we sat in the plane and well that’s always an enjoyable experience.  We landed in Los Angles at around 11pm, Brandon was all amped up so he was still with us, we rented a car then drove to the hotel.

Unfortunately since we were going to be late, Maggie emailed the hotel that and for some reason they gave our room away so we ended up calling a bunch and stayed at a Best Western just north of Hollywood blvd.  Saturday we went to Universal Studios and it was pretty awesome…

I enjoyed the Simpsons portion the most since I love the show but the rest was actually kind of boring.  Brandon was a bit scared of the Mummy and other rides and he started to cry while we were waiting to get into The Walking Dead exhibit so Maggie took him out while I continued through it.  It wasn’t scary, but then again I guess I didn’t have the right frame of mind since I wasn’t trying to scare myself.  Harry Potter was kind of bleh too, at least the other rides and attractions gave a bit of a back story, having never read the books or watched the movies (not a fantasy person) I had no idea what was going on.  We did buy a wand for the little guy and those stupid things were $50!

The Water World attraction was not bad though, lots of action an neat scenes, Brandon said he enjoyed it so that’s good.  All in all Universal Studios is not big and we were able to see everything in a day which is nice. 🙂  We had burritos and tacos for dinner, mmm I love Mexican food!

Sunday we checked out of the hotel and walked around Hollywood Blvd and frankly it was a bit of a waste for me since I don’t care about the entertainment industry one bit.

A lot of other tourists were taking pictures of the stars on the ground and I did take a pic of the Chinese theater but I was pretty bored. After a bit of walking around we drove to San Diego then hit went to La Jolla cove and man is it beautiful there!

Brandon loves the water and we played on the beaches for a good few hours.  I took some videos as well and they’ll go up shortly but man it’s beautiful there and I absolutely loved spending time with the family just relaxing.  Probably as close to paradise as can be, Maggie and I talked maybe of moving there in the future. 😉

We had Thai food for dinner, it was alright Maggie and I wanted to stay out longer but since Brandon was still on Toronto time, by 5-6pm local time he’s already really beat.

The next day we went to Sea World and it was pretty great there too.

Sea World was pretty awesome, the rides were well regular amusement park style but you can get really close to the sea life here and they did a lot of really cool tricks.  Again I guess due to it being so close to xmas, we were able to see everything in a day and the little guy loved it.  He’s so damn lucky, when I was a kid we never went anywhere.

After breakfast on Tuesday morning at the hotel, we drove back to LA so Maggie could do some shopping then in the afternoon we just drove around the city to check things out.  LOL by accident we drove through some slums and I told Maggie we better lock our doors.  You can tell you’re in a poor area because all the windows and doors have security bars in front of them.

Dinner was of course, Mexican food then we dropped off the car and took the complimentary shuttle bus back to the airport.  We got there a few hours early, our flight was at 11pm and well I wanted Brandon to get some sleep.  We landed yesterday morning at 7am and well that day was pretty much a write off lol.

I’m on the holiday break so today I did a lot of cleaning and getting back into the grind at home, we had a great time and definitely will miss the nice weather!

So over the Easter weekend, our family went to Orlando to go to Disney World and we didn’t have enough time!  After having gone there I’d say one really needs a full week in order to see everything, I guess fortunately in our case Brandon is young and we really only did the kid stuff.  Our plane on Friday afternoon was delayed so we didn’t reach Orlando till around 9:30pm, a shame because we had some local sight seeing planned (packed schedule) but meh that’s alright.  Saturday morning we went to Disney’s Animal Kingdom and it was fun.  While there were obviously a ton of animals in the park, I was a bit disappointed at all the fake animals used to showcase certain rides.  

Hehe the cutest thing was when we went on the A Bug’s Life show, there’s a point where the bad bug takes over and it’s loud with a lot of flashing lights.  Brandon as so startled he curled up in a ball with his knees at his chest and his hands over his eyes and I thought it was so cute.  Hehe my little chicken but to be fair a lot of the children in the cinema were shocked and crying. We walked around the whole day going on rides and playing in general and Brandon had a wonderful time.

During the Lion King show, they were looking for some volunteer children and lol we made Brandon go out, to which he had a lot of fun leading the other kids in the activities.  We left the park around 4:30pm, Brandon and Maggie were pretty tired from walking all day (we walked over 20k steps) and for dinner we ate at one of the touristy restaurants close to our hotel.  We had an awesome table right next to a river.  Later we walked through the Disney Springs shopping area and I thought the Lego picture was pretty darn cool. 😉

Sunday we went to Disney’s Magic Kingdom and I certainly had more fun there because there were a lot more rides and “adult things” to do.  

We went on a few roller coasters and Brandon loved it when I pretended to be scared.  I took less pictures this day because some of the rides had poor lighting.  Hehe during the haunted house ride, Brandon again was very scared and both Maggie and I had to reassure him that nothing would happen, that he’d be safe with us.  Brandon also really enjoyed driving around the track chasing Maggie, later he remarked to me that he now knows he’ll be a good driver haha. It was hotter this day and Maggie & B were tired so again we called it a day at around 4pm.

On Monday we went to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, this time during the Hollywood Classics ride, there’s a part where a gang fight erupts between rival robots and this time Brandon went to hide where people’s feet were.  The lady sitting next to Maggie laughed at how cute Brandon was. 😉

Now that Disney owns the Star Wars franchise there were a lot of characters from the movies walking around and the ride was pretty good I’ll admit.  My favorite show was the Indiana Jones one, it was a huge production with large moving sets and they did quite a few bits (modified) from the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, lol Brandon thought it was so funny to see the female lead also beat up the bad guys.  

Hollywood Studio is much smaller so in the early afternoon we went back to the hotel so he could play in the pool.  In the evening we met up with aunt Agnes & uncle Paul for dinner and it was great.  They’re both so much fun and it was great to have some quality time with them.  LOL in the garage uncle Paul gave Brandon a ride to our car in his Porsche, Brandon says we should get one too. 😉

We left Orlando on Tuesday and since we had a connecting flight, we didn’t get home till about 8:30pm which sucked and the work day after sucked a lot too but the vacation was well worth it and I’m glad Maggie made me go lol.  Brandon had a wonderful time and I hope he remembers at least a little bit when he’s older. 

So we returned from Orlando late last night and I’m happy to report that we’re safe and sound.  The trip to Disney World was amazing and I really owe Maggie a thank you for always pushing for us to go away as a family more.  I took a ton of pictures and will edit some tonight, I’ll get them up shortly as I know a lot of friends and family members are asking. 🙂