London 2012 Olympics

After 7 years of waiting the London Olympics finally arrived.  When it was announced that the Olympics would be in London in 2012, I just assumed that I would be able to go.  Obviously a lot has changed since then and we found ourselves living a few thousand miles away and missing out on all the London 2012 excitement.

Not long after we arrived in DC in 2010, the Winter Olympics were held in Vancouver.  We were shocked at the quality of the TV coverage by the American TV network NBC, they seemed to be completely incapable of showing events live.  When I heard that NBC were covering the London Olympics I was really worried that they would make the same mess of the coverage but they said that they had taken on board the criticism from before and would make sure it was much better.  Well, they lied!!

The TV coverage was absolutely appalling.  It didn't get off to a good start when NBC didn't show the Opening Ceremony live.  We had to impose a social media ban on ourselves so that we didn't get any spoilers before we managed to watch it 5 hours later than the rest of the world.

My colleague Nick and I were excited that we had a TV in our office and planned to have it on all day watching the coverage while we worked.  However, NBC had other ideas.  They did show events all day but they didn't show anything important or worth watching, they saved anything good for their evening primetime show.  This meant that they hardly showed anything live so we usually knew the results before we got to watch the event.  The only event that I managed to see GB win a medal in live was the canoe slalom where they won gold and silver.  Nick and I were so excited watching it live but that was our one bit of live Olympics excitement!

We were fortunate that the Olympics was being held in London because that did mean that at least the primetime coverage did show a tiny bit of the GB home team competing rather than just the American team.  But you literally would have thought that team USA was the only nationality competing in the women's gymnastics!

NBC's real low point came when they didn't even show the men's 100m final live.  Can you believe that!!

And then just as I thought the coverage couldn't get any worse, the Paralympics got a total of 5.5 hours coverage over the whole 2 weeks!  You wouldn't have even known that the Paralympics was actually on.

I survived by following the Olympics and Paralympics coverage on the BBC website which was obviously nowhere near the same as being there or watching it on TV.  We do feel like we missed out, lots of our friends in the UK managed to go to watch events and were able to follow it all much more closely than we were.  It's just a shame that the timing of this 'once in a lifetime' event happened to occur during the 3 years that we were out of the country!

St Louis, Kansas City and Oklahoma City

At the end of July we clocked up another 3 states with a long weekend trip to St Louis, Kansas City and Oklahoma City with our friend James.

We spent the first day of the trip, Saturday in St Louis.  First stop was a trip to the famous Gateway Arch to buy some tickets for a tour to the top later in the day.  For some reason I assumed that it was made out of stone but it's actually stainless steel and it is a lot taller than I was expecting it to be, it's huge.

We had a walk around the City Garden or rather I walked around the City Garden while Chris and James sat watching the fountains contemplating whether they should run through them to cool down!

We decided to head indoors out of the heat in the afternoon so went to the City Museum.  It is without a doubt the best museum that I have ever been to and well worth the trip to St Louis just to go there.  It's basically just a giant playframe.  You can climb, crawl, slide, swing, squeeze through gaps and do whatever you want.  And the best thing is there are no age restrictions!

7 storey slide...

After a few hours in the museum we went back to the Arch so Chris and James could go to the top, I don't do heights so I waited for them at the bottom.

In the evening we went to Busch Stadium to watch the St Louis Cardinals vs Chicago Cubs.  The game was pretty dull until the 7th inning when the Cardinals scored 12 runs!

On Sunday morning we picked up our rental car and drove on to our next destination Kansas City.  It had been really hot in St Louis but when we arrived in Kansas it was unbelievably hot!  We had tickets for the lunchtime ball game at the Kansas City Royals and we arrived with enough time to spare to have a quick look at the Chiefs stadium which was right next door.

The Royals had hosted the All Star game a couple of weeks before we were there, it is a great ground, I think it is probably my favourite ball park that we have been to.  

The 3 of us agreed to watch the first 3 innings and then go for a wonder around the park but after the 1st innings we all changed our minds and agreed to go after the 2nd innings, we were sitting directly in the sun and it was so hot I literally felt like I was sitting in a pool of water.  It was hard to actually sit and enjoy the game, I was just waiting for the inning to finish so I could try to cool down somewhere.  And then someone went and got on base, ahhhhh!  When they were finally all out we all headed straight for the rest rooms to try to dry off a bit.  We spent quite a lot of the game walking around the ground and watching the game from different places and when we finally got back to our seats the sun had moved so that we were in the shade making it slightly better.  

After the game we headed downtown to look at some of the city before looking for some barbecue food.  We headed to Jack Stacks which I would describe as posh barbecue!  It was amazing food, I had pork ribs and burnt ends which are chunks of beef.

Most of Kansas City is in Missouri but we finally drove over the border into Kansas later in the evening  taking our state total up to 34!  We found ourselves a hotel in the middle of Kansas for the night before driving on to Oklahoma City on Monday morning.

When we arrived in Oklahoma City we went to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum first which wasn't as exciting as we thought it might be.  Next we headed to the Stockyards area of the city.  We had lunch at the Cattlemen's Cafe and had possibly the best steak all of us have ever had.

There were lots of western shops in the area so we spent some time trying on lots of hats and boots but didn't end up buying any.

Next we headed downtown and checked into our hotel.  We're all fans for the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team so we went and spent a small fortune in the team store before heading for the Oklahoma City Memorial.  

It is a really beautiful memorial, so peaceful and I found it really moving.  There are 2 pillars at either end of a reflecting pool, although there was no water in the pool, I'm sure it must have all evaporated in the heat.  Then there are chairs at the side of the pool, one for each person that lost their life.  The most heartbreaking thing was that there were smaller chairs for each of the children that had died.

We spent the rest of the evening exploring the Bricktown area of the city and I found a brilliant cupcake shop called Pinkitzel.  

Gettysburg

We had been wanting to visit Gettysburg for a long time but I kept waiting for the right weather.  Whenever we had a free weekend, it always seemed to be raining or too hot so finally I decided we just had to pick a weekend to go and deal with whatever the weather decided to do.  It decided to be cloudy and hot so not ideal for lots of walking around.

My friend lent us an audio tour CD which meant we could drive around the main points of interest and listen to a commentary.  This was a great way to do it because the place is huge!

It took us about 4 hours to complete the tour and we stopped at most of the stops for a walk around.  It was interesting but it was just so big, I think you need more than one visit or one day to fully appreciate it.

183 days in...

At the beginning of the year I decided to take part in Project 365+1.  The aim was to take a photo every single day of the year.  I wanted to use it as a way to record our last year in DC and I had grand intentions of learning how to use my camera properly and improve my photography skills.  The good news is that I have managed to get through half of the year taking a photo every day.  But, I haven't exactly made much effort with improving my skills!

I try to take a photo of something relevant to my day.  Some days are much easier than others.  There are days when I get home from work and have to really think about something interesting to take a photo of.  Taking photos of dinner and Chris are easy options so I've really tried to limit those.

I was worried that I might forget to take a photo but that's only happened once and I did remember at 10pm and then had to wonder around the house trying to find something to take a photo of!

On the whole I'm fairly happy with the photos that I've taken, there are probably about 10 that I don't like but I'm stuck with because I didn't get anything better that day.

I'm planning to put together a photo book at the end of the year with all of my photos but here's a little sample from a few days in July...

7 July - Georgetown, early on a very hot Saturday morning

8 July - cheering on Andy Murray in the Wimbledon final

9 July - my tomato plant.  The next day, the wind blew it over and it snapped in half!!

10 July - Chris' new t-shirt on the day of the All Star game

11 July - Flag football

12 July - Friendship Heights