After 3000 Miles - Newport Beach and Santa Barbara...

...Our last stop before driving up further North on the famous U.S. Route 101 was Newport Beach. Most of you will know this place from the teen drama series O.C. California. It is also a calm place with a lot of yacht clubs and very nice beaches.

Santa Barbara was next - it is till now one of my favorite places on the west coast. The city itself is very beautiful, not too big and there is everything what you need. We spent there yesterday evening and today nearly all the day.

Palm trees - they are everywhere in the city - the city itself is very green - just nice.
Sunset on the first evening in Santa Barbara:
Lifeguard on duty:State street:
Currently we are in Santa Maria and leaving tomorrow morning to go to Moneterey and to stay over night in Santa Cruz.

Whales and Dolphins - San Diego, La Jolla and Del Mar

...On Sunday evening we arrived after our beach hopping day in Los Angeles via Venice, Santa Monica and Malibu Beach in San Diego. The area around Malibu is awesome and I can now understand why so many VIP's have their villas there...

Anyway, we drove in the evening to San Diego what is also a very nice city. It's directly on the boarder to Mexico which we did not cross. Our rental agreement prohibited this trip otherwise we would have gone to Tijuana.

1) La Jolla
This spot is a bit outside of San Diego and is a really nice village. There we went to children's pool to see the seals and afterwards we drove around in the village and up to a mountain were we had a 360 degree view over all the area. We also got a tour through Peter Lik Art Photography gallery which was very nice. One day, when I earn more money I will buy one of these pictures. You should check out the website...
2) San Diego
It is also a very nice city with already a really Mexican atmosphere - you can feel that you are pretty close to the boarder. On the second day we made a Whale, Dolphin and Sea lion's watching trip which was very impressive. We saw many Dolphins, Sea lion's and also some Grey Whales. They pictures are not very good, but I took some nice movies, but the reality was much better.
3) Del Mar
After visiting San Diego we also made a stop at the famous Del Mar. There is a great beach which should be one of the most beautiful in California - and it was awesome! We walked through the town and had dinner in a very nice Surfer bar ;)
Currently we are in Newport Beach - many of you will know it from O.C California. We will visit the spots here tomorrow morning and are afterwards heading up North to Santa Barbara.

Universal Studios Hollywood...

...Yesterday we visited the Universal Studios Hollywood which is the flagship theme park of the Universal Studios. Universal itself call this park - The Entertainment Capital of L.A. :-)
The studios are huge and quite expensive, but it was worth every penny we spent there. We did all important rides like
- The Simpson Ride
- The Mummy Ride
- The Jurassic Park Ride
- The House of Horrors (very scary)
and visited also many shows like
- Backdraft
- Waterworld (rated as the #1 show and definitely it was also my no. 1)
- Shrek 4D
- Terminator 2D, 3D (was great!)
- and the Special Effects show.
Between all these shows and rides we took some fun pictures - see more below:

The Terminator:
Jason Bourne and me:
The Zorro:
Waterworld show:
Krustyland, where the Simpson ride is located:
Dinner with Basha:
Yesterday evening Basha and me took the opportunity to meet up again. I know this very nice guy from my time in Dubai where we worked together on the successful POS launch. Unfortunately we did not meet each other since nearly 2 years - next time we will met up in Austria :-)
On the picture - Basha, Markus and me.
Today we are going to leave L.A. and we are driving to San Diego. Let's see what this place will bring...

Los Angeles - First Time...

...We arrived in L.A. on Wednesday afternoon and had already a great time here. Did lots of sightseeing (Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Hollywood Blvd, etc.) and there are two more days to go here and still many places to visit. See below some first pictures:

Must have - the Hollywood sign and me:

David, Spiderman and me:
Elvis and me:
Walk of Fame on the Hollywood Blvd. - I love Austin Powers and also Mike Myers is a great actor:
Also Pepsi cheers for the new President Barack Obama:
Markus, me and the girl who asked us for a picture at Chateau Marmont in Hollywood:

Roadtrip - Canyon Tour

...Our next stop after a more than 6 hours drive away from Las Vegas was the Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. We arrived in the evening and had around -10 degrees Celsius and were at around 2,400 m above the sea level. In Vegas we had 25 degrees Celsius.
This Canyon is not as well known as the Grand Canyon and therefore not as crowded. See below some pictures...

Grand Canyon National Park:
And another long drive 6 hours, what else? - next stop - the Grand Canyon which is located in Arizona.
After around 2,200 miles we reached yesterday afternoon Los Angeles and we are now somewhere in West Hollywood. We cruised already through Beverly Hills and "inspected" some nice houses.

Off-topic:
The gas prices in the U.S. are great for us during these days, because we drive a lot.
This was not the cheapest gas station, but a pretty good one.

Pictures from the first week will come soon...

California Roadtrip - Week #01...

...To keep you guys a bit up to date see below a short overview of what we did so far. We drove already over 1,200 miles :-)

* San Francisco, California
From Saturday to Wednesday morning - we did there all important sights like the Golden Gate bridge, Golden Gate Park, Union Square, Alcatraz, Muir Woods, etc. This city is wonderful and I liked the place very much. Fortunately we could stay at the place of a friend of mine so they gave us some insider tips. Thanks again to Eszter and Jay!

* Berkely, California
On Wednesday morning we made a short stop at the famous university there.

* Yosemite National Park, California
This park was really wonderful. I have to upload some pictures - as you know they say more than thousand words.

* Death Valley National Park, California
We stayed all Thursday long at the national park. The park is very big and it's great what you can see there. Nice mountains, sand dunes, the deepest point in the U.S., etc.
In the evening we left the park and drove to Beatty where we stayed over the night. Beatty is a typical U.S. country side town where we found a nice saloon with cowboys :-)

* Las Vegas, Nevada
Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. We expected a lot from Vegas - but it was not too much. It is a crazy place and super artificial. You can gamble wherever and all the time you want. We stayed at the Excalibur hotel (its built like a castle :-)), had a great brunch at the Bellagio and went to lots of good bars and clubs like the 'Coyote Ugly' (like in the movie) and to 'The Bank'.

Today in the afternoon we left Vegas and drove to the Bryce Canyon (Utah) where we are now in a motel. We will drive through the canyon tomorrow and go later on to the Grand Canyon (Arizona).

California Here We Come...

...In a few hours we are going to New York JFK airport to catch our American Airlines flight to San Francisco. We all are totally looking forward to California...

California dreamin'

See below our planned route:
I will have my laptop with me and hopefully I will have time to update you guys from time to time...

I'm now pretty scared to leave the fabulous and wonderful and amazing and gorgeous and super fun New York City. Fortunately I will come back again for some days in February :-)

Museum Visits and Other Tours...

...The Big Apple is also very famous, because it's the home of many important museums. Due to that, I've found fortunately some spare time during the past months to visit the most important ones. See below a short selection of the "best parts" (it's just my point of view and I did not mention all of them). I have just posted some pictures of each museum - otherwise the blog post would get too long and as you know I have too many pictures of everything ;)

Guggenheim Museum
Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET)
American Museum of Natural History
United Nations Headquarters New York
Yeah - Go Austria, Go :-)


Definitely the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was also very interesting, but I did not take good pictures there. I just was totally impressed and overwhelmed and therefore I had no time to take pictures :-)

When I'm back in the city beginning of February, I also want to visit the Skyscraper Museum and also the New Museum. Let's see if I have time and if I'm still motivated for these visits after our "monster" west coast road trip with over 2.000 miles by car.