I only got s few hours of sleep and wasn’t feeling so hot when I got to the airport. The toilet signs definitely put a smile on my face though, but it made me wish I didn’t have to leave.
travel
The Dole Plantation
I parked the car last night at the hotel, in a spot where I apparently was not allowed to. I got I warning on the window that if I didn’t move my car immediately, it would get towed. And they were not kidding around, I couldn’t even remove the sticker!
The note on the car aside, it’s always nice to live on the beach, even if it just for a weekend.
I took the highway about 30 minutes up north and stopped by the Dole Plantation. I LOVE pineapple, its my favorite fruit so I was uber excited to check it out!
Started off with having breakfast, a pineapple whip, topped with even more pineapple!
Then I strolled around the plantation, I had no idea there were so many different types of pineapples.
They had a pond with fish in the middle of the plantation.
It got pretty crazy when we tossed them some fish food.
I’m a pineapple!
I took the Pineapple Express around the plantation, and got to learn a bunch about how the whole thing started.
They also had a garden you could stroll around and learn about the Hawaiian flora and vegetable. Here is a rainbow tree, nice and colorful!
Pineapples are a part of the Bromeliad family, who knew?
They also had carambola trees, my second favorite fruit! I was so tempted to pick a fruit from the tree, but I didnt want to get into trouble.
After the Dole plantation, we hit the north sore, awesome for surf, snorkel or just bumming around.
We came back to the beach cottage, wrapped our stuff together and took off to spend the last night in Waikiki.
Pearl Harbor
I woke up this morning in a cottage by Barbers Point Beach on Oahu, Hawaii, not too bad!
I was so excited and walked down to feel the temperature of the water straight from bed, without even paying a visit to the restroom!
After a short stroll on the beach, I took the car into Honolulu to check out Pearl Harbor. 
I love history and have always been a huge fan of national history museums and such and was excited to get to visit the Pearl Harbor. I studied the 2nd world war in school, but the main focus was whatever the europeans was involved in, not so much what was going on between the Americans and and Asians. 
You could pay $10 and get on to t submarine, I didnt think it was worth it and just looked at it fro a distance instead.
The memorial for everyone that passed away in the Pearl Harbor attack.
There was a lot of construction and “coming soon” going on, so it wasnt as good as I had hoped, but they had build a really cool memorial over the sunken battle ship USS Arizona that you got to take short boat ride out to.
I thought it would be lame, just some kind of monument with a bunch of names, but it turned out the ship was still laying there underneath you with some parts still sticking up from the ocean, super cool!
The USS Arizona was huge, the red circle is the end of the ship, about 1/3rd of the ship is still behind me.
There is still oil leaking from the ship, I wonder why they cant clean that up, but I’m sure theres a reasonable exclamation for it.
Back in shore, I thought these roots were interesting!
Came back to the beach cottage and jumped in the ocean before it was time to get ready for a night of party.
Vacation!
Heading to Hawaii for the first time, super excited! Not exactly sure were I was heading… got invited to a wedding at the “Honolulu island” which I now know is called Ohau. Started off, of course with a beer at the airport.
Bye Bye LA!
Heading Back Home
Bummed out to be heading back home 🙁
We did have some time for a last glass of wine.
Cerro Catedral day 2
I never wanted to go to bed last night, so much to chat about! But when everyone else was tucked up in bed and I only heard some occasional mhmm from the bunk beds, I thought it might be time.
It kept on snowing throughout the night, but we saw some blue spots on the sky when we woke up. We were all really tired in the morning but quickly forgot about it when we started to bread the fresh mountain breeze.
Due to the heavy snowfall, even more lifts were closed this morning. We wanted to get to one part of the mountain to another. You can usually do this by a chairlift that was closed today, or by going all the way down to the base and go up with another lift. We didnt want to go down and stand in line again, it’d be a lot quicker if we just traversed around that peak… We asked the ski patrol where we could hike and ski, they said we could go anywhere we wanted expect for one peak that he pointed out for us. He also told us to YouTube why:
We took his word for it and traversed over our little peak, it was not very far, and not very steep and wooha, a whole field open up!
Tagging the mountain is always fun!
This was the last day of skiing and the time went by way to fast. Me and Danny are preparing for a long trip back to LA while Magnus and Johan are gonna stay for another 3 weeks.
Cerro Catedral
Cerro Catedra, South Americas largest ski resort is located 19km from Bariloche, sweet, thats a 30 minute drive tops! Hmm, that’s if everyone had their chains on, and/or knew how to drive in a heavy snow fall… Oh well, that’s not the case so we sat back, relaxed and watched the chaos.
A little delayed, but safe and sound we made it up and were ready to hit some fresh powder.
But wait, due to the heavy snow (and it kept on dumping) they just had to dig out the lifts first!
Fortunately, only half of the system was snowed in, and we had plenty of snow to play in until they had found the rest of the lifts.
We found an open field with untouched snow, we just had to traverse over to the next peak. Traverse over is a piece of cake for skiers, but a pain for boarders. Magnus gave Geico one of his poles to help keep the hight and speed, but Geico still didn’t make it all way and dropped down early. Magnus was happy anyway, now he got a chance to show us how they use to ski with just one pole back in the 19th century.
One more powder day down, 4 out of 4, not bad at all!
We had a bunch of things to take care of after the mountain today, me and Danny are heading back to US tomorrow so we had get our things together, go to the supermarket to pick up snacks, find the bus station where our bus will leave from tomorrow, get a postcard for my grandfather, get some chocolate, shower, check email and flight reservations and play dominoes. All in this order and it had to be done before 9pm, we had dinner reservations and were told that if we were 5 minutes late we would loose our table.
We hit the supermarket on our way down from the mountain, drove around for a while trying to find the bus station when we realized that all that time we had was not gonna be enough!
Change of plans… lets find a postcard and the bus station tomorrow! It would be a bummer not to be able to buy chocolate, but I would still survive, let’s just get back to the hostel to shower and get our stuff together.
Quickly check e-mails and flights, no time for dominoes! Heading for the italian restaurant that we all were super excited about when we saw the big chocolate store was still open! Jackpot!
We fooled around for a while before we realized we’d loose our reservation and had to run the last few blocks to the restaurant.
Ice cream for dessert!
We found another irish bar and introduced Danny to the world of Pisco Sour.
Exclusive chocolate at 3:30 am, best thing ever!
Chapelco
I dug up my iPod from my ski bag last night so the 30 minutes up the mountain from San Martin to Chapelco was a big sing-along fest. Once we got there, it was a little gray, and the mountain didn’t seem that big, and a little boring – not much mountain to speak of, more like a big hill. But, what the heck, lets make the best of it!
We went straight to the top, and the first run down was in snow blizzard. The snow felt awesome under our feet, a few inches of fresh powder, but I get emotion sick when I don’t have a point of reference to concentrate my eyes on, and it feels like you are going super fast while you are standing still, so the first run was not that great. I did not have to whine for very long before we found the trees. 
The tree runs were beautiful! All by ourselves, fresh tracks, reference points, rocks and small drops, a huge playground!
Another great day of skiing, and we didn’t have to hike!
Around 3:30pm, and 6 hours of skiing, I think we all had a couple of more runs in us but we decided to call it a day as we were heading further south, to Bariloche. We had a map over the roads in Argentina and they were all color coded, green means stay away, red means a well maintained road that is hopefully paved. It’s a little backwards, but we are in the southern hemisphere so green means stop and red means ok go!
We picked a road that was red on our map, we didn’t drive very far until we had to stop.
Then a couple of miles later it turned into a dirt road.
That soon turned into a mud road! Great, we only had 100km to go!
There were a short moment when I thought we might have made a wrong turn somewhere, but we kept on meeting other cars and trucks and we eventually, after a couple of hours made our way to San Carlos de Bariloche.
We checked in at a hostel that was located on the 10th floor with great views over the city. A Swedish girl was working in the reception and recommended we go check out an italian restaurant down the road. It was packed when we got there and a 45 minute wait to get a table, so we reserved a table for tomorrow instead and tumbled into a stake house instead. They also had a 45 minute wait to get a table, but happen to have a good wine cellar with a bar where we patiently waited.
It was closer to 11pm when we got our food, but it was well worth the wait!
Bariloche has a few casinos, one was on our way home. I’m not much of a gambler, but Magnus loves casinos and while the guys were debating whether we should go in or not, I took the initiative and walked through the door. The rest did not hesitate and walked straight to a black jack table. I watched them loose some monies for a while before one of them gave me 100 pesos and told me to sit down and play with them. One drink and a bunch of high fives later I had doubled the pesos and it was time to check out! 
San Martin de los Andes
The road didn’t get much better this morning, so we quickly decided to take it easy, not rush to the mountain, get there when we get there and chill in the town instead.
San Martin de Los Andes is a small town with a population of 24’000, at the foot of the Andes, only 45km from the Chilean border. We got there around lunch time and immediately went exploring.
I was in the hunt for a postcard for my grandfather and a new first layer to ski in (the first layer next to your skin that is keeping you warm and dry by soaking up all the sweat). I only brought one first layer, and all the hikes have made it stinky – I was in the need for a new one anyway so I might as well buy one here!
But first things first, lunch!
What is the deal with every country that has mountain has good chocolate? It is not necessary a good thing for someone like me with severe chocolate addiction.
And then ice cream off course!
Since it’s a relatively small town with only one main street, we managed to find my first layer shirt quickly, but unfortunately no postcard for my grandfather. They have siesta in Argentina, which means – We’re eating dinner late! With this in mind we went to the supermarket to get something to snack on at the hostel while waiting for the dinner hour.
Loving the prices here, yes, a bottle of really nice wine for 16 pesos, which is about US$4!
And the 1 liter bottles of beers off course! Much more social to buy one large bottle and share than many small ones!
On the way home I was kind of in my own little world, as usual thinking about happy clouds when I suddenly caught the boys drooling while staring at this window. Sorry Nea, we’re eating this for dinner tonight! Quickly in to make a reservation for 9:30pm!
El touristo!
Back to the hostel for a game of dominos and backgammon.
Playing with the flash – to cool for school!
We were all super excited for dinner, this was gonna be our first proper dinner at a restaurant together, and the guys were gonna get to eat whatever they were gonna get to eat… When we were about 5 steps away from the restaurant where we had reserved a table, the whole town turned black. The city ran out of power! Everything was dark, except, wait, our restaurant still had power! We are pretty good at picking restaurants!
Whats cooking?
Argentina are proud of their red meat, and they apparently know how to cook it as well. I would not know since I dont like red meat. But I’m not so picky and there is always something on the menu that I can eat, like seafood or chicken, and if not there’s always fries and a bowl of ice cream. Since the Chileans really know how to cook seafood and we were only 45km away from the Chilean border, I ordered trout, which was awesome!After dinner we went to an Irish bar that we had spotted earlier, but they had a horrible horrible cover band, I swear I could have done it better! And the beers were a little over priced so we called it a night early so we could get up early and dandy to ski in the morning.
