BACK FROM THE U.S
will try and keep this as short as possible, but with all the stuff we did it might be hard.
to all the members who asked me to pick them up jersey's/shoes/cards etc etc, i have already pm'd the members i have brought things back for. there wasn't that much. too all the members i didn't bring anything back for...............sorry
but most of you guys wanted east coast stuff and there wasn't much of a choice for east coast teams on the west coast.
i did bring back alot of jersey's though, a fare few lebrons(home,away,alternate and all star, a couple of each) got some duncan's,shaq's,wade's,kg,marion,kobe,melo and a jordan usa. all of these were between $17 and $34u.s except the jordan u.s.a which cost me $45.
i didn't go to as many games as we had planned as we ran out of time everywhere we went (or in some cases just didn't get to the arena's in time), we planned on seeing a dallas home game as there was a signing afterwards and we didn't get anywhere near the arena till almost midnight
we did also see some playoff games aswell , phoenix vs l.a x 2 games, san antonio vs denver x 1 game, dallas vs golden state x 2 games, and if we didn't see them live we saw 90% of them on t.v as they would have double or even triple headers everyday.(you get more games in a day over there then you do in a whole week over here......)
watching most of these games that we actually went to,(except for the games in l.a and oakland) we did on a 12 day rv trip which was an awesome experience. we travelled around/through california,nevada,utah,arizona,new mexico,wyoming,texas and mexico.
we went to places like bryce and zion national parks, grand canyon, hoover dam,rocky mountains and of course vegas(which my wife and i spent 3 days there by ourself without the kids
)
in vegas we stayed in the venetian hotel WOOOWW, what an amazing hotel it is literally like it's own city absolutely huuuge!!!! one of the highlight's of vegas for me was that i met charles barkley
and one of his mates ron ...somebody, he sat down where i was playing blackjack and layed down $250,000 in about half an hour and then left, he is one funny guy i couldn't belive the shit he was talking to everyone at the table about and then he picked my accent and asked if i was australian, i said yes, so we chatted for about 5 minutes and then he gets a good hand and says to me not to mess it up for him, so said to him that he better not mess up my hand or i will get shane heal to kick his ass again...........he started laughing and then says who is shane heal, so i then had to explain who shane heal was and he just says in his smugg way ohh yeh i remember him (he was just joking that he didn't know who shane heal was) very funny character.
when we did our l.a and san diego trip we took the kids to disneyland,universal studios,seaworld,legoland,wild animal park.
we did disneyland on a saturday(big mistake) there were so many people there you could barely move and for the more popular rides you had to wait in line anywhere from 1 hour to 4 hours, which was ridiculous. needless to say the kids didn't have the best time and they only got to meet a few characters(mickey mouse,minnie mouse,donald duck,goofy and pluto) even though we stayed there all day (10am till midnight) we still didn't get to do much as the lines for everything were huge, we even held our dinner off till almost 8pm and it took almost an hour just to get our food.
so what we did on sunday was skipped universal studios and went shopping instead, and then went to universal studios on monday to try and avoid the crowds. we did avoid the crowds and universal was awesome, there was absolutely no lines for any rides and the studio tours were only half full. the kids got autographs of all the characters and even hung out with spiderman for about 20 minutes shooting webs(silly string) at people as they walked through the entry gates........very funny stuff.
on the studio tour we got to meet a few members of the cast from desperate housewives.........terri hatcher YUMMI, she is so hot and very nice too, my wife got here autograph( i just kept having flash backs of her when she played lois, in the lois and clark t.v show back in the day
), also met marcia ....somebody(i think it's cross) and james ....somebody , the guy who plays terri hatchers love interest, got all there autographs and it was a great experience.
seaworld,legoland and wild animal park were all awesome aswell, we got absolutely soaked at seaworld by shamu the killer whale and went on a roller coaster that drops you 144 ft in 2.3 seconds, scared the crap out of my wife , my wifes mum and my 9 year old son , but my 3 year old son sat there and went daddy can we go again, so me and bailey (3 years old )went on the roller coaster another 3 times, one of very few rides he could go on because everywhere has height restrictions and definately in the top 3 scariest rides we went on.
legoland was great for the kids(not much for parents as there are reverse height restrictions , like no one above 1.5m) but we all still had a ball, and my 3 year old could go on most of the rides which he was very happy about.
and then there is wild animal park were our tour bus got attacked by one of the lions(i got some great photo's of this), it was just like driving around in africa with a big steel cage on the outside of the bus.
the last 2 things i will mention is the card shows and shopping, we were actually suppose to go to 4 or 5 card shows, but just like everything else we always seemed to run out of time, so we only got to 2, one was in utah and the other in l.a. the one in utah was good but alot of baseball cards and all the basketball cards were pretty pricey. i don't collect baseball cards , but if i did thats were you would go, i reckon well over 1,000,000 cards in this school hall type of building.
the show in l.a was unbelievable, it was like a car show.......lights , camera , action.............millions upon millions of cards, i only had 2 hours spare at this show, so i only saw about a quarter of it, i picked up about 15 sprewell cards i needed, all for the measly sum of $5 and these are cards i have been looking for , for ages, like a 1994 pro magnet, 91-92 classic gold version an 02-03 dual allstar jersey of spree and houston $60bv
and i also picked up a t-mac 04-05 swee6t spot auto for $30(only 6 to go
now the shopping , i don't think many people know how cheap it is over there if you just shop around, day to day bargains like alcohol( i am a beer,bourbon and red wine drinker), you can get a case of corona's for $20, a 1.75l bottle of makers mark bourbon for $30 etc etc.
we picked up clothing for the kids (ages 1,3,9 and 12) , 90% of all the clothing we got was between the price of $0.50c - $10 and this is all brand name clothing - nike, adidas,reebok,tommy hilfiger,oshkosh,carters..............shoes we did not pay above $44.95 for a pair of shoes, nike shox that i bought $39.95u.s, just checked foot locker on the weekend $229.95au.......crazy, i also got a pair of golf shoes that i priced over here at $119.95, got them at the vegas nike outlet for $14.
if anyone wants to ask any questions or anything just fire away, or if you would like photo's of something (i have about 1800 photo's)just ask, and sorry once again to everyone i couldn't pick anything up for.
cheers
justin
There should be some room for the carry on luggage if the plane's short a few people!
