My trip to Texas is all booked. I leave here on the 9th of December at 9pm and arrive in Dallas three hours before that :)

Well, I'm off to Texas for a few weeks.

I'm baaaack! Actually I've been back for a couple of weeks now but things have been so incredibly busy that I haven't had a chance to post.

Here's some of the highlights of my trip:

This page lists and links to my favourite photos from my US trip. These don't necessarily correspond to the places I enjoyed the most.

Steve has already posted a trip log covering Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Las Vegas, so I won't duplicate his effort here. Instead, I just want to jot down some random observations and thoughts about American culture. To me, American culture seems to have about three major components: food, shopping & TV. This post will cover the food.

This post continues my series on American culture. I have already dealt with American food, this post is on shopping, and TV is still to come.

This post continues my series on American culture. I have already dealt with American food and shopping, and this post is about TV. I have a few random observations mostly concerning driving still to come.

This post wraps up my series on American culture. I have already dealt with American food, shopping, and TV. This post is mostly concerned with roads and driving.

I went to Melbourne for a shopping trip this weekend. My sister overflowed her suitcase, but I only got a few pairs of shoes and a few tops. Shopping isn’t really my thing. Next time I go to Melbourne, I’ll spend a bit more time sightseeing. Still, it was the first holiday/break I’ve had in several years, so it was good.

Well, this weekend proved to be more of an adventure than a mystery. The backstory is that I won an Air New Zealand Mystery Weekend for 2 people for 2 nights. I was asked to participate in an online discussion forum about FlyBuys & Air New Zealand Airpoints a few months ago. I made sure to tell them what I thought in detail and was given the mystery weekend for being the best contributor. I only had a few months to use it though, and most weekends were ruled out for one reason or another and so it came down to 12th, 13th & 14th of August.

My flight was one of two to depart at 4:20pm, but because the inbound flight was delayed, we were now scheduled to depart at 4:45pm, and start boarding at 4:25pm. About 5 minutes before boarding was due to start I thought I should probably go to the toilet and get packed up and ready to go. On my way to the toilet, I stopped to look at the view of the hills to the east out of the big picture windows. By the time I came out of the toilets, all I could see out of that window was white. The entire airport was engulfed in a blizzard. It was like being inside a snow globe. Over the next hour, they just kept delaying the flights by 15 minutes at a time, until finally around 5:30pm there was a bit of a break.

My flight was scheduled for 9: 45am. It was still dark at 6am but it didn't look like there had been any further snowfall, and it wasn't snowing anymore. Once it got a bit lighter, we could see that there was a couple of inches of snow, and they sent out a fire engine with a snowplow attachment to start clearing it.