chrisbramm.co.uk » Holiday 2010

Rest of the Holiday

wiz — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:44:55 +0000

So I now I’ve remembered, here are the rest of the pictures I took on holiday
Alcatraz:

San Francisco by night

A collection of pictures took at the California Science Institute (The museum building was designed by Arup but I didn’t know this so I have no pictures of the building)

Pictures taken from various boat rides out into the bay

The Golden Gate Bridge

Other Pictures of San Francisco

Yosemite Tour

wiz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:41:54 +0000

The last day that we spent near Yosemite was on the Glacier Point tour and I took lots of pictures. Here are my best ones.

Sequoias

wiz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:33:06 +0000

One of the days that we were near Yosemite, we drove up to Mariposa Grove to see the giant redwood trees.

Road Trip Day Two

wiz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:47:07 +0000

The second day of travelling we drove over the Tioga Pass through the mountains

The City Centre

wiz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:45:57 +0000

On the plane over I watched a documentary called build it bigger, about the Las Vegas CityCenter Development and it is quite frankly a phenomenal development.
Sitting on a 30 acre plot in the centre of las Vegas, the development contains 5 luxury hotels and apartments including the Aria hotel and casino which has over 4,000 rooms. And, because there are apartments/condominiums the development, which would have normally been built in phases, had to be built at the same time so people who were living in their apartments were not looking out onto a building site. This then posed a challenge for the contractors as to build the Aria, 5 tower cranes were erected and all overlapped and required careful planning so that loads would not collide in flight and threaten to bring down the cranes.
There were other challenges to the development as well. Due to the proximity of the airport the FAA has put a height limit of 650ft. The standard hotel layout is as a Y shape with the lifts in the centre but with the heigh limit the only way of increasing the number of rooms would be to increase the lenth of the wings and in a country that rarely walks it would be a sure fire way to annoy guests. The architects then came up with an iconic way of increasing the number of rooms beget added an extra wing an moulded an X shape into 2 mirrored interlocking C shaped. This meant that the Aria can comfortably hold over 4,000 rooms
The Veer towers are also an incredible feat of engineering. Leaning 4.63 degrees to the north and also to the west, this added a number of complications to the extremely tight building schedule. The tight schedule required one floor to be added each week and as a result engineers designed a new concrete that would set quickly in the desert heat but the quick setting would not induce any cracks that would weaken the structure.
Hopefully taking Civil Engineering next year I had to go and have a look and here are the pics grouped by subject

The Aria

The Veer Towers

The Mandarin Oriental

The Vdara

The Harmon

Last Day in Vegas

wiz — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:01:47 +0000

Here are the photos our last day in Vegas

Grand Canyon

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:20:21 +0000

One of the main features of the holiday was the trip to the grand canyon and to be honest I cannot really do the pictures justice so I will just leave you with the pictures.

Vegas Day One

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:09:01 +0000

Woke up on the first day and had breakfast in the room then ventured out on to the Las Vegas strip, camera in hand. I got numerous photos and here are the best ones.

After viewing the Belagio fountains we then went inside to find a conservatory garden with many sculptures made out of flowers.

Getting to Vegas

wiz — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:22:10 +0000

We got to the airport to find that the flight that we were meant to be on had not in fact taken off from Philadelphia and so the first hour of the journey was stood in a queue in Manchester airport waiting for the flight to take off. Once it had taken off and we knew the plane was coming we were allowed to check in and go through security. Even though the plane was delayed about 7 hours, it allowed us time to relax in the airport, read magazines etc and we eventually boarded the plane at around 4:30pm BST. We then had to wait in the aeroplane for a fuel truck to come and refuel the plane which added about 40 minutes to the flight time which when the flight had been delayed for 7 hours Manchester airport really should have had sorted, ready and waiting. Still, we got into the air and had a good flight, little turbulence and good film selection for the headset TVs, Sherlock Holmes is well worth a watch and Finding Nemo is always nice to watch when you want something to pass the time
We always knew that with the delayed transatlantic flight it would be an incredibly tight connection to the flight to Vegas, especially having to go through immigration, pick up the luggage and go through customs but even so it doesn’t excuse the fact that Philadelphia airport did not in one bit try to speed our passage through the airport. Alright there were at least 300 other people on the plane all likely with connections of their own but when you only have an hour in an airport even small delays count. First off was baggage, we were stood round for 5 minutes before they told us which carousel the bags were coming out of and then another 5 minutes waiting for the first bags to arrive. Then customs added to the delays and finally we had to go back through security.
This however was a vastly different experience to security at Manchester. At Manchester, a lot of money has been spent making the process as efficient as possible and I accept that at Manchester when we went through security it was 9am compared to 8:30pm local time in Philadelphia, but even so, the airport knew the plane was delayed and there would be many people trying to get connections. But in the face of all that there was only one scanner open for business when there are in fact 8. Add to that TSA rules about what you need to put where i.e. you have to remove footwear yet didn’t at Manchester. But the woman in charge was from another world, rather than trying to help us through swiftly, everything we did was not right. Katy and I, both carrying passports and boarding passes had put them in one of the trays with my shoes and belt. Then she said she wouldn’t let us through without our boarding cards/passports and so we had to spend 5 minutes arguing with this woman that we had put our passports/boarding cards through the scanner rather than holding them. We all came away with the overall feeling that the staff at Phili where the most unhelpful.
Still we made the plane to Vegas which was noisy but quite empty and so everyone could spread out to sleep. With it being a night flight all the lights were off and so that made the flight seem quite long with others sleep. We got into Vegas at about 11pm PDT and eventually got to the hotel at about 00:30. The hotel is absolutely huge and as a result took us half an hour to find our own room after being directed to the wrong elevators.
That is all for now, I’ll put another post up later with pictures of the strip.