terrorvision101

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Fort William, Nevis Range and Scotland

I decided after coming back to the UK from Canada, that I wanted to do another winter season. I had really enjoyed the last two, and the previous ones in Europe and New Zealand. So before I left Banff, I had started looking for work.

Sadly, the Brexit situation and my limited knowledge of French (and lack of contacts) made it a little tricky to find anything in the Alps, so I started applying…

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LA Pt5 - The Getty and the GO Card Pt3 - Sony Studios and Venice Beach

LA Pt5 – The Getty and the GO Card Pt3 – Sony Studios and Venice Beach

Continued from here

  So this was my day off from the GO Card, as I had a concert to head to that evening, so I found out what was offered at the hostel that day. The HI Santa Monica does a lot of different bits and pieces for the guests, most of which are free (or very cheap) and the event for that day was a trip up to The Getty, a famous museum up on the hill overlooking downtown. It focuses on

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LA Pt4 The GO Pass Pt2 - The studios

LA Pt4 The GO Pass Pt2 – The studios

Continued from here

So probably the best part of the Go Pass, was that if you buy the 3 day (or more) then you get entrance to Universal Studios included as well. Believe it or not, but I haven’t been to many theme parks, so I was not going to miss this chance!

Before that though, we thought a trip to the Warner Brothers Studiosmade sense. I hadn’t booked, but my new friend had – luckily it was…

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Hawaii, Hawaii, USA - Pt8.

Hawaii, Hawaii, USA – Pt8.

Continued from here

My last full day on the island, and the last chance to really explore – time to check out a volcano (again!) The Big Island has its fair share of them, and while the Volcano National Park is the most active, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea are much taller. And like the Volcano on Maui, Mauna Kea has a road right up the side. You can only go part way up with a normal car, but a 4×4…

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LA Pt.3 The GO Pass

LA Pt.3 The GO Pass

Continued from here

So most cities have some sort of multi attraction pass that gets you into a whole bunch of sites and museums. Often these are run by the city, and just cover the government run things, museums and historic sites mostly, but some cities have other cards run by an external company who try to get as many attractions in as possible to help sell the card. The LA one is really…

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LA Pt.2 Back to the Beach, Elysian Park and Downtown LA

LA Pt.2 Back to the Beach, Elysian Park and Downtown LA

Continued from here.

That morning, I met some folks at the Airbnb who were also going to the festival, so I hopped in with them, and arrived nice and early to the site for the second day. Much more of an emo feel to the day (with the exception of happy ska-punkers Less Than Jake). The first couple bands played pretty solid sets of earnest punky rock, but Story Of The Yearwere the first band I…

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LA Pt.1 Arrival, Newport and Back to the Beach day 1

LA Pt.1 Arrival, Newport and Back to the Beach day 1

I love live music, so when I saw one of my old favourite bands were playing down in LA, a city I’ve been hoping to experience for a long time, and it wasn’t in the peak of summer, I had to jump at the chance to get down there and get double the bang for my buck.

Back To The Beach is a music festival put on by John Feldmann of Goldfinger, and Travis Barker of Blink-182, two bands I loved as a…

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A Brief Update.

Things have changed quite a bit since my last post (except the last one about Hawaii, that I just added the tags to yesterday). Here’s a quick run down of the last few months in my life, and a few of the posts that I will hopefully get done in the coming months

My Canadian IEC Visa expired, and my efforts to get Permanent Residency hadn’t been successful, so I made plans to head back to the UKfor…

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Hawaii, Hawaii, USA - Pt7

Hawaii, Hawaii, USA – Pt7

Continued from here.

I had booked my car the day previous, but failed to do enough research on the buses – so I walked out to the airport. Not a great start, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. Once I had the car, the real fun began, my grand circumnavigation of the island, from Hilo to Ocean View.

Akakawas the first stop, a surprisingly popular tourist stop, with the tallest waterfall I saw…

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Hawaii, Hawaii, USA - Pt6

Hawaii, Hawaii, USA – Pt6

Continued from here.

Hilo immediately struck me as a nice place to be. Open and spacious, developed and interesting, with a nice combination of culture and commercialism. It’s not popular as a tourist destination, so it’s a haven for locals, and it shines because of that. There’s no $150 luau on the beach, instead there.s residents running restaurants with the cuisine of their origins – Thai,…

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Hawaii, Hawaii, USA - Pt5

Hawaii, Hawaii, USA – Pt5

Continued from here

So Day 3 on the big island, and time to tick some more bits of the list. I got dropped off in the morning at the start of the Green Beach trail, and as I had time to kill and didn’t fancy paying to stand awkwardly with other tourists in the deathtrap 4x4s, I walked across. It was fun watching the uncomfortable middle aged travelers jammed in the bed of the trucks bouncing…

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Hawaii, Hawaii, USA - Pt4

Hawaii, Hawaii, USA – Pt4

Continued from here.

The ‘commuter’ terminalin Maui might not be much to see, but the flight between really is. It’s not a scenic flight, but when there’s only eight of you in the plane and you’re flying right next to a volcano over perfect beaches it’s hard not to enjoy it. About twenty minutes over gorgeous blue ocean, trying to spot whales, and then we’re over the moon landscape of the lava…

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Maui, Hawaii, USA - Pt3

Maui, Hawaii, USA – Pt3

Continued from here

So where next? Well I love to climb volcanoes, so I went up the volcano. As much as driving really is cheating, it was still a cool drive, and that hike would’ve taken an awful long time to walk. It definitely the most commercial volcano I’ve been on, with a little gift shop up there, but really it wasn’t too bad. All the infrastructure was built for the observatory, so it…

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Maui, Hawaii, USA - Pt2

Maui, Hawaii, USA – Pt2

Continued from here

As we approached Hana there’s a little bundle of things to see. The village itself is cute, but not too exciting, so we grabbed some food at the street food stop just on the road back out of town. The food trucks here are a really good way to eat on a budget, much better value than restaurants in general, and a lot of the food is really good. Plus the surprisingly ethnically…

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Maui, Hawaii, USA - Pt1

Maui, Hawaii, USA – Pt1

One of the great things about working in the tourism industry is low seasons. Plenty of holiday time, and it’s usually a pretty cheap time to travel. I managed to get a break away from Canada just before Spring Break in the USA, and did my usual search to find the cheapest place I could get to that would tick a box and scratch an itch. Of course, one destination is no way to travel, so two…

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Elk Lakes Wilderness Hut NEEDS PICS

Elk Lakes Wilderness Hut NEEDS PICS

One of the wonderful advantages of working for Hostelling International, is that they’re very keen to encourage their staff to get out and about in the local area. Not just trying the nearby restaurants, but by getting out into the country and really experiencing the country.

So there was ten of us heading out, but the main crew had already left, so it was myself and two girls hiking the wilds of

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Jasper Again

As winter had been set in for a while, but starting to come to end, it seemed like a good time to re-visit Jasper, and make the most of the winter activities. If you’d like to know what I got up to on my first visit, check it out here.

We had a firm destination for this trip, skipping all of the stops along the Icefield Parkway(nearly everything is closed or frozen over anyway) we went all the…