I met up with the others in La Ceiba and we caught the ferry over the next morning. It was a rough ride across so we were glad to get there.
Meeting up with the lads in La Ceiba.
We’d booked a hotel room a few minutes walk from the pier and found it to be a great little place – it had a cool bar/restaurant and even a pool! We went to suss out the diving and Earner and I signed up to do the two-day Advanced Open Water course with Utila Dive Centre, while Poff and Jeffers went and did a few dives with another outfit.
The local beach. A favourite haunt – the tree-house bar.
New Year’s Eve was a lot of fun and we went back to one of our favourite places – a bar over the water – for a huge dance party. It was a great night! We rolled into bed about 4am and Jeffers didn’t show up until mid-morning.
On New Year’s Day we rented a Hobiecat catamaran, loaded up on some beers and got sailing. We roared downwind along the full length of the island to a group of smaller islands where we planned to chill out for a few hours before sailing back. That’s where it all went horribly wrong: a few hours before sunset we decided to start heading back up the island, and we found that – with a centreboard – the catamaran couldn’t sail upwind at all! We started drifting away from the island, and the only way we could get back to the island was for three of us to swim along dragging the boat through the water! Eventually we needed to get towed back to where we started (a story in itself) and arrived back well after dark, greeted by the irate owners of the boat.
Myself, Poff and Earner on our ill-fated catamaran trip, just before it all went to shit.
Berkeley plays Stanford at football (that is, American Football) each year in the Big Game. It’s been played for the past 100+ years and is a huge event in the Bay Area – it seems like everyone in the city is either a Cal or Stanford alum!
I went to the game this year with a bunch of friends from school, and was AMAZED to see the Memorial Stadium at capacity – that’s about 70,000+ spectators!! (A far cry from the handful of people we’d have watching the rugby at Monash University!) I can’t say I’m much of a fan of “football”, but it was definitely a spectacle. Especially seeing as we defeated Stanford by about 30 points!
The Cal Alumni Network hosting lunch in front of the Campanile.
Wow!
The Cal band at halftime. Raa raa.
Here are a few pictures from my trip to New York for the Net Impact conference.
Of course a business school student just HAD to visit Wall Street!
The Columbia University campus.
Central Park in Autumn – fantastic!
Jazz in the Park. This sculpture used to be outside the WTC.
Ice skating in Central Park.