7/5/2026 10th Anniversary Trip Day 1: Leaving the kids at home, we're off to Tahiti!
Well.... it's been a WHILE since I've written a travel blog. Yes, Pandemic (that was a whole damn thing wasn't it?) and then, well the two beautiful children have added much joy and also utterly decimated whatever 'spare' time used to exist in my evenings which I used to fill with travel blogging and who-knows-what-else of my yesteryears. Haha. So, a bit of a blast from the past. Seems the previous travel blog I wrote was for our honeymoon (in 2017!) so I suppose it's quite fitting that the next one was for our 10th Year Anniversary celebration trip. :)
We have done some awesome fun international travel with the kids (Portugal!) and of course Canada many times, and we went to Alaska last year with them too -- but it's been hard to find time to make trip notes whilst on a trip, and then to make time (like I am, now, as we 'speak'..) to write up the blog after-the-fact. But alas, here we are! Glad to be 'back' in this familiar territory. (And no, there's no way in heck I am getting some AI to write this for me based on scanning my travel notes, no thanks). Unfiltered, ramble-y Mike Jutan stream-of-consciousness, here we come! I hope you have(n't?!) missed it.
But I digress. Here we go. We went on a 10th Anniversary Trip! To frickin' Bora Bora!! It was insane!!!!
The trip started with Michal's parents arriving a few days prior to us here in California. This trip has been a complex thing to plan, what with camp dropoffs and busy evenings with the kids -- it's a lot to handle just ourselves, so importing my in-laws for the week from Toronto to be with us here and handle the usual Jutan Family madness was quite a feat of organization and pre-planning. And, as can sometimes happen with things where not a single thing can fail for success.. sometimes then one small thing fails and your carefully-built house of cards starts teetering, ideally not fully collapsing. That happened -- by way of our first very-not-fun family experience with... lice. Ugh, those wee bastards! I'll spare you the gory details, but we found this out not long before we were starting to pack and get ready for Michal's parents to arrive, and the last thing we wanted to do was to add yet-another thing to their todo list while we were out. So the mad scramble of washing everything in our house and changing sheets 400 million times and hand-combing everyone's hair like it was the desert scene from Spaceballs.. this 'fun' continued for a couple of weeks and our stress level continued to rise as the in-laws arrived in San Francisco and our countdown to the trip departure date veered ever closer. Alas, in pure just-in-time Jutan style and somewhat of a miracle, we managed to get a "100% lice free!" confirmation (well, re-re-re-confirmation) from the professional lice eradicator place we became quite familiar with over the weeks, in addition to my own nightly efforts with the nit-comb. Let me tell you, I am never going to use the phrase 'nit-picking' without shuddering ever again. But this trip is about the glory of Tahiti, not a ridiculous pesty insect jerk, so let's get back to the point here. At the buzzer, we finally got it all sorted and resolved, and thank goodness that we only left the grandparents with a couple of extra sheets to change for good measure over a few subsequent days, and some extra hair washing to do with some overpriced preventative shampoo of which we were happy to fork over whatever they were asking for it. We have never washed so much laundry in our lives. Our timeline was short and somehow, we slid past the finish-line just in time.
Needless to say, if we didn't need a vacation before... we surely did after that fiasco!
After a few days of familiarizing the grandparents with the plan for the week, how to drive our electric car, and so on.... we got everything wrapped up and off we went. The kids did their famed 'running sendoff' and off we went for our first-ever solo trip without the kids, ever.
Breathing a sigh of relief that we pulled off all the coordination to do this trip
Certainly we have traveled just one parent with both kids, or one parent on a business trip and the other parent at home with both kids; that's all very normal and usual for us, but this was a first. The kids were great, and the gracious grandparents were stellar and ready for the intensity of managing two kiddos all week.
We started the trip off fancy as hell with a United Polaris Business Class ticket!! I had scored a super good deal on the ticket. I'd hoped that Bora Bora would be one of our honeymoon options but it was too far and too expensive back then (and still now?!) but I was shocked to realize that a) Tahiti is only 8.5 hrs from San Francisco, and b) United has DIRECT flights there, and c) it's on the same very-easy timezone as Hawaii! So that was a great surprise when getting into the planning phases here. On the way home, the Polaris tickets were the expected 250,000 Unites miles per ticket so that was a non-starter... but on the way there, somehow, our tickets were only 85k points per person! So that was amazing and we grabbed the opportunity to travel-hack the trip a bit, like we had done so successfully on the honeymoon (a mere 9 years prior!) Back then, we'd scored one Polaris flight, also for free, but it was funny as Polaris was brand new so we got the 'soft Polaris' but not the 'hard Polaris' -- meaning we got the bedsheets and pyjamas (ha!) but it was a retrofitted 'old' United plane and not the purpose-built Polaris seats and so on. So we were excited to try the 'real thing'. It did not disappoint.
The first cool thing is you get to go to the fancy Polaris lounge since SFO is a United Hub and has one of those.
Let's GOOOOOOOOO
Various fancy drink options... it's... uh... 11am somewhere (uh, here)
Michal snacking while we waited for a table at the table-service restaurant in the lounge
I got the "When in Venice" which was very tasty
Lunchtime!!
Dragonfruit Ice Cream
I had read on Pointsguy or something that it was wise to get on the waitlist for the sitdown lounge restaurant upon arrival which was a great call, as the wait was 45 min or so. We had some delicious cocktails while we waited and then had a tasty lunch before the flight. This lounge didn't exist the only other prior time we'd flown on Polaris so it was really fun to try it.
And then, onto the plane! It was a Dreamliner, which is already such a fancy plane and comfortable ride, so upgrading like crazy to Biz was ppppretttyyy pretttyyyyy good. The seats were so fun, comfortable, and only a bit ridiculous compared to regular economy class. This one-way trip was selling for something insane like $4000, I would never pay that, but at 85k points, it was a steal!
I managed to score us, what Reddit calls the "sweetheart seats" which are the odd rows of the Polaris seats, so that the two seats are side-by-side with each other. The even seats are more angled away from each other so I was pleased to get these. Of course, took the chance to make the joke that if your marriage is bad you can put up the divider, and then quickly asserted that I would be taking the divider back down, haha. Thankfully after 10 years my sense of humour still seems to work with my wife, haha.
Anyway, so this was all insanely epic. And then came the food! Yes!!!!! We hadn't eaten in like 30 min so it was time to try the millions of random things you're always surprised you can get served on a plane. They offered us a coffee and Michal hilariously asked for a cappuccino (!!!), I was like "this isn't a hotel, we're at 32,000ft!" and they unsurprisingly said they didn't have the ability to do that. I laughed as I am always amazed you can even get a coffee on a plane, let alone like some third-wave artisanal flat white or something. So that was hilarious. And actually I suppose it could have gone either way on their ability to do it, as the general service was great.
It was time to watch a movie and it turned out I'd basically seen every possible good movie they had on the plane, due to Oscar voting earlier this year! So I needed to search for something else to watch. On the "Live Events" videos they had a comedy special from Ania Magliano, the hilarious SNL UK Weekend Update anchor. I have loved SNL UK's first season, so it was fun to see Ania's standup set. Then, with still 6+ hours to go on this daytime flight, no kids asking me for 100 things per minute, no plausible way I'd waste my time on vacation getting my email inbox to zero.... I needed another thing to watch. And yay, they had The Studio, Seth Rogen's hilarious inside-baseball skewering of Hollywood. I have been soooo excited to watch it since it first came out but simply haven't had the time to do it, so I took the opportunity and crushed 7 episodes of the 10 on the plane. It was awesome, especially when one of my favourite childhood Canadian stars (Sarah Polley -- now an incredibly-accomplished Director), on The Studio Ep. 2, straight-up made fun of the StageCraft Volume that I've been working on at ILM for the past 8 years or so. I'd heard that the show referenced The Volume and it was just soooo insanely cool and hilarious that the thing we made somehow ended up in a Seth Rogen script. Surreal, for sure!
MAN these seats are epic
"May I get you some more White Bordeaux, sir? To go with your mixed nuts in Italian spice dust?" -- why YES PLEASE
Thiiiick smoked salmon
Ok so I just love Aperol Spritz now, it's like the Fernet and Coke that Frank and Jess and I had in Peru but it's sweet and chill rather than assaulting you with 200 insane herbs, but same kinda vibe in a way
Beef short rib
This was fun a "USA's 250th Birthday Sundae" -- with your choice of toppings! See if they can do this on an airplane, maybe it's not SO out of the realm of possibility that they would have a cappuccino maker!
After this, we arrived, got our bags and waded through the humidity (whew!!) to get a taxi to the Intercontinental. It's not a cheap hotel, but we'd managed to score is also for free via Chase hotel points transfer. That was good, as we were really just treating it as a 'place to sleep' to work off the minimal jet lag and because timing-wise you need to spend a night on the Tahitian mainland before you can fly to Bora Bora. That said, though the rooms were basic, we slept incredibly well and the staff were extremely lovely and welcoming.
Upon arrival to the room, we were greeted with the crazy towel-animals and gorgeous Polynesian flowers everywhere.
First things first -- mango juice!
As we learned, every dessert in French Polynesia is a sponge cake with coconut in it -- or so it would seem!
This is so cool. We were trying to determine if the hilarious towel animals were turtles or crabs
Flowers everywhere!!!
We got two free drink coupons at check-in, so off we went to the restaurant to explore a bit before we went to sleep after the flight. My drink was pretty tasty but Michal's was some sort of fluorescent basil extract thing and was weird. On the plus side, Poisson Cru!!!!!! I was very keen to try the local dish which is sortof like a coconut milk version of Ceviche or Poke. It was sooooooo good. Awesome to start off the trip trying it right off the bat.
After the dinner, we wandered the lagoon within the hotel and checked out some of the pools at night. It wasn't really swimming time and we wanted to get to bed early, but was cool to see it. It looked like a pretty big space, but we weren't going to have much time the next day to see it, so it was good to walk around a bit. As we wandered, we saw our nice Polaris stewardess from the plane!! She was so nice and when talking to me on the plane, had referred to Michal as "your bride" :) So that was fun.
Poisson Cru is so good!!!!!!!!
My tasty drink, Michal's terrible one
Coral Reef inside the hotel lagoon itself!
Early-to-bed, early-to-rise, Hawaii-style. The funniest thing so far on arrival was the 'sing-song' way that everyone seems to talk here. "Maaaa-ru-ruuuuuu!!" people sing at you to say 'thank you'. "Ia ora naaaaahh!!!" is "Hello", but with 1000 times more heartwarming pleasantness than you've ever seen anywhere in the states. The sing-song accent is so charming, and we felt very welcome to this beautiful paradise. I tried using my French a bit as people seem to switch back and forth between French and Tahitian.
Well... sure has been a while! Don't have much time these days to post on the 'ol Blogger but took some time on our recent epic trip to Tahiti to write up a travel journal -- like the old days!
Will post on here soon and link on my website, as always, at http://mikejutan.com.
If you're still reading this blog, thank you! Not much spare time these days to post, but glad to have the blog still here waiting for me for this upcoming travel post. Cheers to you!
Wow, sure has been a long time since I've made a blog post -- the ongoing shareability of small articles or videos on Facebook plus the extreme businesses of having young children means I don't get to blogging much anymore! Wanted to share here though some recent (ish!) news from last November. Our team at ILM, the ILM StageCraft R&D Team, has recently been awarded an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award for our work in virtual production. Check it out!
ILM StageCraft is an end-to-end virtual production tool suite that bridges the gap between practical physical production methodologies and traditional digital post-production visual effects by providing the ability to design, scout and light environments in advance of the shoot and then capture that vision in camera during principal photography. StageCraft brings together a real-time engine, a real-time renderer, high-quality color management, physical camera equipment, LED displays, motion-capture technologies, synchronization methodologies and tailored on-set user interfaces to digitally create the illusion of 3D backgrounds for live-action sets.
Today ILM released a fantastic behind-the-scenes video showcasing a bunch of the project I've had the joy of being a part of over the last several years at ILM. There's some awesome pieces here, and I'll let the video speak for itself!
Unbelievably, the headline at Gizmodo about our work is... well... unbelievable! "The Mandalorian Season 2 Was Made With the Most Powerful Filmmaking Tool ILM Has Ever Created"... that's quite a statement indeed. I am so proud of my colleagues and all of the hardworking folks behind the scenes on this. It is such a pleasure and a highlight of my career to get to work on this technology.
Mark Rober’s science YouTube channel is pure awesome, but this time he REALLY knocks it out of the park to give a surprise birthday party to a young cancer survivor. What a legend.
Another quick post to share one my of favourite articles about StageCraft that went out last week. TechCrunch does a fabulous breakdown on what tech we made, how it works, and what the benefits are to the Film and TV industries.
Guess what?? The Mandalorian was [mostly] filmed indoors... there is NO on-location work done for this show. *mind-blowing sounds ensue*
This is the crazy new way of making movies and TV that I've been working on here at ILM as part of the StageCraft Virtual Production Engineering team for the past 5 years!! The talent and inventiveness and sheer badassery of everyone who touched this project is yet another reason why working at ILM rocks so much.
