Leaving las vegas.....

That was my second vacation trip inside a month...... This time to america's playgound, las vegas..... What a vacation this has been !! I was in awe with the city's grandeur and the effervescence that it shone with. No doubt las vegas is THE happening place in the US of A. Loved the ambience and the lively streets of vegas, especially the strip (Las vegas boulevard is called the strip. It has all the famous casinos of vegas and is simply the one stretch that lights up las vegas).

                      We spent the first day entirely on some of the casinos and lost some money (my friends did !! I held it back a little :-)   )  All the casinos have lodging within themselves for guests who wish to spend time and money at leisure. They consist of attractions like malls and shows apart from housing casinos which are pretty much the ubiquitous beings in the city. Every inhabitable corner of vegas has atleast a score of slot machines (read money-eaters)  which have great appetite for the green dollars. That i happened to wrest out 132 USD (i had put in $10) from one of these, is a fact that could easily feature in a Ripley's Believe it or Not !! 

                    When we returned from the las vegas blvd, we set off to the grand canyon on a rental car, at 11 pm, hoping to beat the sun rise. But by the time we got the car and left vegas, it was 1 am. This was a 4+ hr drive from vegas till the grand canyon national park. We reached the South rim at about 5:35 am, just a dozen minutes or so before the sun rise. It was pretty cold out there in a stark contrast to warmer evenings in nearby vegas. The view of the gorge of the grand canyon was breathtaking and to think that a river has carved such deep incisions into an elevated plateau made it even more amazing. After finishing with the grand canyon, we returned to las vagas in the rental car at about 5 PM, with a lunch break in between. All tired, took some rest and only woke up at about 9 PM and set off for the saturday night life in las vegas. The streets were buzzing with tourist crowd and growing more active with the night. We had our dinner at about 2 AM after coming down from a 115-storeyed tower(only the top floor is a hotel) called the Stratosphere. The view of the sleepless city was awesome from there.

To be cont.....

Ta

Whose problem is it anyway ?

I got shouted at. I got shouted at, in front of all my friends(we also work at the same place). 

Who shouted ? Another friend. [Let's call him X]

Yeah..... it was pretty embarrassing alright. I didn't know what to do, i just ducked away sheepishly waiting for the heat to come down. We were midway into day one of our LA trip when we were deliberating on the next ride at Disneyland and most of them were fun and excitement. X comes in and asks us if there are any 'Soft' rides and i, in the fun mood that i was in at that moment, wanting to take a dig, said 'that ship is a softride and ......blah blah blah'. X got really angry and yelled at me for making fun. He went on saying i would know how he felt if i had brought my father along to the trip. Well that's what he did. 

X's wife and his father also  came along with us for the trip and X was having a difficult time seeing his father feeling weak and tired and not being able to cope with the rest of us or enjoy anything out there. Anger justified. But i didn't realize that X being a tough nut to crack was feeling the heat and getting cracked up. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen and i pulled the trigger. I was in my own fun cocoon and honestly, i didn't see what was coming. I didn't apologize. But that's just me... I was being myself taking a dig like i usually do. I didn't do anything wrong.... on a given day this would have passed up as another lighter moment. I take things light and that way, wish to overcome any difficult second i might be in.

But i began to think that i may have hurt someone (without intending to do so) who's not having a good time and should have apologized. I felt sorry for X, later. 

All that's (hopefully) forgotten, X and I speak well now, but god knows if its over yet.

Whatever.......Gone's gone, marching forward burying all the little bitter moments and cherishing the larger sweeter moments is what I intend to do.    

 Ta

P.S - Just because i called him X doesn't mean i started hating him or i despised him after that. No names, that's all.

The City of Angels

Just returned back from a long weekend trip to LA. 4 days of whirlwind touring around the Disneyland parks and Universal studios had me and all of my friends exhausted. Had a
FUN-tastic time after years - turned a kid, freaked out like the world was going to end tomorrow. One amazing city Los Angeles is. Wish i were working & living there. Didn't go much around the downtown, but whatever i could goto was amazing. [May be one more post later about all we did in LA, when i come back to my normal senses.] Disneyland and Universal were absolute amusement and worth all the money spent and distance travelled.

We wanted to holiday for the long weekend (Sep 1st - labor day in the US) and took a day off on the Friday leading into the weekend. We had planned this trip roughly 2 months ago and had booked air tickets then. Everything else, like the Hotel reservation, Car rental etc., kept happening in the run up to the trip. I pretty much thought this would be the last trip to anywhere in the US this year, before my india visit and was hell bent on making this trip a memorable one. I should say it turned out as expected. And this won't be my last visit to LA, but the first of many more to come. I missed the beaches this time, will ensure i don't, the next time around. It'll be some more days before the spell binding memories of the city and the magic of its angels leave me.

Ta