Day 24

So today we said our tearful goodbye to Los Angeles county (we Krysta did, and I did for a few days anyway, I'm going back on Saturday hehehe). We checked out of the Econo Lodge in Glendale, where we had spent a total of 7 nights on this trip now. (Yes I can now reveal where we stayed, didn't want people to know while we were still there!) It served us well and was fairly inexpensive. I had to sleep on my air mattress the whole time we were there though.

real life Saul Goodman?

Anyway, we checked out around 11 and headed towards fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada! It was about a 4 hour drive from Glendale to Vegas, very little traffic on the way. We made a quick stop at a McDonalds and gas station, but otherwise drove straight into the city. Got to Vegas a little after 4, I think anyway, checked into the Tuscany Suites & Casino. I booked the room through hotels.com, and it was only like 30 bucks. Pretty crazy. After getting settled, we decided to walk over to the strip, which was a few blocks away from Tuscany.

So we walked over to the strip, passed by a few more hotels/casinos  including the massive Ballys. We walked by the Flamingo a bit, streets were really crowded even though it wasn't really late yet, but I guess this city runs 24/7. Looked at a bunch of the places along the strip, took pictures in front of them, etc. Ton of people along the street giving out rather interesting pamphlets and "reading material" (to keep it family friendly). I can't believe people actually hand that stuff out as their job. Anyway, we walked around a little more, and went into Madame Tussads Wax Museum.

We didn't end up going to Madame Tussauds Hollywood on this trip, I went on my LA trip last year, but we just didn't get around to it this time, so we wanted to go here in Vegas. It was fun, lots of very realistic looking figures, not to mention a "live" exhibit probably especially for Halloween where you walk around a very scary laboratory and people jump out at you. Ahhh!!! Here are some of the pics.

yeah...Arnold makes me look like a girly man...

aw yeahhhh

poor Krysta, her dreams are ruined!

really like how this one came out, long live The King!

After exiting the museum, we saw a rather large crowd gathering nearby, I was a little perplexed, but then realized that Anderson Cooper was down there, as there was going to be a presidential debate the next day in Vegas and he was hosting it. Looked like he was talking to people, taking pics, maybe signing autographs or something, not quite sure.

We eventually walked back to the Tuscany. When I checked in, they gave me a coupon booklet thingy that included a $20 coupon off any $40 purchase at the Italian restaurant in the lobby. I'm a sucker for Italian food, so we made a reservation there for dinner, which we went to at about 7:30. Great food, great atmosphere, very friendly and efficient waiter. All around good dining experience. After eating, we headed into the hotel's casino for a bit, where I failed miserably at the penny slots. We headed back to the room, I watched House at 9, and then went back over to the lobby for a bit.

Sat at the hotel bar, ordered a few drinks, talked with some of the people there, including the bartender who was a pretty cool guy. They also had a virtual poker game at the seats at the bar, so I decided to play. As you may remember, I only really learned how to play poker a few nights ago, so I wanted to test how well I remembered it. I actually won some money in the game! Shocking I know. I only put a $5 bill in, eventually had as much as $15, but stopped once I got down to $10. I guess that's how you manage to "win" - set limits for yourself so that you don't lose everything.

Anyway, short, but fun Vegas experience, would have liked to maybe see a show or something, but alas we need to keep a tight schedule on this trip.... Here are a few more Vegas pics for your enjoyment.

yeah I'm the man

Day 23

As many Sundays have been on this trip thus far, today was not a particularly eventful day, but that's fine, need some days like this. Krysta and I went to church at Holy Family in Glendale, pretty crowded haha. We went back, I made myself some Lean Pockets, (one turkey/bacon in pretzel bread, and one steak and cheese) which are supposed to only take like 3-4 minutes if you cook 2 at a time, but this microwave was awful and it took like 10 minutes. Oh well, they were still good.

Soon afterwards I drove down to Sherman Oaks to watch the Patriots/Cowboys game at Mad Bulls Tavern. The past 2 Sundays I didn't have any problem getting there, but today there was some fair or something right on Ventura, and it was all blocked off, so I had drive around all kinds of detours, couldn't find any parking spaces for a long time, but eventually found one close to a mile away. But it was alright, I walked over, and had a good time seeing the guys and watching the game. Pretty great game too, of course Brady did what he does best, marching down the field in the late 4th quarter to win the game. Afterwards, I headed back to Austin, Chris & Dave's place for a bit, but couldn't stay too long, as I needed to pick up Krysta and William.

Speaking of them, while I didn't spend the day with them, they took a trip over to Runyon Canyon and went hiking. Guess it was alright they did that then, as I wouldn't have been able to with the foot. Don't have any of the pictures they took from there at the moment, might add them later if I can get a hold of them. Anyway, I drove over to William's apartment, and we all went over to Subway and got dinner (I guess you can call it that haha). We then went back to the apartment for a bit, and William and I watched "The Walking Dead" season premiere. It was alright, wasn't blown away by any means....

Anyway, afterwards we headed back to Glendale, got a little bit packed, as we were leaving the hotel the next day. Conveniently my room key didn't work, and it was almost 11, so I had to go to the desk and get it fixed. No big deal. That's about it I guess. Until next time

Day 22

Day 22 - Saturday, October 15. So today we took a little trip south down to San Diego. On our previous trip in 04, we took a day trip down to SD as well, went to the zoo, and did a few other things I think, but it was a long time ago, so I don't remember exactly... Anyway, we spent most of the morning at the hotel, Krysta brought me up a bowl of Fruit Loops as usual, which was nice, and I researched things to do in San Diego.

Well....seems like the Zoo is probably the biggest attraction there, so we headed down that way. Took a little over 2 hours to get down to San Diego from Glendale, 2 hours? That's nothing for us now! Though it has been a little while since we took that long of a drive, and we'll have to take some long drives again in the next few days, so it's good preparation I guess. Fortunately there was very little traffic on the way down, so a drive that should take a little over 2 hours, did actually take a little over 2 hours. We did make one little pit stop, I dropped in to Wendy's and grabbed a few things and used the bathroom, then we filled up the gas tank which was running low.

We got to the Zoo in the early afternoon, got in with a AAA discount. (Seriously, how is anybody not a member of AAA, so many discounts and free stuff with the membership its ridiculous.) Anyway, we started our journey through the zoo by going through the "Elephant Odyssey" which as its name implies, features elephants! There weren't too many of them out today, it was pretty hot, so I don't know if they prefer the shade or what, but they weren't exactly out in abundance. Whatever. We then proceeded towards the polar bears, where there were a ton of people. Guess they're a big hit. There were two polar bears swimming around when we got there, then they got out of the water and were either fighting or playing, I'm not really sure.

From there we went down to the Panda Canyon, which apparently is a new section of the park that just opened this past summer. Again, really crowded there, but we did manage to see a panda for a little bit. Headed down the Hippo Trail, passed by some more animals and then came to the Hippo tank. There were two hippos in it, one was significantly bigger than the other, might have been its parent. We kept walking on the Hippo trail and eventually reached the Tiger trail, found numerous viewing sights, but there was no tiger to be seen! Eventually we found him sleeping in a little cave thing, guess all cats are similar in their sleep patterns....

We then explored a few more areas of the zoo, and eventually 5 o'clock rolled around and it was time to leave. I got enough of the zoo in the hours we were there, it was extremely crowded and my foot was hurting (I know, I talk about it a lot, but it has played a factor in some of the stuff we've done...) so I was ready to go. It was definitely fun to go in and see all the different animals though, definitely one of, if not the best zoos I've ever been to.

"seeing eye cheetah" inside joke, long story

From the Zoo, we decided to head into town a bit, explore and get dinner. We drove to the downtown area, and had dinner at TGI Friday's, where we both ordered Turkey Burgers! After eating, we tried to drive down to the ocean, but eventually it seemed like it was going to be impossible to find, and by this point it was pretty dark, so we just decided to head back up towards LA.

Fortunately the ride back was also only a little over 2 hours as well. I was concerned as last Saturday night our ride up Rt. 5 towards LA on our way back from Disneyland was pretty bad. But that was luckily not the case tonight, and we were able to get back without much delay. We then pretty much just stayed in the room for the rest of the night. Sorry if this post seems a little rushed, its late and I'm tired and we're checking out tomorrow, so I have some packing to do, but I wanted to get this up there....

Day 21

Finally, I'm almost caught up. Fell way behind for a bit there, but if you've been reading the blog regularly, you'll see that we've been pretty busy, and it does take a little while to write these things up, so forgive me for falling behind, but we're almost caught up now. Anyway, it's Friday the 14th! Oh wait, I guess that doesn't mean anything does it. Maybe I should start my own parody horror franchise called Friday the 14th....ehhhh....maybe not.

Anyway, Friday found us at a bit of a loss for what to do. We've now been in the Los Angeles area for 2 weeks, and we've done a lot. As you may recall, I'm not really out here for a vacation, but since Krysta basically is, we've had to maintain a delicate balance between a business and leisure trip. We've hit a lot of the major sites, but there's gotta be more to do in a huge city like LA right? Well we headed over to good ol TripAdvisor.com for guidance. Griffith Observatory, check. Getty Museum, check. Venice Canals, check. Runyon Canyon.....wish I could check, but Mr. Left Foot doesn't want to deal with that. Natural History Museum, no check.... Hmmm..... hey, why not, Natural History Museum it is.

I'll be honest, I've never been a huge fan of museums haha. But this place actually was pretty good. It was in an area called "Exhibition Park" (I think anyway...) which also houses USC's football stadium, but alas Pete Carroll was not to be found, oh yeah he's in Seattle now. So we went in to the museum and looked around for a few hours at the various exhibits. The main lobby had exhibits on either side, of mammals from Africa and North America, I don't know if they were just fake, or if they were stuffed dead animals, honestly couldn't tell, can you?

oh yeah, I shaved the goatee last night, hair's probably gonna go soon as well....

somebody get their hands on Mr. White's product??

There was a whole exhibit dedicated to gemstones and minerals, pretty cool, no doubt Hank Schrader would have enjoyed it.....We walked through this room that was completely dedicated to this gigantic whale skeleton. Apparently the skeleton itself weighs 7,000 lbs, can't imagine how much the whole whale must have weighed.

What I enjoyed the most about this place was the dinosaur stuff. There were a lot of skeletons set up in the museum, with lots of information on how those dinos might have lived and what they did and stuff. Unfortunately, most of the bones were actually recreations of the fossils, so they were primarily copies of dino skeletons I guess.

that's actually a vertebrae from a "long neck" thing was about as big as I am  

yeah the mini-ponytail's not really working, gotta get rid of that...

We walked around a little more, went upstairs to a big bird exhibit that pretty much occupied the entire floor.

After visiting the museum for a few hours, we headed back to Glendale, I tried very hard to get a few days worth of blogging done, did some more stuff related to job searching, etc. fairly uneventful evening. Just want to leave you with one of the more disturbing images from the museum....

Good Lord what is that thing