Calfornia Dreaming - 10 Things To Do in Las Vegas

Check out a Diner in the Desert
Peggy Sue's is probably the only decent stopover for food on the way to Las Vegas. Can't say much about its washroom though. But Rob Pattison and Lindsay Lohan have been here if this excites you. 

Tour the Strip

The hotels here are the brightest! We drove into Circus Circus on our first night and were overwhelmed and a tad blinded by the lights. The room however was an utter disappointment. We stayed at Vdara for the next 2 nights. 

Also remember to check out the various free shows at the Bellagio fountain and Treasure Island. 

Do not forget to visit the new city centre! 

Learn to Play Craps

This is a must do and it's our new found game at the casino thanks to Jupe, and boy it was pretty fun! Still don't fully know how to play it but you should be fine following a few simple rules. Bet your first round of chips on the Pass Line. If 7 or 11 are rolled, you double your chips. If craps (2, 3 or 12) are rolled you lose. 

Any other numbers and the game starts. The objective is for the player (dice thrower) to throw and bet as many rounds as possible before hitting a 7. You bet on the numbers for every throw. 6 and 8 are the most common so that's where our chips go most of the time. It's amazing how fast the money comes in (and goes!). And so exhilarating when you throw a couple of hard 8 (ie. two 4s). So fun! 

Food Food Glorious Food
We had brunch at the fancy Bouchon at The Venetian. Another note worthy foodie visit was at PF Chang - one more thing to strike off my list of To-Do in California. And this is fully sponsored by the craps table at Planet Hollywood. Thank you!

Check out the Buffet 

One down side of going to Vegas during the weekends is that the buffet queue is super long. There was a queue to get to a queue at the Wynn's buffet. The waiting time was close to an hour. Are you nuts? We weren't, so we snubbed the buffet and got ourselves some healthy breakfast at the nearby cafe instead. 

Shoot some Guns
For the life of me, I still don't get American's obsession with owning guns. But since we're here why not try one our own? It was the hub's idea obviously. We checked out Battlefield Vegas opposite Circus Circus (why do we keep coming back here?). The wife picked the AK47 and the hubs chose the M4 Carbine. You can tell who's the terrorist in this relationship :) 

Check out the vid. 

Catch a Cirque du Soleil 
Personally, I am not a fan. But the hubs enjoyed it immensely. So much so that he caught another one in the plane on the way home. 

Ride the Mechanical Bull and Dance 

Ride the bull in a bikini, I dare you.

Look for the Sign 
The iconic Las Vegas sign is right at the end of the trip, next to the airport. Pose, smile, snap!

Visit the Gold & Silver Pawn shop and the Rick's Restoration
It was so crowded. I had no idea what was going on. If you want to know what's the big deal about these places, you got to ask the hubs. 

A Break in the Desert

We were slightly disoriented after the skydive. But happily we pressed on and continued our drive. Our destination? Las Vegas! The hubs was super ambitious at first and wanted to drive all the way to Grand Canyon. I don't think he was aware that it's a 12 hour's drive. Hah anyway we barely made it to either. 

We drove for about 4 hours and decided to stay the night at Bakersfield, which is in the middle of no where in California. Again, I gotto thank Googlemap for being super helpful through out the journey. Oh how did we ever do without a GPS. 

The little sleepy town had some conference that day so we had difficulty looking for a hotel room downtown. So we settled for a motel called La Quinta which was not half bad. In hind sight, it might have been a tad unsafe because there was hardly any security and anyone could just park their cars right next to our room. A colleague joked that these motels are like buffet spread for serial killers. Nothing stops them from driving to the motels and randomly start killing people. Very true.. but we were safe and sound. 

The hubs taking a leak. This cracks me up. 

Our trusty Mitsubishi for 2 weeks

California Dreaming - Santa Cruz

I have never heard of Santa Cruz before this, and this post is not so much about the place as much as what we actually did there. All in all, we spent about 2 hours there at most. But it was by far the most intense, crazy 2 hours of our lives. We were of course gearing up for a sky diving adventure!

So we packed our bags again, left the BFF's place and drove to Santa Cruz. Did I mention how well all the navigation apps work in the US? My personal preference is the Apple map on my iPhone, although you totally failed me countless times in Singapore you @#$! Anyway I digress..

The trip took about an hour. And as we headed into the aviation centre, we realised the place is meant for some serious flying business. There were helicopters and ancient war planes littered all over. The hubs was so excited looking at all the small planes, and he actually contemplated ditching me for some flying class. I was obviously horrified to do this alone and told him so! If I'm going down, your coming down with me baby! :)

Pic-by-pic of what went through my mind:

We were doing tandem dives with our instructors. The four of us getting into the tiny little plane.  

And the little plane takes off

Alex giving me some final instructions before our jump 

Here we are at 14,000 feet. My legs are out of the plane!! Gulp! Are we really doing this? 

OK.. looks like we are. 

...And we are free falling!!!!! Yes this is me looking REALLY SCARED. Don't laugh. Alex must have been half deaf with all of my screaming. 

Still free falling.. Woah okay I think I can do this

Yippie Yabba Dooo

Still scared but trying to smile for the camera

Alex mentally preparing me for the parachute. Oh please, please let it work.  

.. And it works! Phew. 

Enjoying the view from 8,000 feet. The ocean is right there. 

We were both light weights, so we floated for a bit. 

And my baby landed before me!! I could see him do some 360degree turn thing with his parachute. No fair! 

We are both alive!! 

Seriously intense, glad we did it! 

If you have read this far, check out the video too!

California Dreaming - Silicon Valley and San Jose

We planned on a sky diving trip in Santa Cruz but that wasn't until Thursday. So we had 2 days to kill, no real plans and no place to stay. Luckily the BFF kindly offered us his place for the night, so the hubs got us a rented car for the rest of the vacation and off we went to Silicon Valley. It turned out to be a very geeky trip as we couldn't resist paying homage to the tech giants!

We first visited the BFF to get his keys. Check out his fancy building. 

Then off to Google, Facebook and Apple. Apple was the most visitor friendly, as they have an Apple store that sells merchandises on top of their usual iGadgets.

Google looked like a REALLY great place to work for. All the great things you read about being a Google employee is true. They have a cafe that serves free food, a volleyball court (maybe more), and even free tampons in the toilet.. it's amazing! You can see employees hanging out, really enjoying themselves in the park. Heck, the place reminds me of a campus. Doesn't look like a work place at all. They even have free colorful Google bikes for you to cycle from building to building. Yes, because they are that big. We managed to sneak into the Google store and bought some merchandise stuff. In hindsight I don't know why we went through all that trouble just to pay for some YouTube, Gmail tshirts/keychains... what suckers.

Jelly Bean? Who uses Android :p

Facebook was the most boring visit. The building looks plain and we didn't see Zucky. Although I did see an employee being driven to work in a limo. I wonder if he's anyone famous.



Dinner was at Nola's down at Palo Alto but BFF failed to make an appearance due to work commitment. But what a great find. Loved the chicken + waffles combo. 

Post dinner, we caught a movie in San Jose. And we did it the drive-in movie theater style at West Wind Drive In! I thought that was really cool in a 70's or 80's way. It's a pity we don't have the space for a drive-in here in Singapore. 

And so we drove all the way to San Jose just to see how it's like. And man, it was worth the one hour drive! We arrived at 10pm, and the show was scheduled to start at 10:30pm. It was a weekday so it was really quiet. There was no queue, so we just drove up to the booth to get our tickets and then we were free to roam around to find a spot that we liked. The sound system is your car stereo. They give you the radio frequency to tune into; I thought that was pretty cool cuz I was expecting some crappy sound system from the house. The whole experience was a joy to say the least, even though the movie (Oblivion) was really bad. I would definitely do this again given a chance.





And that pretty much wrapped up the day. It was a long and tiring day, but totally worth it! We slept really soundly at the BFF's fancy place :)

New Hobby

It's been 3 years since I moved into my home, and I think it's time to redecorate! Think it will help ease the post-holiday blues...

California Dreaming - San Francisco

And so we just got back from a 2 week break in the West Coast of USA. In running order, we started off in San Francisco and then headed on to San Jose/Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, Bakersfield (not really part of the itinerary but we ended up here anyway), Vegas and finally Los Angeles. I think we drove for more than 1000 miles, ate too much almond along the way and got a bit of a tan from the sun from all the driving. So anyway here's just some highlights of the trip. The small prints are more for my own reference since I don't keep a journal anymore and I wanna remember everything, so you can ignore them. 

I'll start with San Francisco. 

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Jupe picked us up from the airport in his super fast car. Thx BFF!

Dropped the bag in an apartment in Union Square, which we rented through AirBnb. I intend to write a review of AirBnB so more on that later. We had a couple of hours of snooze before we joined Jupe & friend at the AT&T stadium supporting the SF Giants! The weather was great, but a tad too chilly for my liking if you ask me. Everyone was enjoying the sun and beer and oooh the crab sandwich was soooooo goood! Apparently the sandwich is the only reason why Jupe was there. Besides one or two baseball fanatics, I don't think the rest were really paying attention to the game. Good game nonetheless.. I think. Now who won again?

Had a lovely dinner with Jupe and Candace. Jet lag hit me hard so I went home to sleep after the dinner while the hubs joined Jupe and more friends for drinks. He has amazing stamina I tell you.

Woke up late and joined Jupe & friend for lunch at Maverick. Walked around downtown for a while admiring graffitis, art galleries and antique shops before Jupe had to head back to Sunnyvale.

Made our way to Pier 33 where we boarded the ship to Alcatraz Island for the evening tour. The hubs and I didn't get to do the tour the last time we were at the Bay Area (separately) as tickets usually run out on the day and must be booked in advance. We did the evening tour just to see how the cells are at night, and also as a cheap thrill to see if we could spot anything scary. Unfortunately, or fortunately nothing was spotted. But it was interesting nonetheless just to check out the cellhouse, dining hall, prison library and listen to stories of the infamous inmates who attempted escape. Apparently no one ever did. 

Dinner was at a crab restaurant at the famous Pier 39 where the hubs devoured half a crab on his own and somehow that made me fall in love with him all over again :)

Next day, we boarded the famous tram and made our way to the pier again. We somehow missed Lombard Street but never mind, we've both seen it before. 

Next up on the itinerary, we cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito. It was a 13km stretch and it took us about an hour or so to complete with stops in between. We were lucky for great weather; it wasn't too cold and the sun was up. You get great views across the bridge all the way to Sausalito, not to mention a good workout too! We came back to the pier via a ferry ride. Totally amazing, we're glad we did this even though our thighs and butts were sore the next day. 

FYI we got our bikes from Blazing Saddles from Pier 41. They provide direction to get to Sausalito and it's pretty straightforward. If you're lost just follow the rest of the other cyclists along the way or ask a friendly stranger. 

Bears spotted at Sausalito!

And some dude got arrested in this sleepy town

Dinner was at a Thai restaurant downtown. Food was so-so but the restaurant was crowded anyway. After the meal, we walked home as the restaurant was just about a mile from home. 

We spent the next day just walking around downtown and checking out the hubs' frequent haunts when he comes here for work. Had In-N-Out for lunch and ended up at the Stinking Rose for dinner. Great food, love the garlic but definitely not a place to bring your first date if you plan on kissing her/him later.

That's it in San Francisco, will move on to San Jose/Silicon Valley soon!