• Venice beach cycling

      April 16, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ⛅ 16 °C

      We woke up to breakfast being served by Ester in the kitchen, with pastries, and Hungarian plum jam. After breakfast, she offered to drive us to Venice beach where we planned to rent bicycles. On the way sue had a really good sightseeing tour, on places in their lives, and just places of general interest as well. We drove through the Venice canals, which she said she only discovered recently as well. They are 5-6 little canals with nice houses on their bank, and kayaks and boats on the water, it is a really cute place, unfortunately I didn't take any photos from the car though. Then we found a bike rental place and splurged for the premium bikes at an extra dollar an hour, which had gears. They were still a bit rusty and old, but the gears were surprisingly needed on the flat beach as we had quite strong head wind at times. The beach was very pretty, although it was kind of full of weird people. It had a different feel to the san francisco homeless people though, I never actually felt scared by anyone, but regardless they were still quite a bit of the atmosphere of Venice beach. At the same time there were some definitely local people also around, riding skateboards, rollerskates, walking their dogs and kids, and doing various other sports on the beach. There was a funky weightlifting gym, padel courts, volleyball, and quite a lot of bodyweight training stuff. We played around with those, I climbed a rope, probably for the first time since I was a kid. The best was this line of rings though, that we first saw a couple play around with. Basically you had to swing to catch the next rung, and then do a heft pullup to get some momentum, and then swing to catch the upcoming one again. They made it look effortless, but when we first tried it, we both terribly failed. Eventually I managed to do it, but Seamus never managed to get the hang of it.
      Here's some videos of our monkey adventures and some other things from the day https://photos.app.goo.gl/SIMc22TJMyPFOsFH3
      We also went to the Santa Mónica pier. This used to be a huge attraction, as it was one the the first concrete piers (built to pour sewage into the sea...) but this also meant that they could build various attractions on the pier, like a merry go round, roller coaster, all kinds of food stands. It still is really nice, although it looks much bigger from far away then it actually is. I tried a corn dog for the first time, though it wasn't a super amazing experience to be honest :D
      All in all we cycled around for more then 3 hours, though the guys t the rental place was nice, and only charged us for 3!
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    • The Mad Greek

      April 15, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 28 °C

      After getting out of the desert we needed some food for the rest of the drive, os we stopped at a funky Greek diner, that promised to have the best gyro in America and amazing strawberry milkshakes. While I can't judge if it really is the best gyro in America (it probably wouldn't be in Europe, but it was pretty good) but the milkshake really was amazing, it had actual strawberries in it, which basically won the race for it already compared to most places.Read more

    • Mojave desert & getting to LA finally

      April 15, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 22 °C

      We woke up after a long night's sleep, and we realised we really need to try and contact Ester néni, if we want to stay with her the same night. Seamus went down to ask the front desk, to ask if we can use a phone to call her. He came back telling me excitedly that there's a breakfast downstairs. It was really surprising, as it was literally the cheapest motel we could find in the area... We had some coffee, oatmeal, and toasted waffles, and I managed to call Ester from the front desk, and get their address. We had an about 4.5 hours drive ahead of us, which at the time didn't seem too bad, so I decided we should make a detour into the Mojave desert, as we missed that on our way to Las Vegas. It turned out to be a quite long drive, but it was very pretty, and I didn't want to just drive all day, so it was good that we went. There were long straight endless roads, abandoned buildings, and the largest Joshua tree forest in the US (actually is bigger than in Joshua Tree National Park). These trees are the strangest trees I've even seen, growing in weird directions, and super spiky. We had a tomato throwing competition at one.
      Getting out of the desert we joined up with all the traffic going back to LA on a Sunday afternoon, so we had some really slow traffic. In the end we made it to Esther's House at 9 in the evening. We were a bit worried that we can't let them know that we will be slightly late, and we were slightly right, as they were waiting with dinner for us, but have already ate theirs. Still we were given a warm welcome, maybe even more so, as they gave up on us arriving that night already. We had some beer and rakott krumpli in the kitchen, and then had a super comfy night's sleep again.
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    • A tired night of Mexican food and motel

      April 14, 2018 in the United States ⋅ 🌙 19 °C

      We left the desert at dusk, and we were exhausted so we just looked for the closest and cheapest motel, which turned out to be on the east side of Las Vegas.
      We were pretty hungry though, and I found this very well rated Mexican restaurant about 10 minutes away, so we headed there first. At the entrance we found about 10 people waiting for tables, and they told us that they have been waiting for 10 minutes and will probably wait for 20 more. We were almost out the door, when the hostess asked us if it would be OK for us to sit at the bar, in which case we could sit immediately. Of course we were happy to do that. The place was funnily decorated, had alive guitar player singing Mexican songs, and Gib TV playing horrifying Mexican telenovelas, with the subtitles turned on. We got 2 beers, and a huge bowl of nachos that came with it. We ordered a plate of little starters, that we could barely finish, as we already got full on nachos. All in all it was a really nice place, and afterwards we fell into our beds sometime before 11 as zombies...Read more

    • Valley of Fire State Park

      April 14, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 24 °C

      Another good day trip I was recommended around Las Vegas was the Valley of Fire State park. It was a bit further, about 1-1.5 hours drive, but it was worth the drive. Although after this we felt like we were deserted out a little bit, and would prefer to not have sand and sun and super dry air. Seamus gets a huge electric shock every time he gets out of the car, or tries to do any other ordinary day to day thing. On the way to the park we stopped at a shop that sells a huge amount of fireworks, and cheap alcohol - it turned out that it was a shop on an Indian reservation, so you don't have to pay tax on item bought there, and also they allow you to blow up your fireworks next to the shop in the desert. (you can't do it outside of there, unless it's the 4th of july).
      When we entered the park we were greeted near the entrance by a group of huge horned antílope creatures that I have no idea what they are but looked really cool. Here too we drove around the park, wanting to take a photo of every hill we drove past, and stopped at a couple of places to walk around at. The first one we did was famous because of the ancient drawings that were all over the walls. The second one led to a rock formation called the fire wave.
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    • Brunch buffet at the Red Rock casino

      April 14, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

      So Seamus has a favorite YouTube channel called wort it, where 2 guys try out 3 food places in different price categories, for example sushi, or steak, and the food always looks really good. Most of the episodes are set in LA but they had one in Vegas trying out buffet places, and this buffet was their cheap category. Unfortunately it was a Saturday, so it was brunch with unlimited champagne, which made it a bit more expensive, but it was still quite cheap for the ridiculous amount of food they had. We got in quickly without a wait, as it was still quite early at 10:30, and then got set up with some mimosas by our waiter, and then we went exploring the food options. We didn't even get 1/3 of the way, and our plates were full... They had all kind of Asian food:sushi, sashimi, all kinds of stir frys, our favorite, the walnut shrimp, Korean bbq ribs, etc and this was just the Asian section. They also had multiple hams and roasts that they hand carved for you, and you could ask for a fresh omelette to be made for you as well. There was a big American breakfast section, with pancakes, waffles, eggs benedict, and a huge pile of perfectly cooked bacon, that I added a few of to every plate that I got. It really is impossible to list all the different stuff they had, let alone taste it all, but we gave it a pretty good try. I think we spent about an 1.5 there, taking our time to be ready to eat again (it never really happened, after the first bite we always realised that we are full again). In the end we finished with 3 slices of pies, as they had a selection of maybe 8 different ones.Read more

    • Second vegas night out

      April 14, 2018 in the United States ⋅ 🌙 15 °C

      We arrived back to the hotel around 8:30, so we had some time to shower and rest before starting another night out. We wanted to start out with watching the Mirage volcano erupt, and seeing the Bellagio fountain show, as we noted the times for these on our morning walk. We watched the volcano first, which only happens 2 times every night. I expected something small and only entertaining for children, but I was very pleasantly surprised, it was really cool to see. So there's this volcano in the middle of the lake, and there's loud grumbling noises, water that splashes up like lava, as it is illuminated by orange lights, and a few enormous flamethrowers on the top of the volcano that sometimes erupt, so strong you can feel the warmth of them on your face. There also a lot of smaller flamethrowers sprinkled around the lake, that light up together, they look super pretty as they reflect over the water. All in all it was really entertaining for something that is completely free!
      Then we walked on with the crowd to the Bellagio hotel. On the way there were tons of people dressed up in costumes, they were advertising different shows, or casinos, or strip clubs. We watched the fountain show to the 'Viva las Vegas' song, which was quite cool too, the water sometimes went really really high, and made a load splashing noise when it came down. Then we tried setting up lyft (an uber like app) on my phone too, to get some special discount, which took so long, that we saw another fountain show, which was actually much more fun then the first one. I can't really say why, it had a better choreography I guess :D. The fancy Bellagio Hotel that we were next to has exiled the ride sharing taxis to the basement, but our driver didn't seem to know about this, so it took about 20 minutes to find him, frequently talking to him on the phone trying to figure out where he was, and being chased away from the fancy entrance by employees wearing hats, as they saw we were not looking for a traditional taxi. We even ran after a car for about a 100 meters, which fit the description, which turned out to be just filled with middle aged Asian tourists. Finally we managed to find each other though, and we could start our long drive out to the Freyman Street Experience. It was really bad traffic, and we had to drive around the whole town it seemed to get there - and then the app gave us a price of less then 10 dollars, it was incredibly cheap! The freyman Street experience was something that Seamus has found as somewhere we need to go to (sorry Seamus but I do 95% percent of out planning - you do the driving though, so it's not completely imbalanced). Just a few hours ago the lady helping us in the laundromat also told us that we definitely need to go too. It turns out, that this is a much more real Las Vegas, in the "what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas" kind of way. The strip is something where you could easily take your kids (and we saw lots of families walking around). Here there was a much much higher percentage of drunk people, much more trashy ones at that too, and the streets were full of crazy performers. Like a little short white guy rapping terribly, surrounded by enthusiastic drunk people, practically naked girls, who will spank you for some money, or let you pick them up and have a photo taken, a guy holding a sign asking to kick him in the balls, and just all kinds of crazies. There were also lots of clubs to party at as well. We walked around looking at all the silly people, went into a few casinos (these also had some crazy things in them, like one of them had an aquarium big enough to have a shark in it). At around 1-1:30 we realised we were way too tired to do this anymore, so we decided to hunt down some kind of food, and then head home. We found a place with some slices of pizzas and then took another lyft home, and collapsed into sleep.
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    • Laundromat and some more food

      April 13, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

      This morning we both put on our last clean clothes (Seamus just wore a sweater all day even for hiking as he had no shirts left...), so after 2 weeks away from home we really needed to wash our clothes. It is quite cool we lasted this long, considering we left from Malaga with just a backpack each. We did buy a few new clothes here too, so that helped of course. We had 3 plastic bags completely full of clothes, and the laundromat had machines that were capable of washing that much at the same time. While the clothes washed and dried we sat around looking up places where we could eat something. Vegas has lots of crazy restaurants, especially buffets, so we were considering splurging on something amazing. Unfortunately by the time we would get back and take a shower (we really needed one) it would have been too late for these places to eat at. So we decided to have a breakfast/brunch buffet the next day, and just find something cheap on the outskirts where we were, near the Laundromat. I found a place famous for their philly cheese steak, so we shared one of those and some chilly cheese fries. At the end we had to walk back through the whole floor of the casino in our hotel, with our 3 plastic bags full of clothes, it was a really funny feeling. It actually sparked a conversation in the elevator, we looked so funny and out of place with them.Read more

    • Red Rock canyon national monument

      April 13, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 15 °C

      The red rock national monument is just outside Las Vegas city territory - so it's "only" 20 kilometers drive on big straight roads form the centre of the city to get to city borders. At this point you can already see the rocks, as they are really really red even from a distance. From far away they almost look small, compared to the other dark mountains surrounding the city, just a speck of redness. But once we got into the park, and parked at the first viewpoint, they felt really really big: we kept spotting hiking people and wondering how tiny they are, and realising that boulders that looked small, were the size of a small building. At this first stop we only walked around a little bit, and claimed up one empty boulder. It is really fun to climb around the sandstone, as the plastic of our shoes really sticks to it, it is like having gravity boots on! Then we drove on a bit more on the scenic 20 km route, and I chose a reasonable looking hiking trail to do. We were a bit tired and hungover at first, but walking around really helped to wake up up. It was a really really scenic walk, mostly in a canyon surrounded by various colours of red rocks. Also, quite a lot of bushes, plants, and cactuses were flowering too. In the end we were rewarded with a view of the whole city of Las Vegas, we could easily make out multiple famous casino buildings. It really made you see how big and stretched out the town is, it is crazy that only 600 thousand people live there!Read more

    • Shooting one big gun

      April 13, 2018 in the United States ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

      We were handed a flyer promising 20 dollars off at some shooting range, and Seamus actually wanted to go to one, as he was interested in shooting a fully automatic machine gun. When we showed up, of course it turned out that we can only use the coupon if we spend more than a 100 dollars, and we didn't really want to do that, so in the end he just settled on paying for having only one shot with a 50 caliber sniper rifle. It was only 20 bucks, and it seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity. There was actually a short line, so we had to wait around in the hall, which was also a gun shop. We got slightly freaked out seeing how you can just buy a brand new gun for 200-300 dollars easily, especially with the gunshots coming from the firing range in the background, for a while we kind of decided we never want to move to this country, with all these guns around... Finally Seamus's turn came around, so we both put on ear protection and went inside. There was another guy firing an ak47 inside, which was so so loud that it really hurt your ears even with the protectors on. Actually Seamus's gun was about the same loudness as that one. He said that the recoil wasn't actually that strong, but the fireball was so bright that it hurt his eyes a little bit.Read more

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