Friday, December 31, 2004

cK & n8 take Las Vegas - Part 1

cK drives to Sin City with n8, Liza and Chieri!

For weeks, n8 and I have been planning to go to Vegas for New Years Eve. Its the reason I came back so early from my trip to Florida. First thing was to meet n8 at LAX Airport. His flight was scheduled to arrive at 10:27am. I got to the airport around 10am and found out that his plane left late and was arriving around 11:08am. So now I had some time to kill. I walked around LAX and wanted to a closer look at that spacey thing that you always see in movies. Its actually just a restaurant. So I walked up to it and took the following pictures.

LAX Restaurant (Encounters)	LAX Control Tower	Front of Encounters Restaurant

After killing some time, I met n8 in the arrivals gate at the American Airlines terminal. His luggage took a while to be on the conveyor thingy. We waited a good 15 minutes, before his luggage appeared. From there we took a bus and rode back to my place. When I got home, I was talking to my friend, Liza. She is in Arizona and wanted to come along with us to Vegas along with her friend, Chieri. So she said they'd leave that night and arrive around 3am at my place. The next morning, n8 and I go and pick up the rental car we were going to drive from Avis. I had reserved a "compact" car and was expecting a microscopic Chevy Aveo -- which I was still cool with. Instead, to our surprise, I was given a blue 2004 Pontiac Sunfire. Man, this car was HOT! N8 and I were scheduled to set out for Vegas at 9am, but in reality we didn't leave until 12:30pm. No problem. Its all good. My cousin warned me that the drive might take up to 8 hours, but I didn't care. As long as I was in Vegas by the evening, I was cool with it.

So Liza, Cheiri, n8 and I set out for the long journey to Vegas with no expectations. No hotel, limited budget -- all we knew was that we weren't sitting home when 2005 rang in. The drive down wasn't really bad. Some traffic in the mix and some rain, but overall, it was not as bad as I expected. The high 4000ft elevation was breathtaking. Seeing miles and miles of mountains was very cool. We never saw stuff like that on the east coast. While I drived and looked at the cool scenery, my passengers were sleeping away.

Views on Hwy 15	Girls Sleeping in the Backseat	More Hwy 15 Views
Some Mountain	Hwy 15 Decline	Some Mountains
Liza and cK	The Crew	All of Us Driving
Overlooking Mountains	Some Lights in Distance	There's Las Vegas!!

During our drive, we stopped halfway to stretch our feet out. We took some pics and got back on the road. As the sun began to set, we were approaching what looked to be Las Vegas...but it turned out it wasn't. It was just some other gambling Nevada town 50 miles from Las Vegas. Eventually, our long drive paid off as we saw these real bright lights in the middle of nowhere. This was definitely Vegas in the horizon!

CONTINUE TO PART 2