Driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas takes just over 9 hours. It’s been an interesting and eventful weekend celebrating my sister’s birthday.

Meghan, my sister and I left at around 7PM on Friday and eventually got into Las Vegas at around 4:30AM. We checked into the St. Tropez Hotel and noticed that our hotel room was definitely not up to par (this is the SAME place we stayed at in 2001 that had blood all over the hotel room… I’ll have to find and post that story for those who don’t know about it). There were dried remnants of vomit near one of the beds, the pillows and sheets were stained and dirty (thankfully, not with blood this time) and the place just reaked of cigarette smoke.

We slept for a few hours and awoke to the sound of a cell phone. It was our parents informing us that they were going to drive to Las Vegas for the weekend as well! That was awesome. However, this denied us getting anymore sleep (only 3 hours), so we awoke to straighten up the room and wait for friends. While waiting, we noticed how horrible this place actually was. There were needles in the parking lot, as well as used condoms. Definitely a classy looking place.

Michelle called our parents to complain and they offered to upgrade our accomodations! For Saturday night, our entire group of 11 people would be staying in the Bellagio! That was an amazing hotel and all of our friends were extremely thankful to our parents.

We had a quick blitz around Vegas, checking out various things such as a museum at the Venetian, the swimming pool at the Bellagio and then went out to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe with our parents. Afterwards, we went out on the strip to examine more casinos and drink/gamble away money.

Michelle ended up feeling sick, so she didn’t go out. A few of us checked out the Excalibur and Luxor and then headed back to our hotel to catch up on sleep we missed the previous night.

On our drive back on Sunday, Interstate 15 was shut down since there was an accident about half a mile ahead of us. We must have just missed it. After a half hour of sitting on the freeway, they began to let traffic through. The hold up was a motorcyclist that had somehow crashed.

As we drove by, we noticed things weren’t entirely right. In the middle of the road lay a body partly covered by a blanket. It’s legs and feet were sticking out from underneath in a very contorted position and a motorcycle pulled off to one side of the road. It was a horrid sight.

Besides funerals, this is the closest I have ever experienced to human death. It hits especially close, since that person was also most likely returning from Las Vegas for the weekend and had probably passed by our car not more than 10 minutes before hand. They were probably thinking of the money they had spent this weekend, or how anxious they wanted to get home… crashing probably wasn’t even on their mind. Ugh.

It’s also kind of sobering since I know quite a few friends, as well as my Dad, who ride motorcycles. You can be the most cautious driver/rider in the world, but it only takes one idiot to change everything. Meghan believes that she explicitly remembers the rider and believes it was a female. I haven’t found any news reports on it yet though.

In anycase, we finally made it home at 11PM on Sunday night. This weekend was a lot to deal with, physically and emotionally and it’s good to finally be home. Now to tackle school.

Since it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I thought it is time to celebrate by combining two of my favorite things: Pirates and Haikus!

Avast ye Mateys!
It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day
Let’s plunder booty!

Anyway, I’ll post more on this past weekend in Las Vegas later (class soon).

Yay for modern technology! I just left school and am currently writing this on my laptop as I ride BART to go to the airport.

Anyway, September is going to be an extraordinarily busy month for me. Last weekend, I went on a camping trip with Meghan and friends to a place called Salt Point State Park. It’s a beautiful area along the coast of California, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. We spent a total of 4 days there.

On Saturday, we hiked roughly 8 miles around the park from our campsite, down to the beach and up into the mountains, checking out a variety of geology along the way. 😉 They have a pygmy forest there that is similar to one I’ve seen on a previous geology trip in Mendocino.

Sunday was interesting. We went canoeing on the Russian River, which is evidently a popular area for people to rent canoes in. It’s about a 10 mile canoe trip and we arrived at 10AM and were done by about 5PM. It was a leisurely trip that took the whole day. Before we began, we received an orientation that said about 1 in 5 canoes would flip over. Our group had 5 canoes and 3 of them flipped over. 2 of them within 5 minutes of starting!

We also had an interesting experience in giving some extra beer to a group of ladies who flashed us in return. It was interesting in the sense that they were the ones who offered to do that. We would have probably have given them some extra beer if they had just said hello to us. Regardless, it was a fun time for all involved, despite the moral accountability of some… or lack thereof.

We drove back home on Monday… having lunch at In N Out of course. The weekend was actually framed with In N Out, since we stopped by a new one on the way to our campsite on Friday. So that basically would make it a perfect weekend, no matter what happened.

Dan was on vacation this weekend as well and called me when he was in Lake Tahoe. I gave him some (limited) information on where we were going to camp and invited him along to hang out with us for the weekend. However, we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants and nothing was set in stone. I figured I would just call him when we got to our campsite.

So we get there, only to find out: NO CELL PHONE SERVICE! Crap! A forest ranger directs to an area down the road where there is limited cell phone coverage, so we go there. I leave a message on Dan’s phone (apparently it was garbled due to crappy reception) letting him know where we are. So we wait up the rest of the night for him and he doesn’t show up!

Damn!

Apparently, he ended up camping not more than 20 sites down from us in the same camp ground… looked for us in the morning but couldn’t find us and then took off back to Tahoe. I felt rotten that it didn’t work out. Meghan thought she saw him in a camp farther down when she went for a walk in the morning, but wasn’t entirely positive. And Dan thought he saw Meghan but wasn’t entirely positive either. Ah well!

I’m currently on my way to the airport to fly home this weekend. Nate, Nic and their significant others are going out to Lake Mojave this weekend, where we will partake in some water sports with Nate’s boat (his graduation present)! I haven’t been to the river in so long, so I’m just itching to go. Of course I doubt I’ll get a load of homework that I have to do done, but regardless!

Then next weekend is Michelle’s 21st birthday, which we’ll be celebrating in Las Vegas. So yet another weekend that I won’t be able to get stuff done. But it will be a great weekend, regardless.

Hopefully September doesn’t screw me up for the rest of the semester. It’s kind of a bad start. I’m basically doing everything that I didn’t get a chance to do this summer.

I somewhat enjoy my classes, though I have absolutely no clue what is going on in my Physics class. I understand the concepts of physics quite well. Explain something to me, I’ll be able to explain it back and give examples. But calculating things? Ugh! Math has never been my strong point, and the math in this course is intensive! Plus, since I don’t have a strong grasp on it anyway, I feel behind. (However, I did somehow manage to pull off a B+ in my Calculus II class.)

Hmm… I’m almost to the airport. Time to put away the laptop and actually post this on the site later! Until next time.