Sometimes, a day unplanned trip can be much better than you ever imagined. This is what happened when we visited Carmel Valley, CA. It was mid-April 2011, when my brother-in-law came to San Francisco for work. He visited us in the weekend. So we planned see the natural beauty of Carmel and Big Sur in a day's trip. Not just the city but the route to reach there was full of beauty. Now I know from where these beautiful nature wallpapers come from! Once while searching about the weekend getaways near Bay Area, I came across Carmel Valley Village. And the word 'village' attracted me most. Imagine a village in USA??? Since ever I have came here, we are visiting all developed places. Hence I was so excited to see the village. So after having heavy breakfast, we started off for Carmel. According to our GPS, the route towards village was quite weird. We didn't see any village. Of course, the small Carmel city is beautiful, but we were searching for the 'village' there. Finally we gave up and stopped at a coffee shop. There we came to know the city is only called Carmel Valley Village and also Carmel-By -The-Sea! I was little disappointed as I was expecting a typical village scene, but the beauty of the city brought smile! It was like as if we are in dreamy fairy tale land. Small little fairy tale cottage houses in rows, beautiful creeping plants all over windows, colorful flowers, cool breeze and calm streets. After walking down the beach and a nice Mediterranean lunch we headed towards Big Sur. Have a look!
Although everyone says, "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas"., but I am going to share what all we did in the Las Vegas!
Vegas is an ultimate place to have fun. Time is irrelevant here, none of the casinos have clocks, never ending buffets, over flowing drinks, action on all gaming tables. It was Christmas weekend when we planned to visit Vegas. I believe the finest entertainers in the world come to Vegas to perform and let us not forget the Cirque Du Soleil has made Vegas its home with several shows. Where else can you see Jerry Seinfeld and David Copperfield? Entertainment also lasts 24/7, you can wake up at any time during the day or night, step outside and find something to do. I repeat the city never sleeps. The hotels here too fun to walk through as they all are Theme Hotels. But accoording to Gaurav, Vegas themed hotels were much more, and much better during his early visits. We concluded its more of casinos now.
The Themed Hotels on the strip
the casinos
Bellagio dinner buffet line, we were in line for about 4hrs!
KA is a must watch! Many of our friends have seen other shows by this group,
all are worth watching. It expensive, but believe me completely WORTH.
Vegas is fun, but the fun is all materialistic, nothing natural. It is also known as the Sin City, but all of us doesn't want to commit sin. There are best and worst things about this city, which depend on individual thoughts. This is all my opinion. Visit Vegas, and share your views with me.
the song, "I feel good..." from the Bollywood movie Anjana Anjani
this is one of the best video I have seen showing the Vegas Strip.
Los Angeles is one of the world's most popular travel destinations. I say LA is the dream city for many. It's the Mumbai of USA or we can say Mumbai is LA of India.
We visited LA twice within a year. Reason? you'll come to know later. It was just before the Thangsgiving weekend when we planned a short trip to LA. I was not confident with the 6-7hrs drive to LA, so we took a flight on early Saturday morning and reached LA around 8-9am.
Directly from the airport we drove to re-live Gaurav's graduation days at University of Southern California, USC. We walked around the campus, re-living memories and had our breakfast at Jamba Juice Cafe.
After going through Gaurav's memory lane, we headed towards...
yes, Universal Studios, Hollywood!
101 Hollywood
entering the Universal Studios Hollywood
The Universal Studio
different 'sets' for movies and other shows
we went to stone age with Flinstones!
We had a lot of fun at the Studios the whole day. Everything looked familiar as we have seen those in movies and TV. It was so much fun relating and recollecting the sets, movies, daily soaps, the characters in each and so much more. It was a windy day with slight showers and as a result I was down with fever. We took an early dinner that evening and went to our hotel near Disney Land. As we have to have some drama in our trips, my fever shot up quite high and Gaurav had to go out in mid-night to get some medicine. In the morning, I was all set to enjoy Disney Land :) . Lesson learned : we should keep some basic medicines for emergency.
Now its time to visit the dream land, Disney Land!
Disney Land, where dreams come true!
the castle
the Disneyland map
the entrance and train
Mickey's Toon Town, we saw it alllll...Mickey's house, Minnie's house and her backyard, Chip n Dale's tree house, Goofy/Donald/Daisy...we saw everyone's home from inside and out...I was soo excited. Since childhood (till date) I am a Disney fan, so when everything and everyone was around me, I was lost in my childhood again. I can go there AGAIN. :)
we with Mickey Mouse, yes the real one :)
there are some young angels with Pluto
Goofy at the door!
Minnie Mouse
these were just 2% of Strollers in Disney Land that day
and of course, balloons and more pretty balloons
Finally comes the famous Disney Parade, which is a must see when you in Disney Land
(watch the video below)
Disneyland Thanksgiving Parade 2010
this video is via Youtube,
we were too busy in enjoying and clicking the stills of parade to take a video!
the Castle at night
This was the end of our first trip to LA. Now lets share our second experience
My Aunt came to Toronto, Canada for a month in May 2011. So we planned to visit her in near mid-May. We applied for visa after booking tickets for 11th May. Now finally the day arrived to fly, but guess what, we didn't get our Visa/passport yet! So we cancelled the tickets and thought to wait till weekend. Now weekend was here, and there was still no clue of our passport yet. After much thoughts and several visits & calls to USPS, we decided to drive to Canadian Consulate in LA and find out whats the issue.
So around 9am Sunday morning we took I-5 towards LA and reached around 3pm. There we had already booked a hotel for a night in Downtown LA, near the Canadian Consulate. Since it was Sunday, we decided to take some rest and visit some more places there in the evening.
started with Beverly Hills drive,
believe me, there was nothing to see!
the famous Hollywood
and of course, the Santa Monica Pier
The next morning we had an early appointment at the Canadian Office. There we came to know that their system was being upgraded, hence they couldn't process our Visa application. How can be they so irresponsible. Cause of their so called upgrade, we lost so much. Anyways, let it be...this too a lesson learned . Well the lady at the consulate told us that they will issue our visa in couple of hours, so we had more time to roam around.
yes, our last destination was Hollywood Walk, Kodak Theatre and Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood
After these few last sight-seeing, which was not so worth we took lunch and back to visa office. So finally after getting our visa, we started to drive back to Sunnyvale around 3.30pm. But story doesn't end here. Yes, after about 45miles back to north on I-5, we missed the I-5 exit! and realized after around 50minutes that we are on wrong way! I know we had GPS, and luckily signal was also NOT lost, but I was busy chatting on Facebook with my Mom! Actually we stopped for coffee to be awake and then we realized that we are on 99South instead of I-5. It was late, it was dark, we were sleepy and we took the wrong way! We started singing, no-no shouting Bollywood songs (which were on our stereo) to keep ourselves awake and took a U-turn back around 45miles to join the lost I-5. Thankfully this time SB (Gaurav's elder brother) was keeping our track through Google Latitude. Wow technologies! Finally we reached home around 11pm which was 2hrs late than scheduled. Lesson learned : never chat while on road, keep your GPS 'ON'.
