Krunal and I ended up doing a Vegas/SoCal road trip the week leading up to New Year's. Nothing was planned -- the only thing we knew we were doing once he got here from Boston was Vegas. After a couple of days in the city, we started looking for rental cars. Everyone was sold out, and when available, regulation cars were at like 90-100 a day. I called good 'ol Mountain View Avis; they had a car. We head there next day (fuck, it's nuts to commute down south without a car) and Mr. Anil says, "I'll give you a Mustang. Convertible. 29." Gotta love the guy.
So we started off for Vegas. Things were good. I drove more of the California part because in Nevada it had to be Krunal all the way. After having dinner (at some Denny's) we continued down I-15S. Krunal suddenly realizes we're running out of gas! The friggin' indicator was fux0red! Anyway, we couldn't do much so we kept driving for a bit (that bit ended up being more than 15 miles) in hopes of finding a gas station. No luck, so we moved to the right-most lane. The car stops. Wouldn't start. Fuck. Quickly put the parking lights on, and later pushed the car more to the right (the darn thing kept shaking when a truck would go by). Anyway, so we're fucked. Called NHP, but they said they needed a mile marker and it was waaay cold (less than -5° C) for any of us to go figure. Called Avis. Their Vegas location was closed and the woman who answered wouldn't help us any other way. Called again, and now they'd just hang up. (They'd say "hello" exactly twice and then just hang up.) Bastards. We called another Avis location (I think) and explained our situation. She was extremely helpful. She managed to connect us to a towing service, who was supposed to bring us gas. The guy later called us to find out where we exactly were. We managed to give him directions using the GPS (15 miles away from exit 31 or some shit on I-15S; at this point we were about 20 miles from the strip). Anyway, after maybe a couple of hours he came, without fuel -- the gas station that he thought he'd get fuel from was closed. Oh well, so he said he could tow us to the closest gas station which happens to be in the strip. 20 minutes later all we see are lights. We fill up the tank and look for a motel.
Anyway, so that was that. We spent a couple of days in Vegas.
We weren't sure what we wanted to do next, so since Hoover Dam wasn't too far, we headed there.
Traffic was crazy and later I wondered why people even bother coming here. Anyway, next we thought we should head to check out Grand Canyon. Checked maps/GPS and we were on our way. Half way there, we filled up gas in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. It was way late at this time and we were told there's no point going at this time. So then we decided we should head to Santa Monica.
We got to Santa Monica late in the night. Couldn't find a cheap place, so ended up going to Inglewood, close to LAX. Breakfast next day was at the Taco Bell next door -- and I was shocked to see what I saw. The guy told us it's standard-issue LA. We then headed to Venice and later Long Beach. At this point we decided we needed music to be played from the iPhone, so we ended up at some Apple store in Manhattan village to buy the iTrip -- where we learned that the darned thing works only with iPods. Okay. We then headed to Griffith Park in the Hollywood hills to get a view of the LA skyline (not a clear night, sadly.) Later we headed for dinner at some restaurant in Huntington Beach where we were to meet Cathy and Peggy.
We had decided to head out of the area that night, but both of us were extremely tired. So we drove 6 miles to some motel in Beach Blvd. in Anaheim. Later that night Cathy called up saying they wanted to check out SeaWorld in San Diego the next day. That was a good thing, because plans to meet in Vegas had gotten fucked-up. So anyway, they called in the morning saying they were on their way. We left an hour later. So we were in San Diego.
Nice time was had. Later in the night we headed downtown for some coffee for our drive back to San Francisco.
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