Sin City

No, not the movie. The cheap plastic imitation that resides in the Nevada deserts.

I spent three nights in the Sin City (aka Las Vegas) and that was enough. Every place full of casinos - as if I didn't know that when I decided to go there - and every casino a maze. I had a great room for extremely cheap price. The bathroom was larger than most hotel rooms that I have slept in.

In this town everything is a cheap plastic imitation - almost. The heat was real, though. Daily temperatures were somewhere around 42-43 centigrade. And the thunderstorm, coincidentally, was also real. Yes, it does rain in the Sin City, perhaps once a year and I managed to get there at exactly the right time to witness it. Lightnings were cool, even though at first I thought they were just a part of another casino's outside show to attract more people.

To escape I spent yesterday looking at something that was definitely not a cheap plastic imitation of Grand Canyon. Though not the biggest canyon in the world, it was magnificient. It would have been good to make a trip to go down to the canyon instead of just seeing it from the ground above, but I didn't have the time, or could have had, but bungled my roll for choosing the right tour. Still seven hours was enough to know I want to see more, some other day. Water rafting down in the river should be cool.

Today (Wednesday) I drove all the way from the Sin City to Berkeley, 550 miles, 880 kilometers. It took about 9 hours and I spent about 40 minutes with another 2000 cars in the middle of Mojave desert (well outskirts, I guess) stopped dead on our tracks, because a car had crashed into the highway and blocked both lanes. Even I sweated a little bit.

Tomorrow I'll see more of Berkeley and meet some interesting research people. And lots of cool stuff for the weekend - I can't wait to get up to Napa Valley.