Currently lying on my favorite couch at home, having just arrived home from work and settled in some comfy sweatpants. In my last post, I left off with my travels last summer up until Thanksgiving, and since then I’ve gone on a quite few trips, with 3 alone in Christmas and New Year season.
During the Christmas week, I drove to Santa Barbara with my family to visit my dad’s side of extended family for Christmas. We ate at a nice seafood restaurant by the pier for our family Christmas dinner, and the next day our family got brunch at a local diner. Then my brother and I took surfing lessons from an instructor we found on Airbnb, and it was lots of fun! The waves were choppier than when I learned in Bali, which made it harder to swim and surf but it was still lots of fun nonetheless. The lesson was 2 hours long, and it was such a workout, I was completely burnt out afterwards and sore the next day. A day later, we drove back to Santa Barbara and had Christmas dinner with my mom’s side of the family in San Mateo and we had a delicious hot pot dinner.
The following day (December 26th), we flew out at 6am to Phoenix for 3 days. We visited the local coffeeshops and some museums such as Phoenix Art Museum, Roosevelt Arts District, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. It was quite a small city, so I don’t know if I’d ever visit again, but I did enjoy the few days of slow travel. As a family, we also watched Aqua Man and Spiderverse at a nearby movie theater for $5! On one of the days, my mom and I drove out to Sedona to see the red rocks. Unfortunately for a lot of the day it was snowing and cloudy so we had limited visibility form the rocks, but when the view cleared it was quite gorgeous.
We flew back home on Saturday, and the next day I drove with my childhood friends to Vegas. It was an unexpectedly long 12 hour drive, so when we got to Vegas we crashed for the night. The next day we went to a lunch buffet, shopping, a dinner buffet, and then spent celebrating New Year’s Eve at the XS Nightclub with the Chainsmokers. It was quite cold and there were lots of long lines, so I don’t know if I would ever do it again, but I was glad to be with my friends and ring in the new year with them nonetheless.
That week was so extremely exhausting, from all the hours of traveling to and from home, which was unfortunate because my three destinations (Santa Barbara, Phoenix, and Vegas) were all pretty geographically close together. It was a very tiring week, and I definitely took a while to recover from it, who would’ve thought I’d be relieved to go back to work to rest.
In January, I’ve been on one trip, during MLK weekend to Colorado with some college friends. It was just this past weekend so it’s still very fresh in my mind, and let me tell you, it was quite the weekend. It’s quite a long story, so I’ll save it for my next post.
Cheers!
the world around me 