Summer Travels: Geek Downtime

Between two fun & geek-filled weekends of Anime Expo and EVO, Sty and I made the effort to keep ourselves occupied. In hindsight, we could've devoted some of that time to sleeping and just chillaxing a bit more. Maybe I'm just getting old but, boy, was I sleepy!

Tuesday, July 3
Sty and I decided to take an "official" tour of LA during our downtime between events considering the number of times we've visited and would never do the real touristy things. We picked a decently reviewed tour online before we left on our trip and left it at that. We were running late that morning, so we called in to the tour group to confirm the time. They suggested we go straight to their office but we stayed on track and headed to the hotel pickup location we originally picked at booking. For some reason they figured that we agreed to meet them at their office and decided not to pick us up at our pickup location. We waited over an hour and then an additional hour after we called them to ask wtf was going on until their bus finally came by to grab us.

When we got to the office we were forced onto the other later tour that featured less an area of LA, which fortunately wasn't that huge of a concern. On the tour, we stopped at the Farmer's Market where we had "real" donuts for the first time (vs. Canadian "donuts"), Hollywood where we took pictures of the stars we cared for (BIG BIRD!), and Venice Beach for fake merch window shopping (and the beach too). The rest of LA, like Rodeo Drive, was driven through on the tour bus, so there wasn't much to that part.

It finished up earlier than we expected, so we called up Ken to come and grab us. Considering it was high traffic 4pm, he ended up getting stuck for the longest time, which we felt super bad for. :( When he finally did manage to make it to us, we decided to make a stop at Fry's again for some time wasting before meeting up with HB for dinner.

As we were already starving by then, we had a small snack at Jogasaki which was right outside the Fry's; it was really good! After some shopping, we made our way to Ramen Yamadaya and met up with HB. We also had a side of sake with our ramen to celebrate the occasion.

Jogasaki rolls~

Yamadaya ramen~

Btw, we wrote in to the tour company and got the difference in tour costs back.

Wednesday, July 4
We didn't realize our planned Universal Studios day was right on Independence Day (combined with the summer holidays) so the place was packed.

The park was peppered with water mist spray areas, but fortunately it wasn't THAT excessively hot that day. I made Curious George upset for not wanting him in the photo with me and Fievel. Yeah, was never really a fan of Curious George, so too bad for him. Transformers the Ride was the best out of the bunch, second was King Kong, and the third was probably the Studio Tour (bonus points for having a cute-looking tour guide ;)).

Thanks to our front of the line passes, we managed to see everything by the end of the day. We walked the city walk but didn't manage to decide on dinner so we left the park to find food elsewhere. Ken called up his friends who were checking out some local fireworks and they brought us to Umami Burger where we had delicious high-end burger and fries. P:

Thursday, July 5
We packed up our shtuff and made our way towards Korea town where we were to be dropped off for our bus trip to our next destination, Las Vegas! We had some pretty authentic (or so I think!) Korean tofu pot to-go from BCD for our ride there. The tofu was really quite good, btw~

The ride itself was a bit rough – the seats weren't particularly comfortable, the bus was super packed, the movie they played was super loud – but I was so tired, I just forced myself to nap while I could. For the cost of the one-way, hassle-free trip, it wasn't that horrible of an experience.

Upon arrival, me and Sty hung out at the casino/bar area of the Bally's hotel where we were to stay at before Kozu and crew showed up. We drove out to grab some nummy late night fast food at Sonic's after dropping off our stuff and got to check out the tail end of a motorcycle meetup that took over the whole drive-in parking lot. The peach and coke was my winning drink combination. <3

Sleep happened probably. I think some Sengoku Basara did too.