2008 was just off the charts awesome.  Got an apartment, a free trip to Asia, and encountered and defeated Satan.

Visited the following places for vacation:

• Los Angeles – my other home town
• San Diego – Coronado had beautiful fine, white sand beaches, tall palm tress and water almost a Caribbean blue / green color.  Coronado, the town, was fun, full of great restaurants, but a little touristy.
• La Jolla – upscale beach village, rocky beaches though!
• Laguna Beach – hippie beach town
• Santa Barbara – yuppie beach town, weather is much cooler than in San Diego or L.A., different climate
• Seattle – yes, there is a coffee shop on every corner!  Fun, beautiful, biking is the big thing, Gasworks Park and Fremont were highlights.
• Cannon Beach – Haystack Rock is simply not of this world.
• Portland, OR – interesting dichotomy of both yuppies and druggie hippie scum, would not want to go back.  This distinction of two cultures was reflected in the architecture, as there were older run-down buildings and new oversized glass buildings built next to each other.
• Vancouver, BC – clean, sports / outdoors, fitness atmosphere, lots of tall glass buildings
• Ireland: Shannon, Cliffs of Moher, Galway, Limerick, Cork, Dublin (drove cross country in rented Kia)
• Wales – the drive from Holyhead to England was beautiful – right along the coast of a cobalt blue sea, and the countryside and backroads were just picturesque, with the old buildings, large fields, hills, and low stone walls.
• London (drove cross country in stick-shift rented Fiat)
• Paris, I wish NY was more like it.  Beautiful, intelligent, cultured people.
• Brussels, Belgium – architecturally beautiful city, but yes it rains a lot and everyone drives a Skoda
• Amsterdam – what can I say?
• Chicago – cool, fun, beautiful, great people, so many things to do.  Was like a clean, manageable New York City.
• Las Vegas – The Strip was not nearly as big as I thought it would be – it literally is just a strip in the middle of the desert.  For some reason, I felt really at home there, and felt like I had been there my whole life.  Everyone was from somewhere else – either on vacation or moved there for work.  I did not meet one “born and bred” Las Vegan.
• Utah – Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park.  Beautiful beyone words.  However, Zion was full of foreigners tourists and their kids.  They probably weren’t tourists, but immigrants and their anchor babies. Ugh.  If it weren’t for all the people, I would have liked Zion a lot better – too overcrowded.  Saw Joshua trees.
• Arizona – Grand Canyon – it really was grand ;o).  I was surprised that there were no guard rails near the edge.  I guess there haven’t been enough dumb-ass NYers and NY Lawyers out there to insisit upon it yet, thankfully.  The landscape of Arizona is surprisingly much less deserty than in Utah or Nevada.

Also, in 2008,  culmination of 5 years worth of studying and test-taking.  Also, I learned that some poeple are just shitty, some people are thieves, and some people just won’t like you no matter what – and they’ll try to blame you for their own incompetence.

Overall, a lot of fun, a great accomplishment, and some hard lessons learned.  I have a new affinity for my own country, after seeing how much foreigners love it and after remembering how much soldiers sacrificed for this country.

How can I top this in 2009??

Electric Avenue.  Why is this song so depressing?

I was considering selling or trading my Fender Stratocaster and getting a Gibson Les Paul. Part of the reason I want a Les Paul is because Jimmy Page rocked one in Led Zeppelin during their working years. I like the sustain and the grinding sound of the Les Paul

But then, the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jimi Hendrix used a strat. I’ll keep the Strat, and the Digitech Hot Head distortion pedal I got for it.

I love this RHCP song and the Strat solo at the beginning…

Life’s funny.  We tried to go to Bryce the Friday after Thanksgiving, but we ran into two huge problems:  the road we had to take to get there (before it would get dark out) was covered with ice, and our POS Hertz rental overheated while ascending a 10,000 foot high mountain.  The engine temperature got really bad at about 9,500 feet, even though it was about 24 degrees fahrenheit outside.   Almost at the summit, but with a 40 mile / 2,000  foot descent after the summit, then a 250 mile return trip, I decided we should turn back.

I maneuvered the car through a white-knuckle, steep descent down the side of the frozen mountain, negotiating hairpin turns on precipices without guardrails… and we made it safely back to Cedar City.  We stopped at a Sports Authority so I could return a North Face jacket I bought there (forgot mine in the hotel room!).  In the shopping center parking lot, I turned and looked at the snow-capped mountain that taunted me.  “You haven’t seen the last of me – I enjoy a challenge” I silently told it.

We got back on I-15 and saw signs for Zion National Park, and went there instead.  The drive was mostly downhill from Cedar City, but there was a bit of a climb to the actual park.  The car began to go toward the red-line for heat, but managed to keep its cool long enough for us to go the park and return to Vegas without breaking down.

Friday night we went to the Wynn – great casino, nice shops, hot, young cocktail waitresses, but weak drinks.  Spent about 4 – 5 hours there, then went back to the Riviera, ordered room service and called it a night.  It was funny when the room service guy came to our room to deliver the food, whe he came in to put it on the table for us… took a look around and said something like “Wow! You guys are really having a good time!  All that’s missing is a hole in the wall!” Yeah, we can trash a hotel room in two nights flat.

My “Sea Moose” went back to LA on Sunday morning, I went out to defeat my Moby Dick (the 10,000 mountain that stood between me and Bryce Canyon).  I rented a 4×4 and took off for Cedar City.

I headed back up the 10,000 foot high monster and the Toyota SUV did not overheat during the ascent.  Good sign.  However, the higher up I went, the further the vertical drop from the edge of the shoulder-less road.   This was some serious white-knuckle driving, there was still snow and ice on the road and as I got higher, the twists and turns seemed to get worse.

Finally, I saw a huge shoulder on the road.  I had been driving for about 3.5 hours, the last 1 hour spent driving up this mountain, and pulled over to take a break.  When I was getting out of the car, I noticed it – a street sign that said something beautiful: “SUMMIT 9910 FT.”  I did it – I got to the top!  It was all downhill from there – easy stuff (not counting the ride back).

About 40 minutes later, I got to Bryce, and I met five people (2, then 3 others later)  who changed my life forever.

After hiking for about 3 hours, it was getting dark, and colder, so decided to head out. The experience and the beauty of the park greatly exceeded my expectations.  The air at 8,500 feet is surprisingly pleasant, and easy to inhale.   Then, I actually enjoyed most of the ride back up, then down, the mountain.  The sky at the summit was actually.. BLUE, and I saw the most beautful sunset of my life.  (See the post below).

Well, the experience I had in the Canyon was amazing, and it cured me of something I am now ashamed to admit I ever held in my heart.  I think it was divine intervention.  So, thanks God, thanks Hertz, thanks Toyota, and thanks ice and snow.

I had taken the Sunset Trail because I was looking for Thor’s Hammer (the rock formation shown below in the photo I took that day),  I found it – and something else just as astonishing and beautiful.

I first heard the song “Where Corn Don’t Grow” by Travis Tritt while driving on UT-14, heading back from Bryce Canyon, past Long Valley Junction, through Duck Creek Village, then on to Cedar City, and finally Las Vegas.

The sun was setting, and I was approaching the 10,000 foot summit of a mountain. The sunset was none like I had ever seen before, there was a crescent moon already out, low in the sky, and two bright stars were above either crescent tip, as if the stars were suspending the moon.

As the sun was setting, the sky wasn’t the usual pinks and purples, rather it was a shade of gray-blue I had never seen before.  Fir trees, snow, a winding mountain road, a low, crescent moon, and Travis Tritt on the radio.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

The one line of the song that really got me was “Those weeds are high where corn don’t grow.” I interpreted it to mean something, having lived in a place where corn doesn’t grow for most of my life…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmD_Yjn-JYM