Musings of a Displaced HK-Aussie

Just got back from a snowboarding trip in Snow Valley and 3 nights in Sin City & Grand Canyon with Uncle Gabriel’s family. Snow conditions were slushy (that shouldn’t surprise anyone as Snow Valley is in SoCal) which made snowboarding crap. Snow accumulated on the snowboard basically melted between getting on and off the ski lifts.

Vegas - not much to tell. Wendy and I got 1/2 price tickets to La Femme at MGM Grand. We stayed @ MGM Grand for 3 nights courtesy of Uncle Gabriel getting a good rate.

Grand Canyon - spectacular view although we only went to the West Rim (home of the Hualapai Indian tribe)  rather than South Rim. South Rim supposedly has better views but its 6 hours drive from Vegas, compared to 3 hours between West Rim and Vegas. Constance and Holman would have been bored shitless if we drove to South Rim.

Broke my personal record of hotel stays/travel this year, courtesy of my first out-of-town project. I’ll see if the record can be broken next year.

Work-related: 135

Leisure: 17

TOTAL = 152

Our accommodation in Europe will pretty much come out from hotel points/promos. I also flew so many times (roundtrip each week) to get a free 1-year companion pass on SouthWest for Wendy. Who said working out-of-town is a bad thing?

Let’s see…plans for the 2005/2006 holidays season are:

Christmas: More snowboarding (at Big Bear) and sinning (Vegas)

January: Paris, Spain and Italy.

Checklist:

• Snowboard clothing [check]
• Lonely Planet Europe [check]
• European language phrase books [check]
• Learning to speak French, Italian and Spainish [ongoing]

Myself and Vivek Man-cherry volunteered for the Junior Achievement program and today we showed up at at Rocklin Elementary school to teach a class of 40 3rd graders about city planning and construction. The kids were very enthusiastic and loved having visitors. They were smart and asked some intelligent questions. The classroom had TWO computers in the back - we didn’t have those luxuries back in our days. Definitely worth doing again next year.

After spending 20+ years in the southern hemisphere where "White Christmas" means going to the beach, this year will really be a white Christmas as we’ll heading to Tahoe with a bunch of my colleagues for snowboarding this weekend to celebrate project roll-off.

Wendy flew up to Sacramento before a bunch of us took the 1.5 hr to Tahoe. Ski resorts are way bigger compared to the ones back home. Anyhow, we took snowboarding lessons on Day 1 at Sierra-at-Tahoe and became "self manageable". Day 2 was at Heavenly, with much better scenery including a view of Lake Tahoe. Thanks to Yan for finding the Amex discounts and providing private lessons.