The Vacation

First day of work after a week long break has been tough. Momentum has to take time to recover as I had been relaxing for a week. The vacation was an excellent one even though I had missed out some interesting places like Lombard Crooked Street and Santa Monica Beach. It's a great time for bonding and know my colleagues better.

This vacation was so far the longest I ever had. A nine days eight nights tour around a total of four states in Western America. It was a little tiring to travel by car but the adventures made the trip worthwhile. Setting off in the dawn wasn't new to us but it was still a challenge. I couldn't keep my eyes open while sitting beside the driver. He did a tremendous job to stay awake and drove us to our first rest point in Oregon. The place looked like a deserted town which no one looking after the petrol station. There was hardly any signs of human staying around there. Spending as little time as possible, we left the place for good. Our next stop, Winniemuca, a city of Nevada.

The trip to Winniemuca was quite a short one which took us about an hour and a half to refuel our vehicle and had our breakfast. This is the point where I took over the driver's role and drove our way to Reno, the smallest big city in Nevada. Its surroundings were quite similar to Las Vegas with casinos and hotels everywhere. I bypassed Reno to head towards Sacramento. However, the call of nature came and I had to pull off at a petrol station somewhere in Nevada. The place that brought us to Lake Tahoe.

Lake Tahoe wasn't in our plan but it was highly recommended. Since it was about ten miles away from the petrol station, we made a trip there to unwind our fantasies of Lake Tahoe. It was truly awesome! The beautiful scenery of Lake Tahoe was like voodoo preventing us from sleeping. We got off the car to take some pictures of the nature's beauty. It was so wonderful that we spent an hour admiring it.

Lake Tahoe set our spirit high as we left for Sacramento, CA. I believed most people would have heard of this place as it is the capital of California state. We only dropped by the city to refuel and left for our first holiday destination, San Francisco. The traffic in San Francisco was atrocious and it took us quite some time to find our accommodation. There were similarity street names which led to the wrong place for dinner and wrong address to our hotel. Eventually, we managed to settle down well and had a fantastic dinner at a Singapore restaurant, Shiok. Shiok was run by a Singaporean and the food tasted almost exactly the same you can get in Singapore.

Day two in San Francisco was somehow the most enjoyable one. Its Chinatown was amazing and the Coit Tower was an eye opener. The scenery from the top of hill where the tower stood was beautiful. A place where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Lombard Crooked Street. Besides, the famous Fisherman Wharf can also be seen from such high attitude.

To be continued...