Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Vegas Baby: Part Deux

Almost exactly a year ago, I learned the meaning of the expression "I thee wed" in the beautiful setting of The Little White Chapel's "Tunnel of Love". The opportunity to celebrate this anniversary was too good to miss, so we headed out to Vegas last weekend. Our agenda was rather simple: party, sleep (some), drink (a lot), and repeat in random order. We started out Friday night with dinner at Mon ami Gabi (Paris), followed by Studio 54 (MGM Grand). The party was alright, and most of us left the club in reasonably decent shape between 2 and 4AM, the married boring people heading for their hotel room, the young bloods going for the craps tables. Long story short: everybody ended up getting some sleep, and by 2PM the next day, all of us had made it to the Paris' pool.

The following night was planned out by mastermind Turco. We formed a party of ~30 people and went to Simon (Hard Rock) for an amazing dinner after which off to the Body English, where Turco had arranged for a private lounge with drink service (pretty high performance organizing).

As far as I remember, the Body English is highly recommendable, we had a lot of fun and most of us where decadently intoxicated by the time we followed the natural urge to go home and snuggle in our covers. On Sunday we went to Red Rocks Canyon with Alex and Jules, and pretended to do some climbing. We (=Alex) were able to set up a grand total of 1 top rope and after I miserably failed to set up a second one (~5.10+) we rushed back to the airport in order to catch our flight to SFO.


Some picture links:
Misha's
Andrew's

Monday, April 04, 2005

More Tahoe snow

We went up to the cabin again this weekend. It was a full house (Julie, Ellen, Mark, Sarah, The Ginsberg brothers, Mike, Alex, Siobhan, Marcus and Monique), and most of us went skiing at Alpine Meadows on Saturday. A storm moved in on Sunday, so we decided to pig in for breakfast instead of going skiing, and headed back to the bay before the traffic got too crazy. Donner Pass was already snowed in when we passed it around 11AM. On the way back, Maureen and I stopped in Berkeley to get me some Telemark boots. To Maureen's delight, it took 1h30 to get them fitted. I can't wait to try them out!
It will be a long season, most of the resorts have 10s of feet of base, and there is more snow coming in this week.