a haven in sedona...

one of the cool places we visited in sedona was this catholic church that is built on high near a mountaintside. it was a good place to bow one's head, take a minute to reflect and commune, and just remind oneself that there are some things greater than us out there...

...good stuff =)

24 hrs of lunacy...

this account is written after 24 hr of consciousness, so forgive me if I sound delirious because I am and am likely fading in and out as I type this. Today (yesterday?) was a whirlwind day of activity. We awoke and made our way to Sedona, recently voted by people who know to be the ##6 most desirable place in the US to live in. I can see why. The town is beautiful, slickly designed and well-maintained, but still maintaining a lot of its sense of connection to the surrounding natural environment. We spent the rest of the afternoon driving around looking at rocks and trying to climb up a big rock (Belle mountain)… here’s the proof:

I don’t know what it is about rocks and climbing them that brings such pleasure. It’s the primal urge to challenge nature combined with the thrill of possible death or at least dismemberment with the sheer idiocy of saying hey, I climbed a REALLY tall rock today that makes it so fun.

Some of us got in touch with our natural self (howling is very cathartic, especially when you are answered by other howls)…

(can you imagine the danger the photographer of this picture must have been in? what a gutsy idiot huh? But I’m eternally grateful tho =)

then baddaboom, we drive to las vegas. Last stop, sin city. The best part is… we don’t’ have a place to stay until Monday. It was Sunday ( I think) So the master plan was to just go out till the wee hours of the morning and then find ways to occupy ourselves until it’s time to check in at around 2pm (which at the time we arrived in vegas was 14hrs away). And that’s exactly what we did: we hit up ra at luxor (nice club, the music was a little wack for my taste last night/this morning but oh well you make do), drank some, danced a lot, and emerged hungry. At some point a red light was almost run, flashing occured, numbers were gotten, money was won (and of course lost) and it’s now somehow 3.5 hours from checkin. What a hilarious city…

Marathon

So we said our goodbyes to tony’s brother (thanks for housing us man) and embarked on our ridiculous 12 hr drive from Houston to Albaquerque. The drive was in the vicinity of 850 mi… a not insignificant amount of road to traverse. Armed with starbucks, chocolate-covered caffeinated beverages we embarked on our trip…. And we booked it. Again, the same cycle of channel-surfing, ipod-surfing, and just falling into sweet unconscious obvilion stood us in good stead to get to albaquerque. I don’t’ remember much from this drive… all I can say is if I am seriously considering trying to learn how to appreciated country music to ease the boredom… it must have been a very, long, drive.

Misc. Thought of the day; when a 3 yr. old showers your foot with droplets of urine, for some reason it feels much more… sanitary than if say a 70 yr-old had the same type of ‘accident’.

Ballin’ in Texas…

Consisted of looking for things to eat. It’s a metropolitan area so there was plenty of modern conveniences… but other than visiting the different stadiums (reliant, minute maid, etc.) there was nothing obvious to go and sightsee. An.d since none of the teams which inhabit said stadiums were playing any longer or were not in town… this made for a rather easy going day We did however go to some interesting food places:

French toast and Waffles n’ Wings at the Breakfast Klub: All you need to do is look at it. The waffles and French toast were warm and fluffy but not overly sweet. If you like roscoe’s style cooking you’d like the food there. The portions weren’t overly impressive however.

At night we hooked up again with tony’s bro and his wife, and in addition one of tony’s aunts. One of the definite fringe benefits of this trip was tony’s ability to visit relatives in other parts of the country that he would otherwise not get a chance to (he has grandmas, tons of aunts and billions of nephews and cousins). His family has thus far been very nice and accommodating. We were treated to more Cajun food. Unfortunately the picture resides on my $10 disposable, but let’s just say… crawfish etoufee is yummy yummy stuff. It’s gravy mixed with crawfish and Cajun spices over white/brown rice… after the debacle that is yao’s, this was a most welcome sensation to the palate. Sigh, no Chinese food in 2 wks...

Misc thought of the day: if you were a guy, and someone described you as petite, what would you think?!

On the Road Again...

After getting over this morning’s hangover, I took time to reflect on the night’s events. As probably garnered from the pics below, the night was a blur filled w/ dancing, drinking, and other things…Unfortunately, the night of delinquency and debauchery is over and it is time to move along to other things. After some errands in the morning we got into our new jet black Toyota Matrix and headed to Lake Charles.

The drive was filled w/ various flashbacks to my childhood when we occasionally made the drive to my family in New Orleans. So, the drive was punctuated with comments like, “Oh, I remember that Silo. This is a cool bridge. You go that way to get to my uncle’s”

A few hours later we arrived in Lake Charles at my nephew’s house. I haven’t seen then in over a year since they had moved away from Cali. It was good to see them. Both had grown and the oldest’s voice was starting to change. We played some video games and then headed to Houston to my brother’s place.

The evening in Houston began with a new quest to find Yao Ming’s parent’s restaurant. As you probably guessed it was called “Yao’s Restaurant.” I’ll leave the food critique to our resident Chinese cuisine connoisseur in the next post. We then headed to Chammp’s for drinks and the ball game.

Bourbon Street

'NUFF SAID!

Idiot's Day Food Delight

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Originally uploaded by 3medboys.

Culinary Item(s) of the Day:
up to down: Original jumbalya, Oysters bienville/desire/macque-choux, and lousiana boudin (rice+pork+sausage): The oysters were good, they were all baked and each style had a different type cheeze (mozzeralla on one, parmesan on another, the 3rd unidentified.) The other two dishes? Blah, if you ever go to this oyster bar, Desire (locally recommended) stick with the oysters. $4.95 for 6 raw, $6 for the baked kind, and $10 for a dozen.

Idiot's Day

we are offically declaring may 23rd as idiot's day, for the three of us at least. new orleans, i have to say, it's a rather dirty and unkempt place. the vibe doesn't feel american... it's a little spanish-french-creole-cajun ghetooness rolled into it's one. we did our best to get a taste of that today. so we wake up, and take off to a local eatery called Vasquez's for some local cooking:

mmmm... gumbo with a shrimp po' boy. the bread was nice and flaky and the seafood lightly fried, tasted good, not too heavy. lunch special of the day was $4.95 red beans n' rice with 2 pork chops. good stuff.

so after a nice lunch we were all feeling a might.. sluggish. so we decided to energize ourself by walking back to the hotel. we, in our infinite wisdom decided to walk down franklin ave back towards the french quarter. this area was described later by a local barber (named dominic who is the shiznit, good guy) as a "checkerboard." we would have taken pictures but it's not wise to act the tourist in the ghetto as my roommates gently yet firmly reminded me. so we walked past run-down cars on blocks, messed up concrete sidewalks gently sprinkled with broken beer bottle glass, past rusty metal bars over boarded up windows. and all this in 94F heat (with humidity temp of 103F).

the best part came when we approached a freeway overpass with no obvious way to cross over. we knew we needed to get over... but how? one of us, who shall remain nameless (but think, associated with frosted flakes) decided to tippy-toe up the concrete siding towards oncoming traffic, which was met with incredulous glances by the other 2. we eventually decided to head up the center divide and hope for the best...


we somehow made it to a walkway between the overpass alive, suprisingly. we were then faced with a choose-your-own adventure type scenario:

"You have reached the crest of the walkway with your intrepid friends. Do you:
A) Hope the concrete railing and tip-toe down the freeway hoping to avoid getting side-swiped?
B) Continue down the path towards the dark underpass with a 50/50 chance of a random mugging occuring.
c) Head back and call a cab"
wait... think about this...
take your time...
..
..
..
yep you guessed right, we chose b). obvious, no?

The Big Easy

There is nothing like lapsing in and out of consciousness over the course of a night combined with the inability to take a shower in the morning that just sorta sets your day up right. Riding the train was pretty interesting for the first… ooh 4 hrs or so. At about hour 25 you are just dying. The magazines have been read, the music has been listened to, and you’ve pretty much contorted yourself into every position imaginable in order to sleep the time away, with or without the benadryl. Our car had malfunctioning AC, our neighbor (who on normal days is I’m sure very nice) was letting her guard down with the fluctuating temp and her neuroses began to slowly crawl through, and we had nearly exhausted the food options in the dining cart…

thus when we arrived in new orleans all any of us were really looking forward to was a nice, long shower. Hot water never felt so good…

Tony was whisked away to a secret hiding place by his relatives for some unknown voodoo initiation ritual (something a bout a “family gathering”) the minute we arrived in new orleans pretty much, so we decided to roll out in search of food and to see what fabled naw’luns had to offer at 9:30 on a Sunday night. We meandered down st. charles, took a random left on canal… and then heard the sounds of a jazz band wafting down the street. We turned the corner and bam! A makeshift jazz band was playing (complete with a horn), people were walking around with cheap plastic beads and we had entered bourbon street. People were eating, drinking, heading to nudie bars (no cover!! usually just a one drink minimum, there was one at least every block it seemed) throwing beads and whoring themselves out for beads. I think the weirdest part of it all was the amount of middle-aged to older people who were wandering around the streets getting down and searching for beads. It was like the street was filled with people trying to sort through their mid-life crises. We meandered about like everyone else, hit a few clubs (they were playing some whack music) and just soaked it aaaall in.


Oh, and we did find some food:

Culinary item of the day: the southern equivalent of white castle, something called Krystal (I kid you not). Spicy chik, Krystal with cheese, and a chili dog. In all honesty, none of it tasted that good… but with a $5 purchase you do get an hour of wifi for free.