So my blog is kinda the reverse of most. The holiday-season has come & gone & you didn’t hear a word from me. This is usually the busiest, bloggiest time of the year for most sites. You’d expect me to do a big x-mas themed post with kitchen adventures & stories, ..well x-mas was total bore-mas. We were in a motel that week, no special dinner, no decorations, no special anything.

Then came new years, right on time. I swear I must be the only blogger out there who didn’t post their new years resolutions. Well, we spent the new years countdown trucking across the state-line from Arizona to California, carting belongings from storage to our new house. No partying for us obviously.

So the holiday season was all a bit of a non-event for me, despite being really excited for it originally. I suppose that’s life, the lead-up & anticipation to stuff is often more exciting than the actual event. Meh, I’ll make up for it next year. I am (shamefully) a fan of x-mas & making a big deal of the holiday but living out of a backpack & on a tight budget just didn’t allow for the occasion this time around.

This week we’ve just been decompressing in our new house in Apple Valley & airing out the backpacks. It’s a small town north of LA, in the California desert, & I’m surprising myself just how much I’m able to appreciate the landscape (ask me again come summer however). Nik & I have made a ritual of going for a drive each afternoon to explore a new area of the valley, climb some rocks, take some photos, explore abandoned buildings, watch the desert sunset etc. There is surprisingly a lot to see & do in this barren land. We’re right next to the ol’ Route 66 so there is a lot of Americana scenery, historic old buildings & stuff to check out, lots of big factories & cool industrial areas to explore (& proving to be great photography subjects), plus all the desert landscapes that still intrigue me. I love all the open space. It’s just what I was craving, coming from our claustrophobic Vegas apartment.

I’ve been a bit of a shutterbug, taking hundreds & hundreds of photos this week. Nik taught me a few software techniques that I’m just loving. I was never able to do HDR with my basic point n’ shoot camera since it can’t do multiple exposures etc, so Nik found a way around that problem by creating multiple exposures with different values in photoshop, & doing it all post-camera from just one photo (seems so simple but it never dawned on us). Very cool. I’ll post some pics eventually, but I’m still having fun taking my time & experimenting. ..We also don’t have a decent internet connection at the house yet, so uploading pics may have to wait.

Until next time.

I made a snow rabbit. 

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We arrived in the Victorville/ Adelanto area a couple of days ago, just north of LA in the Mojave Desert.
It’s been quite a surprising find. And I thought it was just going to be a hokey hicktown.

For starters the weather has been fun in itself. They had a huge snowfall out here & seeing the desert covered in snow with the cacti sticking out is still a novelty.

Nik & I went out to El Mirage the other day to see the famous dry lake (you’ve seen it in many films etc, famous for being a giant super-flat piece of land with crackly ground), well it turns out the “lake” area is closed due to the snowy roads etc so we couldn’t go in.

So we took a leaf out of this family’s book, parked the car & played in the snow.

This is our snowman, his name is El Frosto, guardian of El Mirage.

We used cookies for his eyes .. then Nik ate them so we redecorated him.

I believe these are rabbit tracks.

Nearby to El Mirage were some airplane graveyards. We found a small lot where we could get close to the fence, to see the chopped up planes (I’m guessing to reuse parts).

In the background of the last couple of pics you can almost see the larger plane graveyard down the street where they keep a huge amount of planes, but we couldn’t get too close due to the weather. We drove alongside the fence on a dirt road, but since the road was so muddy & slushy we were close to getting the car stuck & in the middle of nowhere it was a bit of a worry, so we turned back. ..Security was starting to watch us too.

These look like cat prints to me, big ones..

On our way back from the airplane graveyard we came across this place quite randomly..

An abandoned town. We didn’t know what we had stumbled into … especially when we saw these signs all-over the place.

The warning starts- Air in the buildings of this area contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer & reproductive toxicity…

All the buildings had smashed windows/walls.

It turns out the place is a military training facility. It was once a real neighbourhood with residents, but became vacant & then was used by the army to run around, do tactical training, test weapons etc. Really strange that we just came across it quite by accident. It was like stumbling into a zombie movie or Silent Hill or something.

Eventually a security guard started following us & approached us to leave. What a weird experience.. like, I knew these places existed but I didn’t expect them to be so close to humanity what with all the weapons & “cancerous chems”, nevermind the fact we just drove in, no fence or anything to keep us out. Across the freeway is the federal prison too. A bit of a creepy area huh?

You’d never believe it. Yesterday it snowed in Vegas!

I went for a drive in the morning to Trader Joes & to my surprise there were little snowflakes falling.

By the afternoon those little snowflakes were big clumps falling from the sky & collecting on the ground.

This was the view from my front door-

Once enough had accumulated on the ground we thought it would be cool to see what The Strip looked like under snow so we went for a drive.

..after scraping the car off.

The snow wasn’t as dense on The Strip at that point of the night (we’ve since seen footage of it totally white with snow). I guess the lights & traffic were too warm, but the Luxor looked cool with a snow film covering the pyramid & sphinx.

Apparently this is totally abnormal for Vegas & it hasn’t snowed on The Strip in many years. Today we woke up & there’s no evidence of snow outside at all (well, it’s probably on the outskirts of town but not here in central Vegas), the sun is out & you’d never believe we had a snowday yesterday. Party’s over.

A bit of catching up to do.. long post…

We came back to Vegas to see Nine Inch Nails perform on Saturday night at Planet Hollywood. Those guys are absolutely incredible & it was great to see a gig finally with the full lightshow, not the scaled-down version that we’re used to seeing in Australasia. Check out some of these screen effects they had. I’ve never seen anything like it. Somehow the screens were interactive..

(As usual, hover over the images to see my explanations)

Also check out Nik’s Youtube profile to see his video footage. It really does pay to see the effects in action.

And then on Monday we went back to LA again, this time for another Jimmy Kimmel taping, The Cure were performing! & to help a friend move.

It was all a bit of a disaster really.

So we left Monday morning with plenty of time to get to Hollywood. We were given a heads up one of the roads may be closed due to snow between Vegas & LA. Still, we had heaps of time for a detour if needed.

We got to the outskirts of Vegas when already the weather started to show itself. Snow was falling! And falling hard. A blizzard even!

It looked amazing, here we were in the Nevada desert & it was covered in snow. Pretty thick too. It seemed out of place to see cacti & joshua trees lined with snow, but very beautiful.

So the roads slowed down considerably as the snow got thicker & a few accidents (luckily not us!) made traffic jams. As our speed decreased moreso in the dangerous conditions it was looking like we might actually be tight on time, not early in line for The Cure.

As we arrived in LA Nik looked up traffic info on his phone, the freeways were all displayed in red (meaning dense traffic, green meaning clear roads) & we had some crazy conditions still ahead. It was raining hard in LA & had been all day. There was flooding on the 10 freeway. I hate the 10, even at the best of times. It’s a bastard of a freeway.

We spent a couple of hours on this stretch of road that wouldn’t usually be anymore than half an hour. We crawled along at a snail’s pace for miles & miles. It was an absolute nightmare & my mood was flaming.

We didn’t make it to The Cure at the curtain call time but ran to the entrance very late to find the queue still there strangely. The gig was planned to be outdoors behind the El Capitan, but since it was wet weather they had moved it inside, in the foyeur which was only a quarter of the capacity. The queue was maybe 500 people long (I’ve heard mixed figures from sources) & everyone had been waiting all afternoon in freezing conditions to hopefully get in.

So we waited along with them, at the back of the queue with hopes to getting in (we had a ticket after all) for hours on the freezing sidewalk. It was unbearably cold & our feet were numb.

Why were we still waiting? The show should’ve been going by now? .. .. We didn’t know what was going on from up the back. We were blocks away from the theatre & the queue was rarely moving. So it was 10pm by the time we started inching closer & eventually we got close enough to see there was no queue at all at the front. The Cure were already playing inside, we could hear them! We were queuing for nothing. The organizers didn’t tell us what was going on at all. Really slack. They could’ve at least done a headcount & told the last 300/400 people in line to go home. There were some really sad faces. So approx 100 of us stayed around & stood on the sidewalk listening to the band from outside. They played maybe 6 songs? They sounded good & everyone on the pavement lightened up enough to dance & cheer, but still I couldn’t help but feel a little sour by the whole experience. We had driven almost 8 hours through blizzard & flood to get there for nothing.

The next morning we woke up horribly early to help a friend move his gear. His stuff had been ransacked by US customs as it arrived in the country & they left it scattered in a dock warehouse in Long Beach for our friends to collect. Very sad. Our belongings came the same way but luckily our boxes weren’t as damaged, a bit beaten up but nothing too major.

So we packed up the container truck & it drove up to Adelanto (just north of LA) where we started unpacking it again. Big job.

And now we’re back in Vegas again until we move to California.