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Leaving Vegas

When I said this blog was a place for me to write anything that I wanted, I meant it. Only here you will find a travel blog post following a blog post about a VS Code extension.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I work for Cloudflare. We recently had our first ever global SKO event. It happened in the SKO capital of the world, Las Vegas. It just so happened that it was the perfect opportunity to extend the stay for a couple of days and make my way to Los Angeles.

I’ve been to Los Angeles before when I was a teenager. My family and I enjoyed a 3-week long road trip along the west coast. But it is one thing to travel as a teenager with a mental age deficit of -5 years, and another to travel as a 31 year-old adult. The mental age deficit being about the same.

I travelled with some friends. The plan was simple. Rent a car in Vegas, and drive to LA. From there onwards, we kept it flexible.

Day 0.5 - Driving to LA

After a final gambling session in Vegas (where my friend Tiago managed to make 40$ out of a single 1$ bill), we made our way to the Rental Center near Harry Reid airport to pick up our rentals. We departed Vegas well after sunset, and the only thing of note during the drive was a stop at Chick-fil-A for dinner, which, as a european citizen living in Europe, was revolutionary. I am not one to glorify fast food chains, but the hype is real.

We rented an AirBNB close to Santa Monica Pier. The place itself was great, and I highly recommend the area.

Day 2 - Santa Monica, Venice Beach and Canal, The Original Farmers Market, Griffith Observatory

We went straight to Santa Monica pier and the surrounding area. I have to say, two things shocked me right off the bat:

• How hot it was, we were wearing t-shirts in January. Temperatures actually went up to 30C (I refuse to use Fahrenheit)
• No crowds. The beauty of off-season traveling coupled with it being a work day resulted in a very enjoyable walk in the pier

The first thing I did was to take a selfie in front of Forrest Gump’s favorite restaurant and send it to my family chat group. I have fond teenage memories of dining with my family at the Bubba Gump restaurant.

The late morning light was perfect. I spent most of my time taking photos of the place. Most of which I will proceed to spam you with:

After a disappointing breakfast at a hip looking establishment, we made our way to Venice Beach where Tiago bought a pair of 10$ sunglasses off of an extremely extroverted Brooklyner who was probably a few past decisions away from making it in Hollywood instead of Joe Pesci. Unbelievable character.

If you ever walked along Venice Beach, you know that you will see colorful characters: a few cycling, some skating, most walking, all locomoting in some way. You will also walk past the occasional one-person record label forcing their mix tapes on you. It makes you feel like some sort of bootleg record label manager rejecting new artists. In essence, this is a must-do whenever visiting LA. It kind of functions as a concentrated melting pot of strong personalities.

We then walked to the Venice Canals. If I am honest, our main goal during this first part of the day was to look for Los Santos landmarks. Los Santos being the fictional version of Los Angeles featured in the GTA V, the video game.

It’s funny to see locations you have been to before in the virtual world, only now with infinite polygons, no aliasing, and infinite frames per second. I still can’t make sense of the weather. Summer temperatures in January, sunny skies. It was great.

One of my (self-diagnosed) problems, is that I suffer from a type of addiction for which the only form of rehab is bankruptcy. That addiction is called Peak Design. If this name doesn’t mean anything to you, then you probably have no need for their products nor a new addiction. But in essence, Peak Design is a company that specializes in bags. They started out by making excellent crowd-funded camera bags that became viral, and they now expanded to phone cases, packing cubes, camera equipment, etc. They only have a few physical retail stores (though they are expanding), but as an avid Japan visitor, I go to their store in Ginza frequently, to the point where the store manager recognizes me. I told you it’s a problem. It turns out that they also have a location in Santa Monica, so we made our way there to test out some of their new products.

A few (a decent chunk of) dollars later, it was time to head for lunch and we visited a place where we ended up having the best meal of the whole trip: The Original Farmers Market.

We tried the following places:

• All’Antico Vinaio - another location of the famous Florentine sandwich place, always divine
• Patsy D’Amore - where I had a slice of pepperoni so good, we had to go back for another one
• Phil’s Deli & Grill - where I got the pastrami sandwich on rye bread

I have yet to go to Katz’s Deli in New York, but this was heaven in a bite. It was my favourite bite of food of the whole trip.

With our bellies full, we headed to Griffith Observatory. Our trip was timed so that we could arrive there quite a bit before sunset, just to play it safe. Unfortunately, once we got there with our cars, we were greeted with a closed gate and a pair of guards that promptly told us that there were no parking spots left at the top. This would have been a perfectly understandable piece of information if it were not for the fact that it was a lie.

At this point we were a bit stressed. Sunset was approaching and we had to find some other place to park the cars and some way to get up. We decided to drive all the way back down the cliff and park in the dirt car parks at the bottom. We all had Uber open to try and get an Uber as quickly as possible.

Tony shows up.

All F1 teams missed out on generational talent. This legend understood the assignment and executed it with precision, and most importantly, speed. He drove us all the way to the top, past the guards (we later found out that if you told the guards that “I am an Uber” they would just let you past. Great to know for the future), past 37 parking spots occupied by invisible cars, and finally dropped us as the top, right as sunset was about to hit.

(taken with the iPhone 17 Pro 8x lens)

Thank you, Tony 🚀.

The day finished with a visit to Crumbl and Porto’s, just to make sure we ended the day with a locally traditional caloric intake.

Day 3 - Jay Leno, Beverly Hills, and Malibu

Following a hearty breakfast at an american diner, we made our way to Beverly Hills.

The idea was to stroll around Rodeo Drive, though my main objective was clear and unshakable. I wanted to visit a specific store called House of Bijan - not because I wanted to buy something (I hear the average purchase price there is in the neighborhood of 80,000$) - but because this store tends to showcase the names of their illustrious customers on their storefront, plastered on the huge glass windows, and when I was at this location years ago as a teenager with my family, we detected a very interesting name listed there:

José Sócrates.

He was Portugal’s Prime Minister from 2005 to 2011 with support from the party he led at the time, the Socialist Party. His government became famous for bankrupting the country, leading to his caretaker government having to ask the EU/ECB/IMF troika for a bailout after his resignation.

Since then, he has been accused of the following crimes:

• Corruption
• Money laundering
• Tax fraud
• Document falsification

So as you can imagine, my family and I were very amused to find his name on an ultra-luxury store front in Rodeo Drive.

Unfortunately, it seems like the store caught wind of Sócrates’ troubled relationship with common decency and removed his name from the storefront.

After this disappointing realization, we walked about until we reached a crosswalk and I look up to the other side of the road. There’s someone in what looks like a Pontiac from the 50s.

Is that Jay Leno?

As I ask this, my friends and I proceed to open the camera on our phones and zooming in.

That is Jay Leno!

This pretty much completed our LA visit bingo card. We spotted a celebrity.

As he drove past us, he noticed my brother had his camera and waved to us, smiling. Here’s the shot my brother took:

After this, our day was pretty much complete. We proceeded to drive hillside and take in the view.

We later went to Shake Shack to double check how it compares to what we have in London. Safe to say, their quality control is coherent.

We ended the day in Malibu as a tick box exercise. Now I can say I have been to Malibu if someone asks.

Day 4 - Calico Ghost Town and Good Byes

The last day saw us starting the drive back to Las Vegas to catch the flight that we had scheduled for the end of the day.

After a quick stop at a random IHOP, we decided to stop by Calico, an old mining town that was converted into a sort of open-air museum. It was a charming town and very close to the famous Peggy Sue diner, an american institution.

I conveniently skipped the part where we stopped by a Walmart to fill the remaining space available in our suitcases with products that we cannot find outside of the US. We focused on the absolute essentials (I consider Mike’s Hot Honey a necessity and the Chick-fil-a sauce must have slipped into the shopping bag by mistake).

Peggy Sue’s food was meh, but do go for the milkshake. It lives up to the hype and to the calories. If I had to pick a favourite item, go for the Patty Melt.

The rest of the day was a chill drive back to Vegas. I genuinely think we made the most out of the few days we had.

PS: All images in this post were uploaded to Cloudflare using my VSCode extension.