So for a while now, I've wanted to go out west and visit Burbank, which is the hometown of one of my OCs. Google Maps just doesn't really cut it, you know? I've also wanted to go back to Little Tokyo and The Last Bookstore, because when we visited them on our way back from Hawaii, it was too early in the morning for anything to really be open. There's almost no Japanese stores here on the east coast other than in New York City and it's been a year and a half since we went to Hawaii. I was feeling a little deprived.
And guess what? I actually got my wish! Mom found really cheap airfare to Las Vegas, which is about a 4.5 hour drive from Los Angeles. We flew out west a week after I graduated and spent a week out there.
It was actually kind of strange re-visiting places we'd already been -- that's never really happened before. In the past, if we'd been somewhere more than once, it was usually somewhere we had family.
I had a lot of fun on the trip! It was a lot different than the previous vacations we'd taken -- other than the drive between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, there weren't long car rides. We actually stayed in hotels for more than one night (twice!!). A lot of it was stuff I'd wanted to see for a while, so I was really excited for everything.
We flew out to Las Vegas on the 3rd, drove into Anaheim the 4th and stayed in California until the 8th. In addition to all the stuff I mentioned before that we'd done before, we also went to Disneyland, visited Burbank for writing research, and drove down to San Diego to see a decommissioned battleship. (I think that's what it's considered. I'm not sure.)
So yeah, this whole trip was different than what I've been used to in the past. It was a lot more chill since we had less ground to cover, and a lot more of it was doing things (things that I'd picked!!) rather than sitting in the car for the majority of the day. Mom commented on how I was visibly more agreeable than I've been on past trips, which made me feel kind of bad;; Looking back, I can appreciate all the trips we've taken, but I'm also not gonna lie and say that I particularly enjoyed sitting in the car for half the trips or being so isolated from my friends. Both of those have changed as we took more trips as a mix between shorter / smaller trips and getting devices that made talking to my friends easier.
Honestly, I'm still amazed that the trip worked out. It was actually an idea I had for my story, and for once, the idea influenced real life instead of the other way around. Aperture has been a really big defining project for me and going on the trip has given me a lot of good ideas that I probably wouldn't have otherwise had.
I have four more posts planned to talk about some of the days in more detail, so please look forward to those!
In the meantime, I compiled all of the music that defined the trip for me. I almost always associate songs on the radio with specific times / places, so I kept track of it this time so I wouldn't forget to add in any. There were a lot! It's strange to hear these songs without any road noise, though. Especially the ones I didn't know about before. It's almost like listening to a different song without all the background noise from driving and the acoustics of the inside of the car.
EDIT: I put together a YouTube playlist if you want to listen to the songs back-to-back! I also replaced the video for Sugar since the original one I linked from YouTube was removed for copyright violations.
I don't think I heard this before we went on the trip, and holy cow it is really catchy. I'll probably end up buying it.
This song has been in like three blog posts before this hahaa;;; I'm really glad that it's popular right now because it's the song I associate with Aperture the most as of recently! It always makes me really happy to hear and I'm glad that I get to associate it with the vacation as well as Aperture itself.
I also associate this song with seeing the new Cinderella movie with my friend for her birthday, so Sugar is kind of a weird mix for me.
I actually hadn't heard Bad Blood before the trip! I've heard a lot about the music video, but honestly, I still haven't watched it. I really like how catchy the song is but I'm kind of upset that I can't find any audio-only videos on YouTube. I tend to listen to songs a whole bunch online before I buy them, and the fact that there's 40 seconds of non-music before the beginning of the song in the video is off-putting.
I also associate this song with prom / graduation, so like Sugar, this one is kind of a strange mix as well.
I only heard Style a few times before we went on the trip, and a lot of the song is really catchy, so I'll probably end up buying it. (And maybe Bad Blood, too.) It's really strange to think how I didn't like Taylor Swift's music back in middle school, when she was still kind of country-ish, but that her pop music is really good. My middle school self would probably never admit that.
There will be more blog posts coming up soon!
Las Vegas (Jul 7th)
Disneyland (Jul 10th)
SoCal (Jul 13th)
Food (yes. Just food. Jul 16th)
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