I've been turning to my experiences from our June vacation a lot in my writing recently, and with this awesome warm weather we've had the past couple days, nostalgia and wanderlust have pretty much smacked me in the face. Multiple times.
So I went through my camera roll and picked some photos to compile them all into one post! I'm almost certain all of these ended up in the original blog posts I made, but they're spread out and I wanted to be able to look through them all at once. So I can torture myself even more.
These are mostly the photos I'm most nostalgic for right now, especially in regards to my recent writing, but by no means are these all my favorite pictures. There's too much of this trip to try and condense everything down to one post.
My uncle was only with us for the first night of the trip, but he's had a big influence on a lot of the scenes I've written in June. There are quite a few scenes for both Aperture and Casanova that wouldn't exist if he hadn't been there.
I was able to indulge my craving for In-n-Out while we were in Dallas, but there are still so many times when I find myself craving it. My only solace is living vicariously through Toni and Carter.
I also had a strange craving for Del Taco the other day when I was with Chris and Bailey at Taco Bell. Bailey understood my pain.
Our first time at the top of the Stratosphere was during the day, so it was amazing to see the city at night.
I used our night in Las Vegas in both Aperture and Casanova -- Aperture's is very close to what actually happened, but adapting it for Casanova got me through a good part of NaNo and helped me build up a lot of the story trying to make it fit.
I haven't gotten a good chance to incorporate Disneyland into my writing yet, but I know I've written at least one scene where Carter is trying to scheme his way there.
Burbank High School plays a very small role in Aperture, but being able to see it in person still meant a lot to me.
It's interesting to me to see how my high school differs from the ones I chose for my novels. Climate and urban geography has a lot of influence and it's been fun to study it, both from an insider's perspective for my school and an outsider's for Burbank and Arlington High schools.
(Also interesting to note, my high school is also named after the town its located in. I only thought about that just now. I wonder if that had any influence on how I decided to pick the schools I was writing about.)
I've been learning a lot about physical geography this year and I've had a lot of fun applying it to Las Vegas and Burbank. I am the biggest geography nerd ever. My group also picked the California drought for our Meteorology case study, so I'll be learning even more about the cause of drought-proofed landscaping like this!
This is another example of studying the differences in urban geography. Malls are stereotypically American, but I think there's still a lot that can be learned by looking at more subtle differences in each one.
Also, this mall was beautiful. And had a couple stores that I wish existed within driving distance of home.
I really wish we had palm trees here. And warm beaches.
I just really like how this picture turned out.
Anyway, TL;DR, I'm still immensely grateful for the alignment of the stars and the hard work my parents did to let us take this trip. It's come to mean even more to me now that I've tied Casanova into a trip that was initially made for Aperture.
Hopefully I'll get my pictures from the trip printed out soon finally so I won't be tempted to make more posts like this every time I want to get back to warm and sunny weather. Hopefully the nice weather we're having will stick around for a while, too. ☼
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