Travelogue

My wife has an excellent writeup about our europe trip, so go here to read up on the trip.

For more snaps from our europe trip go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gromhellscream/collections/72157605716301730/

3yrs have passed since I went to Tahoe last and this time around I am not single anymore!. Aruna was very very excited about this trip as she has never seen snow. We headed out in the wee hours of the morning towards Tahoe. As we drove up the CA-50 we started seeing snow in the hilltops but the best was yet to come. As we drove further the view changed dramatically with trees all around us covered in snow and all we could see was a white landscape like a scene out of a movie.

Though this snap doesn't do justice to the view but it should give an idea. We stepped out for a couple of snaps and realized how cold it really was! My sneakers were no protection against the cold and within minutes we could feel the cold seeping through. We quickly took a couple of snaps and jumped right back into the car and drove on towards Tahoe. By now the traffic was increasing too and we didn't want to get caught in a long train of cars heading into Tahoe.

After checking into our motel sometime later we all headed out to rent our ski gear and hit the slopes at sierra. I was kind of skeptical about my skiing abilities after last time's disaster but as it happens I was comfortable right off the bat and was able to ski without any major problems.

Preparing to ski :)

What came next I was completely unprepared for :) Trying to teach Aruna how to ski!. Now that was an adventure. We got to the beginner area slope and I started teaching Aruna how to put on her skis. For about 10 minutes I struggled to get her left foot onto the ski and lock and as soon as I would ask her to put on her right ski she would start losing balance and fall. Soon for some reason she was not even able to her ski boot to lock on the ski. This was really frustrating and as we came to know later her boot for some reason kept collecting a lot of snow on the sole and hence making it very difficult for her to lock her boots onto the ski.

Only snap of mine on skis I think!

The beautiful sierra slopes!.

After spending about 15-20 minutes trying to teach Aruna we both decided it would be better if she signed up for learner lessons. After we signed her up for beginner lessons I decided to hit the slopes and I was surprised how comfortable I felt and was able to come down the slopes without falling!. Skiing becomes so much more fun when you don't fall!. I pretty much spent the day coming down the slope multiple times and watching wifey learn skiing. I must say its pretty entertaining to watch people who are learning to ski:) Especially my wifey who managed to fall in every possible angle! But at the end of the day she finally did manage to learn skiing and was able to ski a bit without fallling! I managed to capture the attempt in a video :->

I know its late:) but what the heck... I am a lazy blogger and an even lazier photo uploader!. We went to Yosemite during this thanksgiving weekend and I must say it was an interesting weekend.

We left for yosemite around friday afternoon after standing 9 hrs in the cold for the black friday sale and came home empty handed as the thing we wanted got over before we could get it:(. We reached yosemite around 6 in the evening and checked into our tented non heated cabins. It was pretty cold and we were hungry thankfully we had packed food from Madras cafe and all of us literally jumped on the food. After that we headed into the main dining area where there was a grand fireplace and comfortable couches around it and we proceeded to laze around a bit and warm our cold bodies.

After some time we decided to hit the bed and thats when the fun started. None of realized how cold one can feel in a non heated cabin till we started tucking ourselves in and realized the blankets were damp and the cold was literally seeping in and despite wearing jackets etc we were freezing. Fast forward 30 minutes and we decided we need dry blankets and a trip to the reception was needed. Me/Raghav/Sudhir headed to the reception and got a bunch of dry blankets. Well as it happens even dry blankets didnt help as the night proceeded the dew settled onto the blankets inside the tented cabins and we suffered a cold damp night despite wearing multiple layers of clothing.

By morning all of us had hardly slept and we decided unless we could get an upgrade to a heated cabin we would head back home rather than sleep another day like this. Luckily we got heated cabins later in the morning and we decided to head out to toulumne meadows and tioga pass and time permitting further into the sierra nevada.

I must say it was one heck of a beautiful drive. We started with heading out towards toulumne meadows and saw some very very beautiful sights along the way.

We hit toulumne meadows by noon or so. The meadows look pretty though I hear during spring it looks amazing when the plants here flower for a short time.

We spent some time hiking around and climbing up the small hilltop in the meadows. Its a beautiful place and the views from there are just amazing.

After Toulumne meadows we decided to drive upto to tioga pass and beyond into the Sierra Nevada. I am so happy we decided to do that ... As we drove past tioga we came across a frozen lake and much fun was had at the banks of the lake playing on the ice.

After the lake we drove up a little more into the sierra nevada and saw some sights like the following before we decided to turn back and head to the valley. Someday we hope to do a drive down the Sierra nevada. It has some of the most amazing sights.

The next day was a drive upto glacier point for breathtaking views of the valley and Half dome. We spent a good amount of time there taking snaps from various angles before heading out.

A couple of snaps of the famous Ahawanee hotel one from right next to the hotel and the other as seen from glacier point.

Next stop was Mariposa grove near wawona. The grove has about 500 Giant Sequoias these are the largest living things on the planet and can live for about 3200 years. The trees just look fantastic and are about as huge as a small trailer at the base. A few snaps of the sequoias to give a perspective :)

This last snap was Aruna's idea and it cleary gives one an idea of the size of these trees. Spot us if you can:).

Overall a really wonderful and amazing trip. We got to see more of the beautiful Yosemite National park but a lot more remains to be seen. Next trip shall be in early spring/summer to see the falls in full flow and the tuolumne meadows.

Wishing all of you a very Happy Diwali from our side! My wife made some super badam burfi and now its payasam time tomorrow ! We even had some nice baby corn manchurian which my wife made in the evening..

We managed to get a few decorative lights and have put it up in the patio and it looks very pretty. Once again Wishing you all a very happy diwali!

A couple of weeks back we went on a long drive down south towards Big Sur. It was one heck of a drive with beautiful views all along the CA-1. I tried to capture some good snaps and you can get them here .

I am skipping on the description and you can find that on my wife's blog .

Also in other news the bay area was hit by a quake of the magnitude of 5.6 on Richter scale yesterday and a 3.7 quake today. We felt both and it was I must say an interesting experience:).

Yea I have been lazy to update this blog. Quite a few things happened over the last couple of weeks.. We went to a wine and art festival here in Santa clara (nothing extraordinary) and a few snaps that I took at the festival can be seen here. Also while trying to install my new motherboard/graphics card I managed to slice my finger badly which converted me into a one hand typist for a week or so and still a 9 finger typist. Will take a couple more days before my finger heals fully!. In the meanwhile I am being pampered and spoilt by my wife:)). But I did manage to get the motherboard/graphics card installed and now I have a brand new flashy ATI 2600 XT 512 MB graphics card on my machine.

But the reward for the effort of building a new box( playing Supreme Commander) will have to wait as I am still trying to get a cheap copy of windows:)...I am not willing to pay 200$ for Windows! especially when ubuntu works for almost everything else that I do and is free!. The only reason to use windows for me is to play games:p and use the damn webcam as enabling video4linux requires a kernel rebuild which I am lazy to do.

But in the meantime, I have explored a lot of linux gaming options and may I say linux as a platform is ready! its the damn game developers who need to get their act together and release linux clients. Guild Wars runs smoothly under wine except for the fact that it has to be run in DirectX8 mode and with no shaders. The other free games that I explored include Regnum Online , Planeshift and recently Savage: The battle for Newerth. The problem with all the free games is as always content. Technologically they are close to commercial games but the gameplay gets boring really fast due to lack of interesting content. As a result I am just going to play a bit of Guildwars till I can get a windows license.

On the War of the cubes:) I haven't made much progress. I need to get back to it and now that my new box is ready and I still don't have any games to play so its time to get back to development. Also I have been meaning to process more of our San Diego trip pictures and hopefully I will get around to it now and upload more of them.

Thats about it for now! hopefully I will update this blog soon with some War of the cubes news:)

All i will say is it was an amazing trip :) We had a blast and I managed to get some nice snaps:)

For details and snaps read my wife's blog :)

Aruna has lately been trying her hand at sketching. Her latest sketch can be seen here. I had to use my camera as a scanner:) and since the lighting was not optimal I could not get a good bright shot of the sketch.

I can't believe it that its already been a year since we got married! Its been one fun year with lots of good stuff , lots of travel and loads and loads of fun. We saw mauritius/london and moved to the US all in one year! I quit yahoo only to join yahoo back ! We never thought our first wedding anniversary will be in a place so far from our family! After much racking on what to do during our anniversary we decided we wanted to spend it in a nice place. We had been thinking of making a trip to Yosemite since we got to the bay area and this seemed like a perfect time to make the trip and luckily we managed to get a tented lodging in curry village.

Yosemite is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. The drive to Yosemite was just wonderful almost 60-70 miles of hill driving at various speeds. The drive though is mostly safe when compared to similar drives to hill stations in north India. Yosemite is so scenic that one really needs to spend a lot of time in there to appreciate the place. We had less than two days to see as much as we can. We reached on friday afternoon had lunch at some nameless restaurant along the way which was rather crappy!. We checked into our tents and just quickly dumped our stuff and moved out to see Yosemite.


A view of the hills from the Yosemite valley

First order of business though was to dump everything in the bear locker, Aruna was so paranoid that a bear will come that she won't even let me keep even water bottle in the tent(though i did manage to get her to agree to that towards the evening). We hiked our way to see Vernal falls which was like a mile from curry village ( a lodging resort in Yosemite). Best part there is free transport inside the Valley area which runs like every 10 minutes and you can just use that to see the Yosemite valley. The hike to the the bridge from where vernal fall is visible was about a mile and about 2.2 miles to the fall. We decided to just walk to the bridge given our fitness levels:).

We watched the fireworks display at SF on July 4th. Personally I somehow didnt find it as exciting as I thought it would be. It was nice to watch and provided a good oppurtunity to click a few snaps. I uploaded a few and here they are!

In the first couple of weeks in sunnyvale we visited SF and I managed to grab some nice snaps of the streets of San Francisco. I finally managed to upload and tag a few and here they are!

After one long year of trying to convince my wife to blog she is finally here!!.. She has a lot of little stories and experiences to share and in all probability most of you will find her blog more interesting than mine!! She is bubbly, fun to be around, loves to read book and cook for me:) As I blog this she is making me some nice yummy rava upma!... She makes friends pretty fast loves dogs ( as you can see from every trip album of ours there is inevitably a snap of hers and some dog she saw! ) and is a foodie like me.

Masala Dosas and my wife are inseparable and if you guys ever want anything done all you need to do is say the two magic words 'SARAVANA BHAVAN'. Now I better stop before I lose my rava upma eating privileges.

Her blog this way---->echoofthoughts

Well yea I have rejoined yahoo in sunnyvale. Its a long story and I am not going to go into the details of why/when/how. Been here almost a month now, I am sorry if I was not able to meet up with people but if I did miss you its mostly because last 2-3 months have been crazy with all the work for the visa/relocation etc etc.

As of today we will be moving into our apartment here in Sunnyvale. If any of you do visit sunnyvale give me a buzz:). My IM/mail etc all remain the same. Lots of stuff to update and lots of photos to upload but no time. Hopefully we can get around to uploading snaps etc once we get settled into our new apartment.

More detailed updates later:)

Back in bangalore after an amazing fun week in delhi... We went rafting in rishikesh, hogged on delhi chats/foods and much more:)...

We had an absolutely wonderful valentines day! Spent most of the day shopping for stuff we had decided that we want to get each other. The day started with us heading all the way to chickpet and buying myself a Nikon 70-300G series lens which I have wanted for a long time and the aeroshow reminded me why I need one... No point having trying to shoot stuff like planes with a 28-105mm. In most of the snaps the planes look like a small spot of dust on an empty sky.

Then rest of the day was spent running around to get my wife her gift. We switched between 2-3 items she wanted before we finalized upon getting her what I had decided at the start. Yesterday I got her a piece of jewellery for the first time:) A gold chain to go along with a small pendant she had got as a gift during our wedding.

Finally at around 8 in the evening we went for a quite dinner at Magnolia ( my wife's favorite chinese restaurant in koramangala. Overall an amazing fun day despite all the running around:)