With a long weekend gone by...

... can a travelogue be far behind?

Before you start groaning, two posts ago was post number 200 :-). Since I had said I would honor every 50 posts, here is the belated marker meant for that post.

Okay, you can start groaning now :-P.

So my friend S and me were planning on a vacation outside of the US for the Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately, the plan got grounded even before it took off. So S asked me if I wanted to go to Utah instead. Some other undergrad classmates of mine and a bunch of their (and S's) friends were planning to visit Utah's national parks.

Now, though I have heard a lot about most of the "other" friends, I have never met them. S assured me that they were very nice people and that they would be absolutely okay with my gate-crashing. Deciding to be more sociable and all, I decided to go. Spending a good chunk of money got me a ticket to Salt Lake City (sheesh, that darn place is 2 hours away by plane from where I live - darn these expensive long weekend flights).

Thursday, May 24, was the D-day. As with all other pre-trip nights, I had gotten minimal amount of sleep on Wednesday night - what with all the last minute packing and getting "ready". As an aside, while I love summers, it is a lot more difficult to choose and pack clothes for summer. In winter you could choose almost anything (including pyjama tops or that t-shirt with the huge stain or the comfy one with the not-so-gaping hole) as tops - the winter jacket is going to cover it anyways.

Anyways, on Thursday, V dropped me off at the airport late noon. I was well ahead of time. Given that, of course, the inevitable happened. My flight got delayed. By an hour. Thus ensuring that I would *certainly* miss my connecting flight at Las Vegas (LV). Ugh, ugh, ugh! Fortunately, before all my panic alarms could go off, they announced that the connecting flight would be held till we got to LV - phew!

Both my flights were of short duration and went off quickly enough. Once I reached Salt Lake City, I called S. My "welcome party" was waiting for me :-).

**Before I go further, there were nine of us totally - the girls S, G, K, B and me and the guys R, P, V and T.**

Back to the story. Due to terrible hunger, R, G, V and T had gone on ahead to have dinner while the rest were waiting for me at the airport. Quick introductions took place and we were on our way. Yippee, my vacation had begun :-D.

Dinner was at Denny's - why does every vacation include at least one meal at Dennys? There I met the rest of the folks. Dinner was spent in general talk and chatter. It was then time to set off to our hotel for the night.

All of us were too tired to talk much - so we all crashed almost as soon as we reached. We had a long day ahead of us.

To be continued ....

Note 1: To the best of my knowledge, this travelogue should be not be too long. Given that we did so many things over the course of four days, I don't remember too much :-).

Note 2: I did not know that Utah time was one hour ahead of California time. In retrospect, I shouldn't have sounded quite so confident when I went, "Hey, my plane arrived half an early inspite of starting off late" . Obviously (and more logically), my flight had landed half an hour late.