Wednesday 21st march – after staying awake until 5am, I slept until about 1pm. It’s a bit hard getting into a rhythm with my sleep, but who cares wen I’m having such a good time? 😉
After waking up, I ate my delicious leftover Mexican food from last night – mmmm, prawns wrapped in bacon. I rounded it off with the last few bites of the cheesecake that I had left (which I’d also taken home in a container) – still yummy! Kurt woke up and wandered in and said, “Ooooh, cheesecake breakfast, eh?” Hell yes! Ha ha ha.
It was a much quieter day this time, but still awesome. We tootled around the house for a while, and then dropped round to Home Depot, where Summer bought a nice succulent/cactus plant for her mother. I often wish that I had the kind of life where a trip to Home Depot would actually be useful for me, but I’m afraid that when you’re an itinerant there’s not much room for cool plants and things! Maybe one day.
Our next stop was Sweet Tomatoes, which is quite possibly one of my favourite places to eat ever. Yeah, okay, I know it’s just a chain restaurant with a buffet, but their salads are really tasty and usually quite inventive, and the rest of their food tastes fresh. I guess it’s like Sizzler, but a third of the price and not crap. (!) We met Summer’s parents there and had dinner together. I had about 5 different kinds of salad, including a chicken ginger wonton thingy, and an apple and blue cheese one (Monterey blue with peanuts, I think it was called), and a mix of a bunch of others. They had a BBQ potato salad which was also out of this world. I tried two of their soups (asian ginger and broccoli cheese; the asian ginger was like a broth, and delicious) and ate a couple of their breads, namely the garlic asiago foccacia and the quattro formaggio foccacia. Then I gorged on their corn bread, which I LOVE, and then I moved on to dessert – blueberry muffins, warm peanut butter chocolate chip cookie bars and brownies, served up with some chocolate and vanilla frozen yoghurt and butterscotch sauce. Awwwwwww yeeeeeeeaaaaah.
By the end of that I was bloated, but did I regret it? No. 🙂
After dinner we went to Summer’s parents’ house for a little bit, where I met their chihuahuas… by the time I leave here I’m going to wish I had a little dog of my own!!! Afterwards, we drove back to their place for a little bit before deciding that it would actually be a good time to go and catch the show at the Mirage volcano… so that’s what we did! We drove to the Mirage casino again, and darted outside, nabbing a good spot with a good view. 5 minutes later, the loud sound of birds and insects started playing around the lake outside the casino, and the stone mound in its midst started to glow. Then…. silence. The birdcalls stopped, and the top of the volcano started to bubble, and then… BOOM! Smoke and lights and fire and bubbling ‘lava’, and the sound of drums accompanied the eruption. Small jets of flame appeared in the lake, and I have to say that it was a bloody good show! The flame jets were synced with the drum beats, and it had a great effect. Where else in the world can you go to watch a volcano explode just for the fun of it?!? The eruption finally calmed down, and the jets disappeared, and the sound of insects came back and all was calm. Awesome.
With that done, we went straight back to the car and drove to a supermarket near Kurt & Summer’s place. I love going to supermarkets in other countries; it’s usually the first thing I try to do after arriving. I love seeing all the different kinds of food and poking about with all the wierd and wonderful stuff in them. America definitely has more snack and convenience foods than Australia. I also nearly choked on my own tongue to see that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cost only $3.50 per pint tub; in Australia it costs anywhere between $15 and $19!!! And the selection of flavours… my god, I nearly passed out from the effort of choosing! In the end, I chose two and Kurt and Summer chose two. My choices were ‘Late Night Snack’ (vanilla bean ice cream with fudge-covered potato chip clusters and a salty caramel swirl, for a sweet-and-salty experience!) and ‘S’Mores’ (chocolate ice cream with fudge chunks, toasted marshmallow & graham cracker swirls), while they chose the ‘Red Velvet Cake’ (red velvet cake batter ice cream with red velvet cake pieces & a cream cheese frosting swirl) and ‘Banana Greek Frozen Yogurt with Peanut Buttery Swirls’. Holy crapamole! When we got home, we all tried a little bit of each, and I think that Kurt and Summer made better choices than I did. I loved the Late Night Snack, but the S’Mores flavour was a bit of a disappointment; why have a graham cracker swirl when you could just put lumps of graham cracker into it? It tasted a little wierd. The greek yoghurt one was delicious – which was surprising for me, because I’m not generally into the whole American ‘peanut butter is a sweet treat’ thing… but wow, did it work with banana! And the red velvet cake was sublime.
We watched TV and snacked until I passed out on the couch at about 2am – either from exhaustion OR from a diabetic coma, I can’t say for sure which! 🙂
Thanks for stopping by,
Tara.
Born in Hong Kong and raised all over the world, I've been tootling around for 33 years now. A Spanish friend of mine once said that "the smallest pot has the finest marmalade"... I have to agree with her! I'm small but I can still make 6-foot Brazilian bodybuilders cry if the need arises. And I never need to whinge about legroom on a plane!
little tara 
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