On my way to DEFCON32, I decided to take a one and a half week of holiday to take advantage of my presence in the US and to go visit the West Coast, as it was the last general area of the US I had not yet visited.

The easiest routing wasn't the most evident given I wanted to minimize the amount I would be flying. I decided to use Harry Reid International (in Las Vegas) as a hub and ended up taking a train from Zurich to Frankfurt and flying onwards to Las Vegas.

The flight was mostly uneventful, except for the presence of a somewhat rude and self-important man sitting in the row in front of me. Said man later accosted me in the queue for the bathrooms and subsequently attempted to flirt with me, calling himself a self-described chad bisexual republican. Needless to say, I was having none of that.

Upon landing at LAS, I expediently shuffled through TSA and Customs, a task simplified by the fact I had prepared printouts of my itinerary and other important documents, to give them adequate satisfaction that I wasn't planning on staying.

Exiting the airport, I was hit by the blazing inferno that was the Nevada desert, which on that day was a toasty 47 degrees Celsius (or 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit in freedom units). Screaming internally at the lack of public transportation, I took a ride to a hotel where I would spend the night.

After 4 hours of sleep a very sleepy Maya woke up again to take an early bird flight to Los Angeles County Airport (LAX), where my friends Kat and Izzy picked me up.

From there, we ended up going sightseeing around Los Angeles by visiting or viewing such places as Griffith Observatory, the Warner Bros. studio lot and the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

stellar view

Later in the day we ended up deciding to go visit air conditioned buildings, including but not limited to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Japanese Village Plaza Mall, a book store and other local spots.

We ended up getting food from local shops or food trucks which were really delicious, as well as spending an evening in one of LA's many dive bars, where a performance by a local grunge band was being held.

My time in LA was short but full of adventures, and on Monday morning all three of us said our goodbyes at the airport, where the next leg of my adventure would bring me to Seattle.

There, I would spend a week hanging out with Alyx, Erin, and most importantly Emma (their cat) around Seattle.

We ended up mostly chilling out, but with a few excursions, such as visiting the Amazon Spheres (more colloquially known as "Jeff's balls", for those in the know), or engaging in excursions for photography reasons.

(there's 3 of them)

One of those events was the "Boeing SeaFair Air Show", which involved the US Navy's "Blue Angels", a flight demonstration squadron which we spent an afternoon taking pictures of.

Later in the week, we took the ferry out to Bainbridge Island, to see if we couldn't go hunting for some auroras. We didn't have much luck on perceiving auroras but I did take a pretty good shot of the Seattle skyline from the ferry.

A lovely view from the ferry.

For funny reasons, Alyx thought she should bring me to a German themed restaurant around Seattle, which ended up serving some pretty decent draught import beer, and a very decent schnitzel.

We got up to some more shenanigans, including visiting a few places I won't mention in a public setting, and other fun places such as /dev/hack - the local Seattle hackerspace, RE-PC (a second-hand computer store that had a lot of fun things to look at), and the Seattle Connections Museum, which I had wanted to visit ever since watching their projects in technological conservation on YouTube.

The temperature in Seattle was much easier to appreciate than that of Las Vegas or even Los Angeles but I would leave this idyllic summer climate to brave the desert heat once more for the few days I would spend at DEFCON.