Categories: PersonalTravel

Some photos from our recent trip

We spent 5 days on the road. Mary, Tini, Nuno, and I went to Zion and Bryce canyons in Utah. We flew to Las Vegas, stayed for a night, got our rental, and then drove by lake Mead and Hoover Dam, before settling at Ponderosa ranch for few days. The landscape was absolutely amazing. The hikes we chose were on the mid-difficulty level but they were absolutely worth it.

I think this panoramic view of Bryce canyon summarizes the trip pretty well… absolutely gorgeous!

On the way back, we stayed for another night at Las Vegas’ newest hotel: Aria. We spent the last day playing tennis and chilling in the pool 🙂

The trip was full of breathtaking scenery.

The hikes allowed me to experiment with my new photo zoom lens (x100-x400).

A wonderful trip despite being humiliated on foosball by Nuno 🙁 Here are few photos from the place we rented at the ranch…

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about