Snippets from my trip

Monday, July 16, 2007
3:26 PM

Leaving California; heading off to Durango, CO for a few days to see some old friends, then back to Michigan for a few days more. Will return to Cali in about 10 days--after which Rob and I will roadtrip down the coast to LA and see me off for my year in China. Coupled with our roadtrip across the country from Michigan(Rocky Mountains, Arches National Park, and salt flats), this has been a summer of pretty hardcore traveling, even for me.

7:05 PM

The flight from SFO to Las Vegas can best be described as "hurtling". The pilot's idea of "descent" was a 20 minute nosedive. When I saw that my current flight had "No Services", I had no idea they meant a 19-seat (21 with pilots) mini-plane with no restroom. The pilots are young--maybe about my age, and talk like Nebraskan farm boys.

I'm now on a tiny, Beechcraft heading towards Farmington, NM, getting thrown through a storm cloud over the Nevada desert. I feel like a character in a WWII movie. The view is terrifyingly, apocalyptically gorgeous--The skycap is black, the horizon blood-orange. I can see lightning strike from sky to ground and a funnel cloud form. The plane circles steeply. 50 or 55 degrees to the left. I can see the blue-grey clouds stroking the ground. The landing is swift; a sound like a disaster, and then surprisingly smooth as it coasts. Some raindrops streak diagonally upwards against my window. The must be less need for an airstrip for these little planes. I wonder at terrifying freedom the pilots must feel to pilot small planes through the births of desert storms.


7:46 PM (8:56 Mountain time, now)

The plane landed in Cedar City to drop off half the passengers. The pilots announced that we could take a pit stop since it would be 10 or 15 minutes before we took off again. It's turning into a layover as they're waiting for the weather to clear. The horizon looks like a postcard--blood orange and bright yellow (sunset) with streaks of grey and pale pink rubbed down from the the indigo grey sky, the color stopping abruptly against navy mountains the shade of night. Every so often (more rarely now), I can see a stream of lighting strike vertically down.


9:14 PM

Back on the plane. We're now flying through the rain. the reason I can tell is because every time the winglight strobs, I can see raindrops flash frozen-illuminated by the light. It is noisy like hell outside-literally, like hell. It feels and sounds like we're flying straight through hell. A million bats and demon-lets flying straight into the side of our plane shaking us off our course. Sounds and feels like we're in a blender. Turbulence feels like we're about to die.


Anyway, a recap of the past week:

Saturday, 7/7:
Arrived after 9 hours of traveling; totally exhaused. Went out for seafood. The food was great, except that they forgot my order.

Sunday, 7/8:
Went boogie-boarding in Santa Cruz. It was cloudy and cold (wetsuits are awesome) but there were 6 foot waves. It was Rob's first time in the ocean, and a pretty impressive outing too considering the fact that he can't swim. Walked along the boardwalk afterwards, which was super-nice.

Monday, 7/9:
Checked out the Kwik-E-Mart in Mountainview (a couple blocks from the Googleplex); will post pictures up soon. They were out of Buzz Cola and Krusty-O's, so we got a "Simpsons" donut and a Squishee instead. Brilliant bit of marketing there--it cost 7-Eleven less than 1 million bucks to outfit the dozen or so Kwik-E-Marts across the country, and normally I would never make a pilgrimage to a 7-Eleven or buy a donut or Slurpee. I don't even like donuts.

We also went hiking at Santa Clara State Park, I think, and we nearly got lost. Well we got lost a little bit, but we hiked back to the main road and made our way back. It was awesome. We also saw the world's lamest waterfall.

Tuesday, 7/10
I had the stomach flu. It sucked. Stayed in bed all day, could barely move because stomach flues make you so weak.

Wednesday, 7/11
Chilled out all day because I was still sickly and weak. Had lunch (like I did every day, except for Tuesday) at Google. Saw Ratatouille that night (with Rob, of course!). It was a cute movie :-) and the rats looked squishy.

Thursday, 7/12
Went to a special Google dinner that Rob had gotten tickets for. They had a 4 course dinner paired with 4 different wines that were based off of recipes from a master fishmonger/sustainable fishing pioneer. I was pretty lukewarm about the food (flavor pairings blah blah blah... thought I could do better, personally) except for the dessert. I was quite right that all the recipes were by the fishmonger himself except for the dessert, which was devised by the Google chef. A good fishmonger does not a good chef make, IMHO.

Friday, 7/13:
Raced down to San Francisco to check out Jeffrey's Toy Store. Had dinner at Green's, a gourmet veggie restaurant. They're my favorite out of all the places I've ever eaten at :-D.

Saturday, 7/14:
Decided to take surfing lessons in Santa Cruz, but we spent half the day doing laundry instead at the Googleplex. When we tried going down there, the traffic was soooooo bad that it took us 3 hrs to get there :-(. The lessons were done for the day, so we ended up renting boogie-boards and wetsuits again. The waves were kind of small, so we ended up just playing at the beach. :-D Later we went for some mediocre seafood and had some kickass caramel apples.

Sunday, 7/15:
Woke up at 6:45 AM for 8 AM surf lessons. There was no traffic so it took us only 40 minutes to get tehre. It was great watching Santa Cruz wake up to the morning fog. They gave us giant, pepto-bismol pink foam surfboards as rentals--it looked like we were floating around all day on giant tongues. I ended up getting the hang of it... sort of... but Rob caught on quickly and by the end of the day he was ballin'. It was a perfect day by the sea. The sky was blue and the water crystal clear, and the sand sparkled with little specks of gold with every lulling wave. We spent about 9 hrs in the water, and then found a great little taqueria across from the boardwalk. They had the Moscow Circus playing for free at the boardwalk so we caught that show, which was awesome. We headed back before the sun set, and all in all had the perfect day.

Well perfect, except for the fact that Rob didn't put on sunscreen and he's white, so his face exploded.


Anyway, I love the beach. I love the ocean. I love the fact that even though when I was growing up, going to the seashore was one of those big, once-a-year vacations where you'd stay for a couple days at a hotel, in California we can go to the beach every weekend if we wanted to. I love hiking. I love California. I love how there's so many outdoors things you can do there. Most of all, I love Rob. When I come back, we can become surfers (or maybe he'll just become one, cause I suck) and by then he'll actually let me ride on the back of his bike. California is making Rob so supercool, at this rate he'll be a rock star by the time I come back from China.