Rough Draft

Dana and Chris's Visit

Dana and Chris came out to California for a couple weeks. Their first full day here was Memorial Day and since I had the day off from work we went up to the SF Zoo and Muir Woods. The next three days they took Caltrain up to the city and did a lot of sight-seeing including Alcatraz, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a trip to Japantown which yielded this bounty. Friday we went up to Yosemite National Park and spent all day Saturday there. Sunday was spent hanging around the 'Tino including a trip to Santana Row, mini golfing, and El Burro for dinner.

Dana and Chris spent most of the next week at Chris's brother's place in Monterey. They of course went to the aquarium and rented bicycles one day. I was quite jealous to find out they went skydiving one day. A couple of us at work were just talking about how fun that would be a few days prior to that.

I'm glad Dana and Chris made it out here. It definitely felt like the college days: coming back to the apartment, sitting around a table talking and playing games. Good times. We played many hands of Pinochle, which I hadn't played since my trip to Cleveland a year ago. The first couple days I played a bit too aggressively, but got better as the week went on. I pwned the last hand of each of the last two games we played, but that was purely due to being dealt a great hand. The first game I had all but 2 or 3 of the hearts and in the last game I got dealt a double Kings around! Chris and I called that last game a tie though, since we both made it over 150 and if Kings around was worth something more reasonable, like 16 points, I wouldn't have won.

One last note is we made good use of my GPS during their trip. So much so that we gave her the name Gina. I also discovered she can speak directions in Swedish, but I haven't come up with a good Swedish name yet.

Hopefully they can make it out here again when I can take a vacation day or two so that we can head down to SoCal.

Yosemite

Last weekend, on a whim, Dana, Chris, and I took a road trip to Yosemite National Park. We were originally planning to rent a cabin, but when Dana called Friday morning to make a reservation there weren't any vacancies. Not to be deterred we decided we'd just get a tent and camp outside. This turned out to be a bit of wishful thinking.

We arrived around 12:30 AM and drove around following signs to various campgrounds, but all of them had signs up saying the campground was full. After about an hour of this, we gave up and made our way back to the visitor's center at the park entrance and just slept in the car. Not the best night's sleep I've ever had, but hey, it was an adventure.

The next morning we checked the building where you can reserve a spot at the campground but were simply greeted with a sign listing all campgrounds as either full or closed. So with that in mind, we decided we'd just had home that night rather than trying to find a place to camp.

We spent the day hitting most of the major sites: El Capitan, Yosemite Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Half Dome, and Glacier Point. Everything we saw was really spectacular. I posted a bunch of pictures on flickr. The pictures turned out well, but most of them don't even begin to give a good sense of the shear size of the mountains and falls.

Oh, and being the huge dorks that we are, we had to take time out after lunch to play Settlers. Good times.

If you haven't been to Yosemite, I definitely recommend you go at some point, but I highly suggest a bit of planning ahead of time (unless you really don't mind sleeping in the car).