Los Angeles

We spent the past few days in Los Angeles, doing a lot of walking around Jed and Mona's neighborhood and driving around to see parts of the city. We also went to a Mariner's game in Anaheim.

There is a park just outside the apartment where "everyone" in LA goes to hike. We went up there and from one of the little peaks up the canyon we had a pretty good, if somewhat smokey, view of the Hollywood sign. We went up there a second time during our stay and saw a horse and a goat named Chucky. Chucky seemed a bit upset about having to hike with all of the people and dogs of LA. The views at sunset were also very nice from this hill.




We drove to Santa Monica and Venice. The beaches were empty, but it was a weekday. There were a lot of shoppers along the "Boardwalk" and we did get to see a cute little canal that ran through the city.



We also ate at a couple of delicious restaurants and enjoyed spending time with Jed and Mona. We drove to Tucson yesterday, spending the day driving east. Our ride went pretty smoothly and we saw a nice sunset in the rear view mirror. We also got to watch a lightning storm off in the distance.

Mariner's Game and LA first impressions

We went to a Mariner's versus Angels game tonight in Anaheim. It was an exciting game; Felix Hernandez pitched for the Mariner's and did quite well; gave up two runs (only one earned) in seven innings and the Mariner's tied it in the 9th only to lose it in the 10th 3-2.

Angels stadium is pretty nice, although it's very commercialized. I know sponsorship is rampant in sports but there were actual TV commercials on the big screen between innings. And when an Angels player did something good, instead of saying something like "Ichirific" on the big screen, the play would be sponsored by some electronics store. I'm sure it's the future direction of sports, but I think Seattle is a little behind the curve on this so far. Also, I would say about 95% of the people at the game were wearing Angles clothing; the crowd was a sea of red. Of course partly this was due to the fact that it was "hat night" - Jaimee and I are now proud owners of Angel's caps - but mostly the red was from the jerseys people were wearing. This compares to probably less than 50% of people at a Mariner's game who wear Mariner's gear. Could partly be that the Angels are doing well this year, but I think it's more than just how well the teams are doing.

As for LA, my first impressions are that I like it. It has too many highways, traffic is as bad as people say it is, but the weather is good (hot and sunny, but not too humid), and from what I've seen so far, the architecture is pretty nice. Today we walked around Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards (saw people leaving flowers on Michael Jackson's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame), ate lunch at a vegan thai restaurant and went swimming in the rooftop pool of the apartment building where we're staying. I think what I like about LA is the possibilities and vastness of the city. There's a lot going on, even if it is all spread out. It's a place that I'd like to get to know better, even if it means a lot of driving, and at fast speeds; LA drivers are crazy.

Tomorrow, we plan on hiking up to see the Hollywood sign, then a visit out to the boardwalk of Venice beach.

San Diego

We left Joshua Tree and continued to San Diego. We stayed with our friend Jennifer who was gracious enough to host us even though we only gave her a few days notice! Jennifer had a really cute bird, Nugget. It reminded me of when Jaimee and I first met; her roommate had two birds. Nugget was a little quieter than the birds Jaimee used to live with, but Nugget still craved attention.

We were only in San Diego for two nights but we managed to see a lot of the major sites. We went to the Del Coronado Hotel, saw La Jolla and the beaches north of there, and went to Ocean Beach closer to the city. San Diego is a beautiful city, and you certainly can't beat the weather.

Then, on our drive to Los Angeles we stopped at Lego Land!

This was not a planned stop, but when we saw the sign for it on the side of the highway I thought it would be fun to stop. Unfortunately, it cost $65 per person to get in, plus $12 to park! What a rip-off. However, they have a "shopper's pass" where you can enter the park for one hour. They take an imprint of your credit card, and if you're not back within an hour they charge your card the price of admission. In this case, if we weren't back in an hour they were going to charge $130 for the two of us. Also as part of the "shopper's pass" if you buy $20 worth of Legos they reimburse your $12 parking fee. Sooooo...we ran around the park for an hour taking pictures like mad and I'm now the proud owner of a Boba Fett Lego keychain. (I also got some Lego refrigerator magnets for when we have a fridge again.) Since I'd decided to pay the $12 for parking this was like getting $20 worth of stuff for $8; what a bargain! Although the hour time limit made for a nerve-wracking tour because the park is huge and we tried to see everything in one hour. And, my purchases were actually $19.98 before tax so then I worried that they wouldn't reimburse me the $12 because of the two cents, but it turned out not to matter. Legoland is cool, although I'm not sure it's worth $65. The price didn't seem to deter too many people, as it was quite packed.

Here's the slideshow of all the San Diego pictures:

Now we're in Los Angeles until Friday morning. We're actually cat sitting for an old friend of mine who used to live in Seattle. We have an apartment to ourselves in Hollywood. Pictures and blog posts to follow.

Death Valley and Joshua Tree

Did we really go to Death Valley in the summer? Yes, and although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, I'm glad we went. After climbing Mt. Whitney and recouperating a little at the hotel in Lone Pine, we decided to drive the 100 miles into Death Valley National Park. I knew it would be hot (average day-time highs of around 110). What we didn't know is that there was actually a mountain pass of about 5000 feet we had to climb over. And that it was more like 120 the day we vistited. We turned off the air conditioning and even though the breeze made us hotter, the car did fine. It started to inch up on the temperature gauge but it never gave us any problems.

After seeing the sights of Death Valley (like Badwater as seen in the picture on the right) and cooling off a little in the air conditioned museum, we weren't sure what to do for the night. I had actually thought that it might cool off enough in the evening and night to camp in Death Valley (aren't deserts supposed to cool down fast?) but it was averaging close to 100 all night. So, we pressed on toward Joshua Tree National Park, another 275 miles Southwest. We got to see the worlds tallest thermometer in Baker, CA (on left - it was still over 100) and somewhere near Lucerne Valley, CA we saw a pretty large fireworks display while driving. We still don't know what they were for.

We camped on the North side of Joshua Tree the first night and pitched the tent under the full moon. Although it was still warm it was nothing like Death Valley. In the morning we got up early and toured the park, including a hike of Ryan Mountain (peak #22). Then we pitched our Kelty Carport shelter and created our own shade while waiting out the heat of the day. Jaimee and I hadn't used the Carport on this trip yet, and it worked great. In fact, we were able to rig it to cover the picnic table and even slept under it instead of pitching the tent.

The next morning we got up and headed further south, going to San Diego where we are now. We're staying with our friend Jennifer, whose family lives in Seattle. She was kind enough to host us even though we gave her very little notice. We're having a great time here, and will post about it with some pictures soon.

Here are the rest of the photos from Death Valley and Joshua Tree:

Death Valley and Joshua Tree

Climbing Mt. Whitney

We left Devils Postpile and turned south on 395 and were amazed by the beauty all around us. On the west of us were the Sierras and on the east of us were the "Alabama Hills" (filming location of the Transformer movies). The drive was through this valley and it's very hot and dry through here; the clouds get caught by each mountain range and don't dump rain in the middle. We went up to the Mt. Whitney portal. It was swarming with hikers. Even though the hike is 22 miles round-trip with 6,000 feet of elevation gain, topping out on Whitney at 14,497, it seems that most people opt to do it in one day! We, however, took two days to do it (I'll leave the one-day hike for another time).

Even with two days, one of the days has to be a long day as there isn't camping along the entire route. Here's what we did: we hiked from Whitney Portal (8,300 ft.) to Trail Camp (12,000 ft.) covering 6 miles and set up camp (picture of our little tent with our built out campsite). We actually hiked this in only four hours! This is when I started to feel beginning symptoms of altitude sickness. Jaimee felt fine, but I had the classic symptoms: headache, nausea and lack of appetite. It feels like a caffeine-withdrawal headache combined with a dose too many of NyQuil. And, since we'd hiked the first part so quickly, I had nothing to do but lie in the tent and rest and all Jaimee did was worry! Eventually, we cooked dinner, I ate some and went to bed hoping I'd feel better in the morning.

We set the alarm for 5:30AM so that we could get an early start. I was feeling a lot better. I didn't sleep super well, but my headache was mostly gone, although I still wasn't feeling very hungry. We were treated to the most incredible colors as the sun came up:

We drank some Coca tea that someone who'd visited Peru gave us (it's supposed to help with altitude sickness). We left camp with our packs only loaded with water, some food and extra layers. We started hiking around 6:15am and actually summited at 9:15am! So, for those keeping track, that's only 7 hours of hiking so far. Although tired, we both felt pretty good.


We snapped a few photos at the top, signed the trail register and headed down around 10am. Lucky that we left when we did; the clouds were ominously building up around the summit and lightning can be a real danger up there. We got back to our camp and made a quick hot meal as on the way up neither of us had been that hungry so we didn't eat much on the way up. Then we packed up our camp and proceeded back down to the portal area. Never have 6 miles seemed so long, but eventually we made it. We ended up hiking 16 miles that day, and as Jaimee likes to say, she thinks her shoes have a "12, maybe 13 mile limit" for comfort.

The thought of camping again, and especially eating camp food made both our stomachs churn so we went back to the town of Lone Pine, CA (elevation 3,700 ft.) and found a hotel and ate in a restaurant, neither of which we'd done much on this trip so far. We capped the adventure off with two frosty beers and a game of Scrabble.


Now, we're contemplating where to go next. We're going to LA next week, but we have the weekend without any firm plans. We're going to head over to Death Valley for one night at least since it's only 100 miles away, but after that we don't know. So, the adventure continues...

Here's the full slideshow of our climb:

Yosemite and Devils Postpile

After we left the San Francisco area, we weren't sure when we'd have Internet again, but being as this is California we found the Internet in a little bagel shop in Mammoth Lakes. We drove from Los Gatos to Yosemite, but because of a "prescribed" forest fire that went from burning 90 acres to over 3,500 acres parts of the park were closed. The entire "Yosemite Valley" was closed to cars. Since we were heading across the Sierras we had to take the Tioga Pass road through the northern section of the park.

This meant we missed El Capitan and Half-Dome. But there was some really cool scenery along the road. We camped at White Wolf campground for one night and did a day-hike of Lembert Dome near Tuolumne Meadows the next day.

Then we headed toward Mammoth Lakes on and went to Devils Postpile National Monument for the night. The Postpile was pretty cool and this morning before stopping at this bagel shop we took hot spring showers.

Here's the slideshow of the two parks:



Now we're off to the Whitney Portal for our climb on Tuesday.

San Francisco Part II

After visiting my friend Lisa in Marin county and touring the city of San Francisco, we next went to Berkeley for a stroll around the town and University of California campus. We loved the town (although I think the University of Washington campus is prettier) and loved to see all the people biking. Then we went to visit the Keynote Systems headquarters in San Mateo, the company who I'd worked for in Seattle for the past two years. Being that it was a Friday afternoon there weren't very many people around, but my former co-worker Herman was kind enough to tour me around a little.

Then we went to the charming town of Los Gatos to visit my high school friend Tim and his wife Nora. The town is really quaint and Tim and Nora were excellent hosts. We had a wonderful dinner and immensely enjoyed chatting and hanging out for the evening. They live on a wooded road right outside of Los Gatos and their house could have easily been found in Vermont.

Although we'll be seeing lots of different places on our trip, to me, it's more about the people. I'm not being very good about getting pictures of all the people we're staying with on the way, but I'm really enjoying visiting the people along the way.


We also decided on our first trip scheduling change. Originally we'd thought we'd take a trip to the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California but after looking into the logistics of it we decided we're going to instead spend the next week in the Sierra mountains. We were already planning on climbing Mt. Whitney on Tuesday, but now instead of heading right back to the coast after the climb we're going to stay out there until after Labor Day when we'll then head to LA to visit another old friend.


So, we probably won't update the blog in the next week, but you can check our Spot page to know where we are. We'll update it at least once a day with our new location.

San Francisco

We are having a great time in San Francisco. We arrived Wednesday night after a long drive from Crater Lake National Park. We are staying with Asa's friend from college, Lisa and her boyfriend Svilen in San Rafael. They cooked us a wonderful dinner on our arrival and then we went for a nice walk around their town.

Yesterday we spent the day in the city. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and paid the $6.00 toll, only cringing a little. We went to Haight-Ashbury for a little walk and a cup of coffee. It was just about 11:00 and things were just beginning to open, good thing we slept in a bit. After that we drove along parts of the 49 Mile Scenic Drive and got to Twin Peaks where we had a great view of the whole city. It was here that we were able to see a tiny bit of fog creeping away from the Golden Gate Bridge. I didn't remember it being there when we were on the bridge.

We had a really delicious lunch at Herbivore in The Mission. Then we went to a used bookstore for some paperback bargains. We each found a cheap book to keep us busy.

Next we went over to Lombard Street. It was one of the places that everyone said we should see. It was very busy with cars and pedestrians (some of them actually walking on the narrow street to snap photos of their cars coming down) but we ended up driving down ourselves. The EST pulled through beautifully, though I made Asa stay in the car so no photo!

From here we parked and walked down to the Fisherman's Wharf. We saw the shops and the street performers. We saw just about everyone eating clam chowder bread bowls. It was a very fun atmosphere and very full of people enjoying the sunshine. The sea lions were sun bathing too!


After all of this time walking and sightseeing we headed back over the bridge to see Asa's friend Amber for dinner. They hadn't seen one another in many years and it was a really nice evening of sushi and reconnecting. It was a very full day, and I think we may have fallen in love with San Francisco a little bit.

Today we will be touring the East Bay and then staying with a high school friend of Asa's in Los Gatos. The sun is already shining so I am expecting it to be another wonderful day.

Here's the link for the rest of the photos, which we may add to as we take more today and tomorrow.