Ice Cream, Blueberries, and Budget Airlines Monday morning came rapidly. Faith and I slept for a bit longer than we intended to before getting up to work and hang out with Julie and their kids Katie and Carl. The day was dreary and rainy, which seemed very apropos for the Pacific Northwest but was apparently… Read more

Fires, Forests, and (No) Ferries As the sun rose on Friday, July 26, so did we, getting all our things (freshly cleaned!) back into the van and helping the Westers pack up their car. They were headed to a college visit for Joel then back to Boise via Mammoth Lakes, and we were headed up… Read more

San Diego and Back In the morning, I woke up early to get a few hours of work in before everyone else got up for the day. This was probably not the wisest move on my part, as today was going to be very, very long. Our docket was filled with exactly one activity: the… Read more

The LA Experience In the morning, I got up early to get some work done before we all got ready and hit the road to LA. Our first stop was at the Getty, an art museum in the northwest part of the city that we reached after the usual slog through traffic. The museum is… Read more

Coasters and the Coast The next morning, I repeated my now normal schedule of working early with a latte supplement. We got ready and headed up the coast to Laguna to go to Thousand Steps Beach to swim in some man-made pools that get replenished by the tides. We managed to find parking not too… Read more

Beach, Beach, Beach In the morning, we vacated our spot as the sun brightened the early morning darkness and went to a coffee shop to work and read until we had the code to get into the house. We soon had the code and made our entry, swiftly disabling the alarm and exploring what we… Read more

Pastries and Wine The next morning, we quickly vacated our spot as we were excited to get into Solvang and enjoy its Danishness. We found some public parking and made our first stop at a bakery where we each got a pastry to calm our rumbling stomachs. Faith got a Danish waffle, which was more… Read more

Too Much Heat and Too Many People The next morning, we awoke at our lovely, secluded pull off and got ready before taking the long, winding road down through Kings Canyon. The road descends thousands of feet to the bottom of the canyon before winding up with the canyon floor toward the road’s end. The… Read more

An Easy Alpine Adventure In the morning, we awoke and left while our once-loud neighbors slept peacefully; we resisted the urge to clang our pots and pans near their tents immediately after quiet hours ended, packed up, and hit the road. Our destination for today was the Tuolumne Meadows on the extreme eastern end of… Read more

Inviting, Illegal Water The next day, we left our campsite and made our way down a long, narrow, windy road into the northern part of the park at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. It was again supposed to be extremely hot, and as we found out once we reached the reservoir, it is much lower in… Read more