Blogs from California, United States, North America - page 1024

Hey everybody, Just writing this first pre-travel blog to test this thing out and see how it works.. and to tell y'all what this is all about. As any of you who know me know, by this time next week I'll be off on the first leg of my South American adventure with my long time buddy Devin. I figured while I'm gone rather than make a million phonecalls to tell people about the things I've seen or done each day, I'd try to make a webpage and update it as we travel along. I'll be taking a digital camera, and Devin will have his laptop. Most of our hotels have wifi so I'll try to upload pics and a little summary each day, time permitting. Above and to the left, click the button and you'll ... read more

I have to get sidetracked a little and remember the mountains. I was out of breath, we weren't really walking fast, but it was all uphill, steep, steep, steep. Fawn and Glenn were ahead of me, I lagged behind and Fawn's dog Jessie kept pausing to look back, make sure I was still in sight. I grabbed onto a tree branch as I stepped over a root, and I noticed that my hands felt funny. I could hardly make a fist, it was like those few minutes after you wake up in the morning, when you can't grip anything too hard because your fingers havn't moved much all night and they gotta get used to it again. A few minutes later, "Ow, Jeez!" Seth's ring was cutting off the blood circulation to my finger! What was ... read more

Those trees are indeed Joshua Trees. Just when i thought it was impossible for my trip to keep on getting better and better, it goes and does just that. For the last 3 glorious days i've been having a fantastic time in Joshua Tree National Park, 9 hours drive south from San Francisco (many many thanks to Uncle Nick for the driving - about 1100miles in all). In short Joshua Tree is not just a slightly overrated U2 album (oooo risky comment), it's an area of desert east of Los Angleles 558,000 acres big. It's one of 380 US National Parks. It's littered with amazing granite rock formations, cacti, Joshua Trees, sand and general dryness. After the mammoth drive down form San Fran on Monday we arrived at the Jumbo Rocks campground around midnight, pitched up ... read more

Hello everybody, Well, I am very sad to say that Amber and I are officially back home. Our flight from Dublin to Frankfurt (and then San Francisco) was supposed to leave at 6:50 AM. After packing and taking in the last of Dublin the previous night, Amber and I got about two hours of sleep. We woke up at 4:30 AM to make it to the airport on time, but when we got there, we couldn't find our flight anywhere. What was worse was that our flight desk (Lufthansa Air) wasn't open at 5:00 AM like it was supposed to, while every other airline was. We asked many people around the airport for help, but we kept gettting the run-around. At perhaps 7:00 AM, a Dublin Airport worker found us sitting despondently in front of the ... read more

Spent Thanksgiving weekend at the Green Gulch Zen Center. Rented a cottage with a great view of the ocean and mountains. We went for a hike Thanksgiving morning; the weather was spectacular with crystal clear skies. We had to hike up to the cottage with our food and supplies, took us 45 minutes cause the wine was so heavy ;) ... read more