Day 1

[aggienaut]

Hey so. I've been on a roadtrip around the country. It was pretty cool. I had assumed the whole East Coast would be as developed as California (since after all, They started there first) ... was shocked to find that in fact there's lots of forested area over there. Wtf. California is ugly. I don't get why people are so stoked on it.

Anyway, I thought for kicks I'd recreate the experience by posting my notes on the trip one day at a time. Its like a real time update ... only a month delayed.

So yeah.

Day 1: Jimmy, Betty & Matt picked me up near the end of the first day, having come down from the Bay Area. We continued on to Twentynine Palms, CA, and crashed at a friend Betty's'. The place is a giant Marine Corps base, and they say that "29" is "worse than Iraq."

It looks like this out there.

Comments

California

[yami.livejournal.com]

It is amazing how absolutely ugly California can be, of this there is no question. But then there are the parts where I grew up and the places I visited. It seems like ugly is what you have to drive through in order to get to any place totally incredible. On the coast just South of the Bay and down to just North of Santa Cruz is pretty beautiful... And then of course directly North of San Francisco on the North end of the Bay Bridge is gorgeous too. Where I grew up however, to the east in the Sierra Nevadas is amazing. There's always Yosemite too. I would suggest planning a trip up highway 4 to visit the Stanilaus River above Arnold Ca. and then further up highway 4 and drive that way to Lake Tahoe (or whats left of it). There is this totally volcanic lake made of a basin of granite called Alpine lake - its deep and big enough for motor boats but you can see all the way down to the bottom because of how clear the water is. I live in Seattle now and took some friends from here down there - they were absolutely blown away by it.

Month late...

[giographix.livejournal.com]

I thought about doing something very similar when I got back home from one of the last vacations I took. I lost steam after the second or third day and forgot about it. May you persevere and post the whole thing.