Author: kevin

Lindsay had a few days off for spring break. “Wow, that’s great” – That’s what you might be saying. But YOU ARE RIGHT! It was great! I took a few days off (three, if you want to know) and we had a 5 day great weekend. I should add that prior to this amazing weekend I had an amazing birthday party, thanks to Lindsay, complete with oysters (and a super cool dude who shucked them for us), friends from all over the place, etc.

Anyway, last weekend. Wednesday night we drove down to Big Sur and camped right off the 1 at Kirks Creek, an awesome campground right on the coast. To be honest, I was not in a particularly great mood on Wednesday, mainly because I was very tired, so I took a nap (the second in a week, which is some sort of insane record for me). I woke up from the nap, Lindsay and I had dinner (I believe we had chicken bratwurst, if such a thing exists). Then, we played a game of cribbage, which was a great game of cribbage. After these exiting events, we went to bed (around 9:30pm, although Lindsay stayed up for another hour or so reading).

Around 12:15 we woke up, got in the car, and drove ~20 minutes along the 1 to this insane compound/cult/spa/retreat/magical place. Basically there is this thousand dollar a day spa that is huge, but in the middle of nowhere, and then open up every night from 1am until 3am for clothing optional natural mineral baths. These aren’t just your normal run of the mill mineral springs, they are in this (as I’ve mentioned) insane space, on top of a cliff overlooking the ocean. You could see/hear the ocean crashing on the rocks below, and the stars were out and it was a clear night and probably in part because of how tired/dazed I was it was an amazing experience. I’m very happy we went.

The next day at breakfast we weren’t exactly sure what we were going to do to be honest. We had originally planned to go to Disneyland, but earlier in the week we were worried that it might not work out with Sai. But with a bit of sleep I felt a bit more positive/energetic and gave Nick a call to see if he’d be cool with us leaving Sai at his place during the day while we were at Disney. Being the great friend he is, he said “no problem” and the rest is history, which you’ll read about next.

We drove down to LA (which btw, if you have never driven from Northern California to Southern California on the 1, it’s worth doing, it’s a beautiful drive, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it EVERY time you’re driving) which took us way longer then it should. I sometimes talk shit about SoCal (always joking of course), but one thing I really don’t like is that we seem to end up in shitty traffic every time we drive down. Oh well. We drove down to LA OK? That’s the point.

So anyway, Thursday we had dinner and that was great. Then we went to bed. Then we woke up and had what I would classify an amazing day. First, on the drive down to LA we spent an hour or so reading through various tutorials on how to maximize your time at Disneyland and minimize wait times. I won’t go into many details here because you can easily find tons of information on google if you’re interested, but things like how exactly the FastPass system works, which rides tend to have longer lines and at which times, etc. When we got into the part, we ran past all of the families pushing strollers and got in the front of all of the lines, grabbed FastPasses while the other figured out the shortest lines, etc.

Now, + and –

+ We rode most of the big rides without waiting more then 10 minutes (which was insane)
+ Related, but the park was busy (of course), just busy enough, but not so crazy you couldn’t find a place to sit if you wanted, etc
+ I was not scared on any of the rides (the last time I went to Disney I cried on Space Mountain)
+ I genuinely felt really happy to be there, and like it was a “magical” sort of experience. Part of the “magic” was probably just the number of people there that seemed to be having a good time, but it was also fun to be a “kid” (as cliche and Disney commercialish that is to say) and I really appreciate all of the attention to detail, etc. Just a happy sort of place (“The Happiest Place on Earth”!)

– The rides, if I were to be honest, were not as spectacular as I remember. I think a big part of that is just growing up, but on most of the rides we went on I left feeling at least somewhat underwhelmed. Some rides (such as the Matterhorn Bobsleds) I felt very underwhelmed
– Lindsay was perhaps not experiencing the “magic” feeling as much as I did above – not to say that she didn’t have a very good time (she did I think), but she didn’t feel depressed when we left (I did!) and perhaps wouldn’t be as likely to go back next year. I think I could go back to Disneyland in a year and have an amazing time again
– It seems to be maintenance season at Disney, so a number of the bigger rides were closed. Most notably (for me), It’s a Small World was closed, and most notably for other people I tell was the Indiana Jones ride. Also the Finding Nemo ride.
– Autopia was insanely not great IMO, perhaps great for a 3-9 year old kid, but I was pretty upset because I was a great driver and this terrible kid who could barely drive still beat me, even though he kept running into the track and loosing speed! (I’m 90% kidding)

Honestly I was surprised that I liked Disney as much as I did. If I just write down my thoughts about the rides, the food, etc, I wouldn’t probably paint a very pretty picture (just “OK”). But there was something great about the experience and I’m excited to go back.

I took a bunch of photos (black and white, unfortunately) but I haven’t finished the roll yet. I’ll post them when I get them developed/scanned. Also thanks to the Teeples, they purchased my ticket for my birthday and I don’t think we’d have gone without that incentive.

After Disney, we went home and went out and had some great Thai food. Then Saturday morning we woke up and drove home. And that’s about it.

Well, quite a bit has happened since my last post here. I spent two weeks solo in Chicago for work. Lindsay and I went to a wedding in LA. We spent a day in Santa Cruz. I shaved my beard (and am now growing it back again). Actually that’s all I can think of.

Chicago was a great time. I stayed in a fancy hotel and went to a pretty interesting training. Anthea came to visit, as did my mom and Tristan. I ate some great donuts, and a (not pictured) great pizza.

Anyway, long story short, I took a few photos and figured I might as well post a few of them.

Anthea in Union Station

This Panorama turned out pretty well, except that I somehow (even though I SWEAR I did, I always do!) didn’t lock the exposure. So I ended up with two differently exposed photos, which I didn’t spend the time required to try to match more evenly and instead just used photoshops (generally pretty good) “match color” feature. So you can see the seem. I’ll probably go back at some point and do a better job.

This donut place was a chain (or at least there were a number of different locations, I don’t know if “chain” has a technical definition, but in the case I use it to mean “more then one location”), but was very great. The donuts were expensive-ish (2-4 bucks I think?) but were creative/quality enough to justify the price I believe. Case in point: the creme brulé donut had a very hard caramelized sugar shell on it. Which is easy enough to do if you are making creme brulé, but I don’t know they kept trays of the things hard/crackling all day.

This was a really cool old (50s? 60s?) arcade machine in one of the arcades on the Santa Cruz boardwalk area.

We really like Santa Cruz. The rocks are cool and all, but honestly the coolest part of this was the group of kids bodysurfing in the water.

I took this photo because when we move from this apartment someday, I’d always like to remember the few (see:currently in a pretty serious drought) but awesome rainy days we’ve spent in our apartment. I may not want to remember the crocs, but there they were! Edit:Actually, I also should point out that there is a ridiculous amount of grain (if this were digital I’d call it “grain”) on the crocs. To be fair, I did try to bring out more detail from the shoes, so ultimately this is my own fault, but I didn’t actually notice how bad it was until posting this. It’s my fault.

A portrait of Nicola that I like a lot. Good looking guy!

Edit: I realized I mentioned a wedding, but didn’t actually post any photos from it. That’s mainly because, to be honest, I didn’t take any photos that were that worth posting. But, for the sake of keeping track of memories:

This should be an interesting next few months, lots of fun stuff planned. For now, time to go to bed and read “Code Complete” <3 p.s. I finished reading the Gentleman Bastard's third book ("Republic of Thieves"). I really enjoyed it.

Lindsay and I had a 3 day weekend for Veterans Day, and we decided to do some camping sort of activity for the weekend. AND IT WAS A WONDERFUL ADVENTURE AWESOME WEEKEND.

First, because I am guessing people might be wondering and I want to admit this right away: 1) We didn’t catch any crabs 2) I didn’t get any fish while freediving because I wasn’t spearfishing.

That said, honestly this was such an amazing weekend. To start, we left Saturday afternoon-ish from Oakland without any concrete plans, other then we knew we wanted to go camping and we knew that we wanted to go North. Lindsay recently took a “sea foraging” class and was excited about the possibilities of catching crabs (like I was 6+ months ago), so we figured something along the coast. Bodega Bay came to mind and so we sort of had that area in mind. We called a bunch of parks and as we expected (and I worried about!) all of the state parks we called were full and had no availability. BUT, one great lady I talked to told us about a private camp ground near/in Salt Point. I actually forget the name of the place, but she said it was a nice place that was dog friendly so we decided to head there.

It was a two and a halfish hour drive to this campground. When we got there, we paid the nice lady whose property it was, and she told us how to get down to the camping area. It turns out the campground was on the beach, RIGHT on the beach. It’s hard to explain how awesome this place was, but hopefully the photos at least give SOME idea. It’s a working beach, and by that I mean when we arrived there was a huge pile of dead fish heads/bodies sitting on the beach. Everybody there was either fishing or spearfishing, which if you know anything about my recent interests (spearfishing/freediving) then you’ll know how excited I was about this.

Anyway, we got out of our cars and started hauling our stuff onto the beach, and a nice guy (whose name I forget) came over to us (it was dark, so it was MUCH appreciated and we honestly weren’t sure where we should put our stuff) and told us that we could setup our stuff by his tent if he wanted because he had a fire already. So we setup our tent next to our new friends, and sat out by the fire. It was perfect. We were literally 20 feet from the water when the tide is in. And our friend had a good day of fishing and was (as we set up the tent) frying a fresh lingcod in a pan with butter and lemon. And he gave us half the fish, which was more then we could eat. But it was an awesome sort of night, with the waves so close (see photo above).

The next day, Saturday, we woke up earlyish (7:30ish). This was mainly because of the previously mentioned fish heads on the beach were being attacked by a large and angry pack of seagulls (the grey type). First thing up (this moment haunted us for the rest of the weekend) a guy in a small pram type boat pulled up and unloaded a crab pot with FIFTEEN of the biggest, most beautiful dungeness crabs I’ve ever seen. FIFTEEN is a lot of dungeness crab, I’m guessing these crabs would cost you a good $200 bucks at a grocery store. Anyway, it was magical.

The rest of the day we spent driving around Bodega bay looking for a good place to throw in our one hoop net and fish with a small crab snare from a pole. The problem here was that while we have a good chunk of the items required to go dungeness crab hunting, we don’t have everything (like, for instance, a boat). So while in our minds we were picturing ourselves pulling in a trap with 15 dungeness from out in the Pacific, the reality is we were standing on a jetty with 100 (literally-ish, I’m guessing it was around 100) locals and tourists, having little to (in our case) no success.

Still, we got to see Duran beech, which was nice. I took a few photos with my film camera (which I’ll have to develop and scan to share), but it really is pretty cool to see just how many people fish. I’ve said this before (possibly not on the blog), but I feel like fishing/crabbing/sprearfishing out in California is like hunting back in Michigan, or at least there are similarities. The entire beach, which was very very busy, was occupied by people going to put out crab pots for dungeness. No families hanging out on the beach getting a tan, no teens playing catch in the water, just people hunting/fishing.

That evening, back at camp, I rented a Kayak (the lady who owns the property rents out what I am assuming is her Kayak) and attempted to paddle out past the kelp (see photo(s)) and catch us some crab. I quickly realized that even in a cove like we were in, the swell once you paddle out a bit makes it difficult to handle even the relatively light (but awkward) hoop net that I was using. Anyway, I gave it my best but had to come in relatively quickly and didn’t catch anything.

That night (this would be Sunday night, aka last night at this point) Lindsay and I had the entire beach to ourselves, and we cooked up a delicious feast of Trade Joes’ tortellini and a jar of cheap but great pasta sauce (side note: Lindsay tells me that according to a recent story on NPR, real tortellini in Italy is always served in a broth, never in a red tomato based sauce). We ate while watching the sunset, sitting on the beach. As soon as the sun was down we started a camp fire and sat for a few hours by the fire reading (second aside in as many sentences: I finished American Gods), then we went to bed at something sad like 7, mainly because even with a fire it was still a bit chilly laying on the cold sand. Lindsay was probably sleeping by 7:30pm or so, I was a bit of a night owl and didn’t fall asleep until almost 9.

The next day we woke up early, a bit before 7. I made a better attempt to catch us some crabs and kayaked further out. I made sure to organize the line on the crab trap before attaching it to the kayak (I had some trouble before). But, long story short, despite this, somehow the line got tangled when I threw it over and being the total newb that I am (it will not happen again and I learned a lot) I didn’t have the other end of the trap tied to my kayak, so when it went over the side and when the rope ended up getting tangled on itself, there wasn’t enough slack for the floats to make it to the surface. So, long story short the entire trap went under the water, and I felt/feel a bit stupid about it..

BUT, after that, and as much as I honestly didn’t feel like it (at this point being slightly wet and feeling a bit depressed about the stupidity and loss of the hoop net), I went for a quick and very cold but very much wonderful swim/freedive in the cove. It was great. Nothing too crazy, but I recently took a freediving class and haven’t been freediving since then. For the record I feel like a bit of a “tool” saying “freedive” but I guess I should get used to it, that’s what it is I suppose. I didn’t go particularly deep, probably 20 feet or so, but it was deep enough that I was able to swim under/through the kelp, and long enough that I felt like I was actually practicing. Honestly the visibility sucked, and I didn’t see much other then a few smaller fish and a few starfish, but when we go back I’ll feel more comfortable heading out a bit deeper (probably with Lindsay in the kayak) and actually doing a bit of spearfishing.

After that, I took a bit of an outdoor, painfully cold shower, Lindsay (thank you Lindsay!) packed up camp as I was getting out of the water, and then we headed off! Not too much happened after that, we did a tiny bit of exploring in the towns (Bodega bay and Pantaluma) on the drive home, and that was it! Grocery shopping for the week, then we just got back from Barnes and Nobles reading a bit.

I’m very excited to head back North. Now I just need to find a reasonably priced used speargun on Craigslist, and perhaps replace our hoop net.

As always, more photos on flickr!!!

This past weekend Lindsay and I drove down to Morro Bay to do some camping and diving before next weekends big bug grab. The “bug grab” being a live-a-board dive charter we are doing with a bunch of friends (Nick included!) down near/around/on Catalina Islands off from LAish area.

Anyway, the trip was great/awesome. We got a late start from Oakland (didn’t leave until after 8pm on account of Lindsay having a Cross Country meet), so we didn’t arrive at the campsite until 12:30 pm or so. Thanks to Nick (hey buddy!) for staying up (or getting up?) and calling us at the exact moment that we drove by the campground. This is difficult to appreciate, but somehow at the exact moment that we drove by the campground (we totally missed it and had no idea where we were going) he called. Perhaps it’s because he was using Find my Friends (?).

So we got in, setup camp (and by camp I mean the tent) and were in bed by around 1am. This is around the time that the raccoons really seem to come out. This campground is actually really awesome (we went a few years ago with Nick and some of his other LA friends) but the number of raccoons that live here and come out at night is probably off the chart, if you were to chart the number of raccoons in all campgrounds with a reasonable upper limit drawn.

Anyway, in the AM after a semi-restful night of sleep Nick, Beau and I took off for the docks (Beau had some work to do and found a coffee shop). Lindsay would have come, but we ended up having two dogs for the weekend and sadly it was too hot for the dogs to be left in the car/tent. Lindsay if you read this I love you and am sorry you didn’t get to dive! That message to Lindsay aside, I think the first dive we did would have probably been something Lindsay wouldn’t have exactly loved anyway. The dive was to ~70-80 feet, with maybe 10 feet visibility. Shawn, our dive boat captain and dive master and really the only other guy we went diving with, tells us that even for the relatively poor visibility in the Morro Bay area, this was particularly bad vis. So that was a bummer. On the bright side though, we did manage to dive in what I’m guessing (and hoping) are significantly more difficult dive conditions then we will dive in next week, so it was good practice!

The second dive, was awesome. The visibility was still not great, but we went spearfishing! Which, although I haven’t posted about this yet I don’t believe, is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time! And something I want to do again! It was awesome. Shawn had a speargun which he let us borrow, and he showed us the proverbial ropes. Not sure if that’s a proverb or not, about ropes, or whatever, but anyway he showed us how to shoot fish. Turns out it’s not so hard, and WAY more my style then fishing with a hook and line I think. You are down there, looking under rocks, watching out for sharks (not really), finding some great fish, BAM shooting them, reeling them in, and putting them on your stringer. Honestly it was pretty awesome. Especially for a perhaps less then super beautiful dive, it makes the visibility not so important because you’ve got a task you are working towards.

We only had a single speargun, and we shared between the three of us, but I was able to get a reasonably sized black rockfish. Perhaps not the most awesome looking fish, but it tasted great. Honestly next time I fish I think I’d go for more rockfish because I thought they tasted the best.

Anyway, we ended up taking 2 cabazon, 1 lingcod, and 1 black rockfish. Honestly I think we could have probably had 10 rockfish but we were only shooting what we could reasonably eat (and even the four fish we got were plenty for two meals).

When we got back, Shawn cleaned the fish for us (taught us as well). Then we went back to camp, picked up Lindsay, ate some lunch, at some ice cream, then went home and cooked up the fish.

Great weekend.

Not a whole lot to say, but after several hours in the dark room, and many many more scanning photos one at a time, I figured I’d post a few of the photos I’m reasonably happy with (as promised in one of my previous posts).

Sadly, I am not and was not really in the photography mood the past months (ok, year+), and it shows as I’d say the large majority of photos are very much “meh.” That said, I think that developing these photos and spending some time in the dark room has helped me appreciate photos more once again. So hopefully I’ll get back on the horse, a bit.

So here we go…

I’ll go in chronological order, starting with photos from Colombia.

Here is a dog (temporarily named Playa) that Lindsay loved and wanted to keep. It lived outside on the beach.

The hut type beach place we stayed on the beach in Colombia

And Sykes Hot Springs

And Yosemite/Sacramento

And more on my flickr account.