Surfin’ USA

Nature calls…

11/30/07 at 03:21 PM | In California, Trips | 1 Comment

(Second post for today, wow! Make you sure you don’t miss the first one below… )

After eating way too much on Thanksgiving, Teiko and I used the long weekend and finally managed to take two days off to go backpacking in the nearby Cleveland National Forest.

So last Friday we headed into the San Mateo Canyon Wilderness, which is a virtually untouched area where you can basically set up your tent freely. We packed our backpacks with the gear for an overnight outing and hiked 3.5 miles (5,6 km) to the bottom of a canyon, where we pitched our tent at around 6pm; it was already almost dark at that time. We had some trouble falling asleep so early, but eventually managed to get some hours of sleep. The next morning we rose early, packed up our things and hiked back out — this time uphill, so it took us a little longer.

Except for some blisters on Teiko’s heels, it was a great adventure and I can’t wait to go for another trip, hopefully soon. Living in a densely populated area as Los Angeles / Orange County, the calm and quiet of ‘the wild’ can be a very welcome change…

One month, lots of pictures

at 02:45 PM | In California | 2 Comments

It’s been more than a month since I last got around to writing anything here, sorry for the delay. Life is busy for me, and things are bound to get more intense with finals’ week coming up. Report, projects, presentations…

Anyway, I decided to finally take the time to share a few pictures that accumulated over the weeks, let’s see… It starts with a guided hike in the Laguna Coast Wilderness for which I joined some German colleagues. Then a picture from San Diego, where I visited Teiko for a day when she was attending a conference. It’s a very nice city, I’ll definitely want to go back at some point.

After the conference Teiko’s friend Sue and her boyfriend Josh stayed in Irvine for a few days and we took them on the same hike that I had learned about just a week earlier.

Finally, as you might be aware, Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on November 22nd; so we got a few friends together and had our own Thanksgiving dinner with everyone cooking and preparing some part of it. The food was truly delicious (and there was lots of it!), everyone had a great time.