Finding Our Way Around

We flew to Costa Rica and managed to drive ourselves to our first stop, despite the drive being 3x as long away as expected. We ate delicious steak and slept in a very non-touristy hotel (complete with a possessed TV, a "suicide shower", and a scary-giant spider.)

San Jose, CA & San José, CR

Costa Rica! Costa Rica Costa Rica! As Wil Wheaton would say, Costa Rica I am in you!

I'm having fun distinguishing "San Jose" (ie the Californian city) from "San José" (ie the capital of Costa Rica) purely by accent mark. `;)`

Name Games

The adventure managed to start even before we left the country. Forrest had booked the plane tickets for us. Even though I had confirmed the itinerary too, we both missed that my ticket was booked under my married name — which is a problem for international flights, since my passport is still in my unmarried name. Oops!

I called the airline days before the trip, asking if it was going to be a problem. The representative told me that yes, definitely, they could deny me from getting on the plane. He made a note on my file (did you know that you have a "file"?) but said I'd have to go to the ticket agent to get things properly changed over to my unmarried name.

I left my car at Google's long-term parking lot and took a towncar (better service than a taxi and cheaper!) to SFO. I got there early to deal with the name change business. I was glad I'd gone to the county clerk office to get an official copy of our marriage certificate, because the agent asked to see it! Luckily, the airline didn't charge anything for the ticket changes, even though I'm pretty sure their terms of service or whatever says they could have.

Throughout this, Forrest thought I was just being paranoid. I'm still unconvinced, and in any case, I'm glad I got my ticket fixed because I didn't have any trouble.

Flying to Costa Rica

Waiting at CLT during our layover

Forrest arrive around 9 or 10 in the evening of the 28th. We waited around in the airport until our flight from SFO to CLT (Charlotte, North Carolina) at midnight, so technically the 29th. (I had not read the plane ticket carefully, and had thought at first that I was picking Forrest up from the airport, then driving back the next day to fly out at noon. Not so.)

I finally tried out a sleep mask for the first time, and wow does it make sleeping on a plane so much easier! I wish I had tried it before.

So I wake up in Charlotte, where we get some marginal breakfast and kill a little time before taking off for Costa Rica! :D

Landing in San José

Kölbi

The international airport in the capital city is... somewhat smaller than we had expected: SJO has 17 gates (compared to SFO's 102 gates, for example).

The very first order of business was getting local SIM cards for both our phones and the iPad (our "GPS device" for the trip, rather than paying by the day to add it on to the rental car). In the middle of the airport was a convenient kiosk for Kölbi, a local telco. We did the transaction 80% in Spanish — I didn't know how the payments structure was supposed to work, so when we got into the details of it, I got a little lost. Amusingly, that was the thing that Forrest had researched, and by knowing what to expect her to say, he was actually better able to follow the Spanish at that moment. :P Don't underestimate how much context can help you understand a foreign language! Luckily, the saleswoman spoken somewhat more English than I did Spanish, so we were able to clarify what the deal was.

It worked out to approximately $40 for unlimited data on all three devices for the entire trip. Plus local calls, and also calls home at 30 cents a minute. (We ended up calling home a couple times during the trip because that's not too pricey, but we didn't chat on and on either, because it's not dirt cheap either. The Goldilocks amount of calling, if you will.)

From there we went out through customs. It was as simple as running our bags through a scanner and picking them up on the other side.

Getting the rental car

Because it took us 30 minutes to get the SIM cards set up and get out of the airport, I was a little afraid that the rental car company's representative would have ditched us. Or that they weren't going to send a rep like they had said they would. Or that we didn't really have a reservation like I thought we did. (The rental car was the one thing I reserved through a travel agency, because it was $200 cheaper than booking directly. I had thought it was actually even more-cheaper, but it turns out that the agency's quote didn't include all the taxes.) All sorts of nagging worries while we were busy being overwhelmed by the crowd of people crushing up against the glass windows, looking in at the arriving passengers for the person they were supposed to meet.

But then we went out to the curb, and Forrest spotted the guy with my name on a sign (that listed like five other names). Not ditched! Success!

We (by which I mean mostly I) chatted with the guy in Spanish a little bit while waiting for the car to come around to pick us up. Turns out, the car they picked us up in was the one we would be renting. I dunno if that's a normal rental car thing, but it was nice to see that the car worked before we took over. ;)

The guy at Mapache Rent a Car was a little pushy about the optional insurance packages, but not any more than most car-related salesmen I've had to interact with.

But he did give us a map, directions, and a local's sense of how long it would take to drive to our destination — Ciudad Quesada, aka San Carlos — 3 hours, instead of the 1 hour that the TripAdvisor forums had led me to believe. This led to a bit of... strife... with the worried (and also tired and hungry) husband. You see, even though we had landed at 1:30pm, everything was taking longer than expected, and it gets dark very promptly at 6pm on the equator. And when the rental car guy told us it took 3 hours because the roads became very steep and windy 1 hour out... Well, Forrest was worried in a completely justified sort of way. But we decided to drive as far as we felt comfortable, and made room in our expectations for sleeping in one of the two towns that were on the road before Quesada.

Driving is not as bad as we were led to believe

Pan-American Highway in the rain

In what became a theme for this trip, we slowly began to think that the roads in Costa Rica might not actually be as bad as everyone (including the rental car guy) would have us believe. The Pan-American Highway, for instance, is certainly smaller than we would have expected a major highway (only one lane in each direction), but it was in great condition. And sure, it was raining (because summer is the rainy season in Costa Rica), but it was just normal rain, not scary torrential monsoon rain or anything.

Between the verbal instructions the rental car guy gave us, the map he highlighted for us, and the iPad GPS (with detailed maps that Forrest had pre-downloaded before the trip), we were able to find the turn off of the Pan-American Highway and head north toward Quesada. When we hit the first town on the route, Naranjo, we felt comfortable to continue onward, so we did.

Advertisement Van

Just outside of town, there was this van with speakers mounted to its roof. They were blasting advertisements for some local business, in the same way you might get spam flyers in the mail advertising a sale at the grocery store. It was like spam, in van form. Van-spam, if you will. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

A little further down the road, we drove through Zarcero, which is apparently "famous" for its weird topiary garden in the middle of the town. Forrest ask me if I wanted to stop and walk around, but A) I knew as well as he did that daylight was an issue, and B) I didn't especially feel the need to walk around. We sorta looked at each other, judging whether the other was more "into" the topiaries, and then we agreed we'd seen as much as either of us felt compelled to. Maybe that makes us bad tourists, but we're the same kind of bad tourist, so it makes travelling together work out. :)

Zarcero (photo courtesy CostaRicaPhotos.com)

Just beyond Zarcero was where the rental car guy had warned us the road became very steep, windy, and just generally bad. We did get stuck in a traffic jam because of a couple one-way, the-same-direction-must-always-yield bridges, it really *wasn't that bad. For instance, the breaks never failed like what happened once to Forrest when he was driving down some truly steep roads to go backpacking. And the road was always two-lane (except for those pesky bridges with the ceda el paso aka "yield" signs), unlike the part of CA-4 between Ebbetts Pass and Markleeville that we've both travelled multiple times.

If you're Friends or Family with me on Flickr, you can see Forrest's awesome "not amused" expression at being stuck in said traffic jam. :P

We checked in again with each other about how we felt on pushing on all the way to our destination vs stopping early in Zarcero. We both agreed that the roads had been fine and seemed perfectly safe to drive even past dark, if necessary. So onward we went!

Getting to the hotel

Hotel El Parqueo

We rolled in to Ciudad Quesada at 6 o'clock, right at sunset. Our next "adventure" was locating the hotel where we (supposedly! hopefully!) had reservations for the night. In Costa Rica, no buildings have addresses. Instead, they have relative directions. For example, our hotel's location was 400 meters north and 200 east of the central plaza. A block is roughly 100 meters. So we drove to the plaza and counted blocks. There were some one-way streets which we had to dance around, which means we got slightly lost once before finally finding the hotel.

The front door had a locked gate, but ringing the doorbell promptly called the young man behind the front desk to open it. I told him (in Spanish; I'm positive he spoke no English) that we had a reservation. He looked us up in a logbook-type-thing and found us. I was so relieved; up until this point, I had been afraid we didn't really have a reservation and we'd be spending a stressful time chasing down last-minute accommodations.

I asked to see the room before paying. He said of course and took me down the tiled hallway to the last room. It had a private bathroom (which is an optional upgrade feature in most Costa Rican hotels), a queen bed, a twin bed, and a fan (but no A/C, which I hadn't thought to ask about over the phone). It seemed sparse but clean and safe.

Suicide Shower

The only questionable thing about the room (other than the lack of A/C) was the shower. Check out the photo. See the green wire coming out of the wall and connecting to the shower head? That's how the water gets heated. Our guide book said that they aren't all that uncommon, and are affectionately known as "suicide showers". The book recommended you not adjust the temperature while running the water(!). I ended up deciding I wasn't in that much need of a shower. Forrest said it was for the best, because apparently there was a giant nasty spider in the shower stall that I wouldn't have wanted to see. D:

Anyway, I went back to the front desk to pay for the room. It was ₡15,000 for the room. They didn't take credit cards, but had no trouble with American dollars. I only had twenties, so I gave him $40 and he gave me back ₡5,000.

During our entire trip, we never came across anywhere that did not as readily accept dollars as colones. What's more, all but two or three places gave us colones in charge at the actual exchange rate (₡500 for $1) without charging any fees at all. There is absolutely no reason to exchange money in Costa Rica; they either take credit cards or American dollars, and if you overpay with the latter you magically get local currency at the best possible rate. It was pretty cool.

I asked whether there was a curfew. The employee told us there wasn't; we could come and go as we pleased, we'd just have to ring the bell to get the front desk's attention. With that, we said good night and headed out to dinner.

Delicious, delicious steak

So Ciudad Quesada is in the middle of cattle country. And when in the cattle country, it's my philosophy that one should eat steak for dinner. I had researched (via Foursquare! hehe) a steakhouse with good reviews beforehand, so we headed straight for the Coca Loca Steakhouse on the western edge of the central plaza.

The restaurant looked a little hole-in-the-wall-ish and Forrest was a little reluctant to go in. But he was even less interested in searching for a new place to eat, so we went in. Like in every single restaurant during our trip, the waiter said we could sit wherever we wanted; we were never seated by a waiter.

Forrest had heard somewhere that ordering things rare or medium-rare was unusual, so we braced ourselves for getting medium or well-done steaks. But thankfully either Forrest's information was bad or the waiter knew to ask foreigners about steak done-ness, because we got into a discussion with the waiter about the Spanish words for it! Apparently it's rojo, medio, y bien cocido (IIRC).

I ordered a filet mignon and Forrest ordered a ... T-bone? (I'll have to ask him if he remembers.) But the cut of meat isn't the interesting thing; the size of the steaks was the interesting thing. They were both huge. I stuffed myself but was only able to eat half my steak, despite it being delicious. Forrest managed to eat all of his steak, which turned out to be his favorite meal of the trip, but he was very full. When a Tico* family of four sat down at the table next to us, we noticed they ordered "family style", which seemed much more sensible to us now that we'd seen the portion size.

"Tico" is the word for a Costa Rican.

Possessed TV

Possessed TV

We walked waddled back to the hotel, counting blocks as well as double-checking landmarks. (I'd also recorded the location as a pin on my phone, just in case we somehow got turned around or lost.)

We slept well enough despite the warm evening, except for a very sudden, loud noise jerking us away in the middle of the night. We leapt out of bed, hearts pounding from the adrenaline of surprise. The noise was the TV, which had decided to turn itself on at full volume. I fumbled at the remote buttons in the dark until Forrest reached up to turn it off directly. We have no idea what possessed the TV to pull such a stunt, but we did not appreciate it.

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See also my Flickr set for all my photos, and my Foursquare list of the places we visited.

Going to Costa Rica!

Forrest and I decided to go to Costa Rica in 2 weeks! There is a lot of stuff to decide on and reserve!

Another (backdated) blog post, another travel adventure! (Yes, yes, I know that both our Zurich/Munich and honeymoon trips aren't written up. Quiet, you.)

Why Costa Rica?

Google is very generous with its paid holidays. For the fourth of July, they not only gave us Wednesday, July 4th, but also the following Thursday and Friday. Which of course meant that pretty much everyone took Monday and Tuesday off to get nine days off for the cost of two vacation days. It's a good thing no serious bugs or outages happened then, because I'm pretty sure there were no (American) Googlers at the office to fix anything. ;)

So Forrest (also a Googler) and I had this big block of time, and we knew we wanted to go on an adventure. We thought about going to Alaska for a while, but the plane tickets were surprisingly expensive. So we started looking at Latin America. South America was expensive, presumably 'cause it's just so far away. And then we looked at the average July temperatures for Central America; Costa Rica seemed "less hot" than other Central American places, and that seemed as good a reason as any.

So we decided to just do it: we picked Costa Rica and bought the tickets on the very same day, just two weeks before we'd be leaving! That didn't leave a whole lot of time to plan a ten-day vacation to a country neither of us knew, but honestly, that was part of the excitement. (Both Forrest and I have always thought it would be exciting ... and maybe a little scary ... to do that clichéd thing of going to the airport and buying a ticket for the next plane flying to an "exotic" destination.)

Pretending to be a travel agent

I took point on doing the bulk of the research and reservations. Forrest looked up what was up with the cell phone situation and determined that we should be able to buy a local SIM card in-country to get internet. But pretty much everything else about our trip, I figured out for us. It was crazy-intense: there are so many moving parts to a ten-day trip in a foreign country! I can definitely believe that travel agents earn their fees.

So I did lots of googling, lots of travel book reading, lots of forum-reading and -posting. For pretty much the entire two weeks, I lived and breathed Costa-Rica-trip-planning. I took notes on what sounded interesting and gradually (but not too gradually! I only had two weeks!) formed an idea for what we might do while in Costa Rica. I sent the list over to Forrest for comment, and we were both pretty much on the same page. (We really travel well together, because we're both into the same sorts of things and like the same pace.)

(Here's where I'm going to plug TripIt as a great resource for not only storing your travel documents but also planning and coordinating a trip with others. It was super helpful!)

I made reservations mostly by email, but I did have to call one hotel via Skype because they only had a local Costa Rican phone number and no website or email address at all. And of course the phone call was entirely in Spanish, so that was challenging and exciting! (This was a non-tourist hotel in a non-tourist town.)

The woman on the phone at first spoke at me like I was fluent, but I quickly got her to ask simpler questions (and by simple, I mean simple: ¿Uno o dos personas?, hehe). She asked me for a local phone number, but I didn't have one yet. She didn't seemed bothered by this. Then she confirmed the date, how many people, that the room had a private bathroom, the rate, and ... hung up. Without taking any contact or payment information from me. So I was like, "Um, I think we have a reservation for the first night..." :P

Dinner & Closed Shops

Chinese... Thai... Swiss? Restaurant

After I finally got Forrest up from his nap, we walked 15 minutes down Bederstraße (that's a street name, FYI ;)) to look for a supermarket to buy some snacks. The place ended up being closed, so we wandered into the Suan Long China Restaurant to eat. The waiter didn't speak English, so we got by on my smattering of beginner's German, pointing at the menu, and gesturing. We got the beef fried rice and lemon chicken that we wanted, though!

The fried rice's flavor was quite different than we expected — distinctly pad-thai-esque. Then we noticed the statues in the entry looked far more Thai than Chinese... And the waitresses looked more ethnically Thai than Chinese, now that we stopped to think about it. So we ended up at some Thai-Chinese fusion plase, I guess. It's good tho'. :)

Wandering around closed stores

We took the tram back from dinner (Forrest's feet were bothering him) and we checked out the hours of the Starbucks and other stores nearby. Everything seems to close on Sunday, so we're not quite sure what we'll be doing tomorrow. Besides checking out the Grossmünster cathedral, that is. (They're open after mass.)

There is a small mall right next to our hotel, but all the shops had already closed for the evening. Despite this, the main door into the mall was open and there were a handful of people strolling around. So we wandered around there a little bit, found a supermarket and a bookstore to investigate later, then headed back to our room.

Google Voice & Skype work, kinda

we tried giving our parents a call over Google Voice. It had terrible echo and lag, though, so we gave up on that method. I called my parents back via Skype, but there wasn't enough bandwidth to do video and the audio wasn't all that great either. Forrest finally bought a cheap phone card and called his parents on a (gasp) phone, which actually worked.

I'll try Skype again from work on Monday, to see if it was just a bandwidth issue like I suspect.

Nach Zürich!

I'm writing this blog post from my hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland! In case you were asleep during that last sentence, let me reiterate: I'm in Europe! A week (working) in Zurich, then a 4-day vacation to Munich.

My team at YouTube works closely with another YouTube team in Zurich, and so here we are (are will be, as teammates arrive over the weekend) to visit with them face to face. Forrest has tagged along for the ride (out of pocket). This is going to be so awesome.

Language on the Non-Stop Flight

The plane ride over was a direct flight on Swiss air from SFO to ZRH. We flew in coach, which worked out okay for 5'2" me, less so for 6'2" Forrest. The on-board dinner, chicken and gravy-goopy and rice, was actually edible, so that was nice. And the wine was free! The stewardess was like, "Um, also, everything else is free to," just in case I was uncertain. :P

I was expecting to hear a lot of German on the plane, but I wasn't expecting there to be so many French-speaking passengers on the flight too. I know that the eastern part of Switzerland speaks French, but Zurich is in the western, German-speaking part of the country. There was an elderly couple seated next to me who clearly didn't speak English. I couldn't hear them as they talked quietly together, but it didn't sound like German, so I figured it was probably French like the passengers behind me.

Throughout the flight, the elderly man and I communicated wordlessly. He tapped me on the shoulder for help when he had somehow gotten the entire cradle for the funky remote control to pop loose, and again when he needed help with the retracto-cord for said remote. We gestured and "spoke" with facial expressions when he needed to get up to use the bathroom or stretch his legs. Every single time I got something from my backpack in the carry-on compartment above the seats, he reached out to help lift it (ineffectually, but I know he was trying to help out a stranger).

It wasn't until we were descending for landing that I clearly heard the old man tap on the seat-back display and say to his wife, "Un grado," referring to the temperature. I assumed that they spoke Italian, the third* official language of Switzerland and screwed up the courage to see how far my Spanish would go with an Italian-speaking Swiss man.

I was shocked to discover I had been sitting next to a Spanish-speaking madrideño the entire flight! I wish I had tried asking him what languages he spoke at the beginning of the flight. I'll try to take this as a reprimand/lesson to be bolder in approaching people on this trip!

We remarked on the snow in the distance out the airplane window and commented on how San Francisco had no snow and was in fact very sunny, warm, and springlike in comparison. The couple had been in California for the past month (treinta días rather than un mes) visiting their daughter who lives in Burlingame. I told him I lived in Los Gatos, near San Jose, and we chuckled about all the city names in California being Spanish names. He told me that they had visited a mission while they were there, and I told him that all California school kids have to do school reports on the missions. And then it was time to disembark. But it was awesome to see that my Spanish really is good enough to have a conversation, at least a simple one with a willing partner. :)

Zombies

Forrest and I didn't really get much sleep to speak of on the plane. So we were the zombies, trudging through the airport. The customs agent didn't ask us a single question, just stamped our passports with an indulgent smile when I specifically requested it. Unlike the customs agent in Madrid (eleven years ago!), who had haphazardly opened to a page at random and faintly stamped my passport crookedly, the Swiss agent made a neat, crisp stamp aligned with the margins on the first page. We extrapolate from our single data point that all Swiss must be neat and orderly. :P

We met up with my manager, who had been on the same flight (business class), picked up our checked bags, and zombied out to buy train tickets. The automated tellers require credit cards with smart chips in them, so we had to buy the tickets from a person at the window. This turned out to be necessary anyway, because there were like 20 different ticket options plus a "more options" button, so we really didn't have a clue which ticket we needed to buy from the machine anyway. The woman at the counter was very friendly and helpful (and English-speaking) and we ended up with the tickets we needed for the week.

We took the S2 train from the airport to our hotel. We checked in, intending to fight off the jetlag and wait until it was actually bedtime to sleep. But Forrest sat on the bed and we were doomed. I set an alarm for 2 hours and we napped. Well, I napped. I'm up writing this blog post now while Forrest continues to sleep. At first I tried to reason/cajole him out of bed, but after half an hour I gave up. He's not gonna be happy about messing up his sleep schedule... :(

But anyway, we're here, we'll eventually get our internal time clocks straighten out, and I'm looking forward to being a new place with new languages and new experiences!

The fourth and final official language is Romansch, spoken by about 1% of the population.

Almost Lost Mary (Our Cat)

Mary, one of our cats, snuck out the back door while we were gone for a couple hours. But we eventually found her meowing outside. She seems no worse for wear, although it was a few pretty upsetting moments for me.

Forrest and his dad were bottling homebrew today. After they cleaned up, we went to dinner in Santa Cruz.

When we came back home two and a half hours later, only Amy (one of our cats) came running to kibble-dinner-call. Her sister, Mary, was nowhere to be seen. If there's one thing our cats our consistent about, it's being on-time (or, more often, early) to meal times. That's when we realized that the back door to the deck was slightly ajar.

Mary is always peering through open doors and looking out the windows. She's dashed by me when I get home from work a couple times, and I've had to chase her down the deck and haul her back inside. So when we saw the back door had been left open for hours, and Mary hadn't joined Amy for dinner, we were certain she'd snuck outside.

Our cats have essentially never been outside. They certainly don't know how to win any fights or be "street smart." They don't have any experience wandering around and coming back home again. "Lost Pet" posters stay up for a long, long time and I've read plenty of news stories about how the odds of getting a happy phone call from animal control aren't so great. I've lost two cats who wandered outside, one never to be heard from again and another that got run over. So when I realized that Mary had probably been outside for over two hours, in the dark, I immediately assumed the worst and became very sad, thinking I wouldn't ever see her again.

But I grabbed a handful of kibble, went out the back door, and sprinkled it around the deck while calling her name, hoping the sounds of me and the kibble would bring her running. Forrest suggested I put the kibble in a bowl so the kibble-noise would be louder. I thought then that I heard some rustling in the ivy or the trees or something, over in the area beyond our backyard. I stood still at the deck railing and looked in the direction of the sound, but I didn't hear anything more.

I tried the same routine out the front door and the side door, but I heard nothing further. So I sat on the floor next to the cat-feeder (where Amy was still obliviously chowing down on dinner), opened up the front door again, and looked out at the front porch. I felt defeated, certain that no amount of wishful thinking that we would find Mary would make it any more likely. I was feeling really sad. Every now and then I'd jingle some more kibble and call for Mary. Maybe she'd wander back some time later that night, if I just stayed at the door and waited for her.

Then I heard Forrest tapping urgently on the deck window and waving his firesword (ie, ridiculously powerful flashlight). It's only the second time I've ever been pleased that he has this ridiculous flashlight. Because he'd found Mary. After I had left to look around the other sides of the house, Forrest had grabbed the flashlight and a bowl of kibble and kept jingling it while looking out the way I had first thought I'd heard rustling. And eventually, Mary showed up below the deck, meowing.

I grabbed my own flashlight and ran out the side door, into the chicken yard that was closer to Mary. I lifted the chicken wire fence and Mary scooted under it. Her tail was all poofy. I carried her inside, so surprised and relived that she hadn't gotten herself eaten or beaten up or truly lost.

You can believe me when I say that we'll be double-checking that back door shuts all the way from now on.

South Coast Ridge Road

We camped overnight near Big Sur and did a couple-hour drive on a "4x4" dirt road along a ridge between the Pacific Ocean and some valleys. We enjoyed some great weather and gorgeous views.

See all the photos of this trip. (To see photos that include people in them, you have to be my "Friend" on Flickr.)

View from camp

Before the Trip

Last weekend, we went on an "offroad adventure." But because we'd never actually gone offroading before, we picked out one of the easiest roads from the book we bought, and we talked my parents (who have gone on other easy 4x4 roads), Forrest's dad Dennis, and our mutual friend Ben, into going along with us. Our destination was the South Coast Ridge Road, in the Ventana Wilderness in the Santa Lucia mountain range.

Forrest and I went up to Walnut Creek the night before. Yes, this is an hour's drive in the wrong direction, which we then had to backtrack. We did this because the truck's power steering had died a while ago, and Forrest hadn't yet fixed it. The parking space at our house is a narrow, sloped patch of chunky gravel with poor lighting, so I don't blame him at all for not having worked on the cars. My dad, on the other hand, has a nice, flat, well-lighted working area with even more tools than Forrest has. So off to my parents' house we went.

This did have the side benefit of forcing us to be completely packed and ready to go the night before. Left to our own procrastinatory devices, we probably would have been doing last-minute packing right up until it was the agreed-upon time to leave.

Forrest stayed up late fixing the truck and continued the next morning, but he got it done. I went food- and supply-shopping while he worked. My parents left ahead of us, so that someone could get to the camp while it was still daylight and set up.

We ended up getting to Ben's house exactly at the agreed-upon 3 PM, but there was a slight hitch: we had discovered that one of the shocks had sheered off completely. Sorta important for an offroad trip. So I rode with Ben to the campsite while Forrest picked up his dad in Santa Cruz and repaired the truck with Dennis' help. Luckily, the job was as quick as Forrest had thought it would be, and they ended up only ~20 minutes behind me and Ben.

Camp

Camping at Bottcher's Gap

We stayed the night at Bottcher's Gap, which as windy as only a gap can be. Although, to be fair, even when the wind gusted and flared the campfire, it wasn't that cold. And once we got into bed and out of the on-again off-again wind, it was downright warm (for a January night). I even took off my long johns, and Forrest unzipped his sleeping bag completely. It was probably somewhere in the 40's.

Forrest cooked us all dinner, with help from Dennis. They cooked up some delicious steak on the camp grill, accompanied by maple carrots in the dutch oven and sweet rolls from Safeway. We had a near-incident with the table when Dennis sat on the unsupported end of the bench and nearly tipped the whole thing over, but otherwise dinner was good. :)

After dinner, we sat or stood around the campfire. Ben doesn't drink much, but one thing he does is Tullamore Dew, a tasty yet reasonably-priced Irish whiskey. So Forrest and I made sure to bring a small bottle of it. Between the six of us, we managed to polish off the entire bottle. What's camping without the drinking around the fire, I ask you? Not camping, that's what. :P

A Late Start

Ben and Dennis, both being early risers and/or directly in the path of the morning sun, got up sometime around 7 or so. I'm not exactly sure when they got up, because I was definitely still dozing. Forrest and I slept in the back of our truck, with the same setup that we used for our cross-country honeymoon trip. Unfortunately, the curtains' sticking-back velcro had un-stuck itself, so we had no curtains to block the sun. Which meant that I got to see the sunrise and only dozed off and on until I finally got up around 8. My parents slept in longer.

Eventually my parents got up too, and my dad started cooking his famous Mountain Man breakfast in the dutch oven. It was delicious, as always. How can you go wrong with an omelette with bacon and potatoes and melted cheese on top?

View from the road

We finally got on the road around noon. We got slowed down by two slow-moving drivers along Highway 1 on our way to the start of the road, so we didn't even start heading out into the offroad part of things until past 1 PM. The offroad book had said to allot 3-4 hours for the road, and with it being winter and short days, I was a little worried about having enough light. But we headed off anyway, starting on the south of the Coast Ridge Road and heading for the northern end, where it T's into the Nacimiento-Fergusson Road.

South Coast Ridge Road

We turned onto Los Burros Rd / Forest Road 23S01, just south of Plaskett. We were immediately greeted by a sign warning us, "Impassable when wet." But despite it being January and thus supposedly winter, it hadn't rained in a while and the ground was completely dry. We headed up the road, quickly climbing into the coastal mountain range. We stopped at the first good vied of the ocean and took its picture. But I got the sense that the rest of the group didn't really want to make photo-opportunity stops, so that and the lunchtime photo were the only two I got of the South Coast Ridge Road itself.

We drove past a small section of houses. Like, normal, primary residence houses, not rustic cabins or camps. I can only imagine what their pantries look like, given that whenever it rains there's no getting in or out on anything motorized...

Once we got on the ridge, it was gorgeous views of the oak-covered canyons leading to the Pacific Ocean to the west, and equally gorgeous views out over the ridges and down into the Salinas Valley. We speculated about whether you could see the Sierra Nevadas themselves on a clear day, or just the thunderheads over them. But as it wasn't a particularly clear day, we could see neither. Even so, the views were great.

The road was surprisingly well-maintained and easy to drive. It was plenty wide, totally dry, and so long as you had an automatic or low gears, even the "steep" sections were totally navegable by noob 4x4 drivers. It was almost disappointing, except for the fact that I would not have rather had the conditions end up being to hard and get us stuck with no one being truly experienced at leading an offroad party. The only "exciting" thing that happened was when a group of three dirtbikers nearly ran into us as they came flying around the corner.

View from lunch

We stopped for lunch on a narrow section of the ridge with a pull-out space large enough for our vehicles to get off the road. We had a tailgate make-your-own-sandwich lunch. We stood around, eating our sandwiches, drinking iced tea. When the western view of the ocean got boring, you could just turn around and look out over the valleys, then back at the ocean, etc. It was a beautiful day, warm without being hot. It was hard to remember that it was January!

We headed onward and eventually made it to the paved Nacimiento-Furgesson Road, the only road that cuts east-west through the Santa Lucia Mountains. Rather than head back the way we came, north up Highway 1, we headed east toward the much faster Highway 101. The road took us through the Hunter Liggett Military Reservation. It was predominantly empty landscape, full of old oak trees and rolling hills. It was sunset by then and rather picturesque, except for imagining unexploded ordinance lurking just off the road. :P

It was full dark when we finally got to Soledad (where it's happening!). We stopped at the traditional Soledad attractions: Las Delicias bakery and Starbucks. Unlike in years' past where I was super nervous about ordering in Spanish at the bakery, this time I was much more confident and just ordered. Like a boss.

From there, we went our separate ways. I had a good time and look forward to our next adventure!

No More NaNoWriMo

I've done NaNoWriMo for six years now. Unfortunately, I think this year's now-aborted attempt will be my last.

First, I am never into my stories enough to see them through. That's a major contributor.

Worse, though, is the toll that NaNo takes on my relationship with my husband. Even though I'm a fast typist, I am a super slow writer, so I use every non-work moment to write during November. That means I stay out writing until midnight, come home and crash, and repeat 30 times. Or else I go straight home after work but hide out away from him, writing by myself. Either way, we don't really interact when I'm doing NaNo.

It would be different if I had six novels to show for it. But I don't. I have one zeroth-draft from the single time I "won" NaNo, five drafts at various stages of "completion," and no real desire to go back and spent the time and effort to work on any of them.

This doesn't mean I'll never try writing novels again. I look longingly enough at published books and have story ideas wander into my brain often enough that I'll try it again, under less time-crunch-iness. But I don't think that the format of NaNo is working for me — no matter how much fun the community spirit is, unfortunately. I'll miss the camaraderie and the zaniness, but overall it's just fitting into my life anymore. :(

Honeymoon Posts on Hold Until December

Your (not-so-)regularly scheduled honeymoon roadtrip entries have been put on hold for the month of November due to my annual participation in NaNoWriMo. If you want, you can follow my word count progress on the official site.

See y'all in December! ;)

Hissing Cats

Before our honeymoon, our cats Mary and Amy were happy friendly sisters. Now, they are hissing and arching their backs whenever they're near each other. It's very out of character and sad to watch.

According to the internet (especially the comments on that post), formerly friendly cats can end up suddenly hissy at each other for several reasons, all of which apply to Mary and Amy, unfortunately:

• a new environment (eg, moving to a new house)
• one cat going to the vet, but not the other, so that one has "funny smells" the other doesn't recognize
• redirected aggression (eg, seeing a strange cat out the window that they can't directly fight, so the pent up aggression gets taken out on the cat they can get to)

My sister took care of our cats in her Sacramento apartment, and now they're back home after 5 weeks away. Amy (uncharacteristically) starting peeing on the carpet instead of the litter box, so she took Amy (but not Mary) to the vet. And my sister had commented that Mary was constantly looking out the window at the neighborhood cat. So that's like the trifecta of Bad Times, cat-wise.

I just hope that they work out their issues soon; it's really sad to hear them hiss at each other all the time now. :(

Our Married Names Are Official!

After much angst and gnashing of teeth and railing against all existing married-name-options1, I decided at some point during our long engagement what my married name would be. We agreed on taking my maiden name as a second last name and his last name as our shared family name. As of today, the Social Security office knows about our new names!

It's all downhill smooth sailing, with updating our names at horrible friendly places such as the DMV, banks, the credit card companies, and the passport peoples.

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1. If you're dealing with what to do about your married name, I highly recommend reading the posts on the subject over at A Practical Wedding. And if you don't quite get why there should be angst and gnashing and railing, then I super duper highly recommend reading the posts on the subject over at A Practical Wedding.