I'm not really in the mood to write at the moment, but I feel guilty cause I haven't written in almost a week. Now that I can write at work I didn't intend to write over the weekend. But then I also didn't write on Monday or Tuesday. And I'm almost out of time to write today, so better get to it.
We left Vegas on July 3rd because the idea was to drive to San Francisco and spend the 4th there. This is a drive that could take about 7-8 hours, but we decided to go the long way around, through Yosemite. It's definitely a better drive than the "quick" route, which takes you back into California and then up the 5, where there is nothing to do or see. And we figured we may as well see something. Also, Mathias really really really wanted to go to Yosemite but we didn't have time to properly go and spend time there, so we figured we might as well drive through. It ended up taking 14 hours. But it was a damn good 14 hours. The drive out of Vegas is kind of boring, just a lot of long stretches of desert and small towns (one of which we stopped in at this fantastic, middle-of-nowhere diner that was everything you want a middle-of-nowhere diner to be, and also the food was not terrible!). We did have to make one stop at an empty desert road so Mathias could take a picture walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, on a road that just stretched onwards in a straight line into the horizon. And eventually, as we got to the California border, things got a little more exciting. We got some hills and national forests and lakes and stuff, so we did occasionally pull over to the side of the road for pictures. Really the closer we got to Yosemite the nicer it got. And then we did get to Yosemite, finally, and that's where it really got good. That place is really fucking beautiful. Like I said, we didn't have time to actually stop and see the park, but we entered through the east gate and drove across the park to the west gate to continue on to San Francisco. We did get caught in some traffic thanks to a stupid women who parked too close to the side of the road which led to her car falling off the road and into a small ravine then having to be towed out blocking traffic for about an hour, but other than that we were mostly on the move, enjoying the scenery. We did get out a few times to go look at rivers or trees or whatever, which got Mathias super excited. Like more excited than I've ever seen him. And he's not a very outwardly excitable person. But sadly no time for a proper hike or anything. As we got the west gate, we did also loop back to go and see the Yosemite Valley and Half Dome, so at least I can say I've seen those, too. Then once we were out, it was getting dark, so pretty much the only stop we made between Yosemite and SF was at Taco Bell for dinner. Yum. And 14 hours after having left Vegas, we finally made it! I did not expect it to take that long, but it was a great drive.
We spent the next 2 days exploring SF. On the 4th we walked across the entire city in the morning, from the Golden Gate bridge on the west side down to the piers on the east side, just along the waterfront the whole time. This allowed us to take in like every necessary site in the city in about 6 hours, without having to pay for much of anything. A real feat in a city as expensive as San Francisco. The best part of the walk was probably the dog beach. Obvs. So we made it to the wharfs in the afternoon, where we hopped on a boat for a bay cruise. Sadly Alcatraz was booked out for like 2 months, but we were able to at least take a boat around the island and then down along the coast over to the Golden Gate Bridge and get a close up view, plus great views of the city. It was actually a pretty awesome boat ride. You should do it if you go to San Francisco. I'm sure Alcatraz is awesome too, but I am not at all upset we didn't make it cause this boat ride was great. So until this point it had just been Mathias and I, but then we went up to meet my friend Zabrina to sit in a park and eat a drink. Zabrina is like the best picnic planner I've ever seen, so she prepared like 3 bottles of wine and all kinds of cheese and dips and chips and veggies and stuff, then took us to Dolores Park, which is a park where all kinds of people just go sit outside, listen to music, drink and smoke, and be social. If it weren't so cold it would have been perfect. But yeah, it was like 50 degrees. Mathias said Stockholm was warmer than San Francisco. So ridiculous. We got about 2 hours in the park before it really got too cold, and so then we headed across the bay to a house party in Berkeley to celebrate. It was a really great house party, and theoretically we should have had fantastic views of all the fireworks along the peninsula, but thanks to San Francisco's infamously terrible weather, we did not. We could see across to the other side, but the clouds were way too low and so mostly we just saw something shoot up into the sky and then disappear into the clouds. Sometimes we'd get like the bottom half of a big one or something, but generally nothing. Well done, San Francisco. Still fun, though. Since our first day in SF consisted of way too much walking, we kind of took it easy on day 2. We hung out with my friend Candice, drove around instead of walking around, and then once everyone was done with work we met up for drinks with Zabrina and my friends Jason and Heather whose place we were staying at, but who had gone to Sacramento to see her family for the long weekend. I really can't remember what else we did that day, except drink coffee. The 4th was really the big one.
I also don't really remember what we did on the 6th, but that's because we went up to Sonoma and drank a bunch of wine all day. We both intended to not get wasted, and then we both got wasted. Go us. I couldn't even tell you which wineries we went to. But also because it's been like a month. What I do remember is that I now know about "old vine" wines and am a fan of Zinfandels.
And the next day we started the drive down the coast. But that will be a story for either tomorrow or Friday. So now we move on to music, one old and one new.
The old one is Lord Huron. We obviously listened to a lot of music in the car. And while Mathias does listen to a lot of good music and does know a lot of what I listen to, he did not know Lord Huron. So I played him Lord Huron at some point, and it ended up being his favorite new artist of the trip to California. With good reason. Lord Huron is fantastic. They've been on the blog in the past, so maybe you know them (although Mathias reads the blog sometimes and listens to the playlists and missed them). Mathias's favorite song (and one of my favorites by them) was The Stranger, off of their first album Lonesome Dreams (Actually it's older than that. It's off of their Mighty EP, and was probably the only song I really liked by them before Lonesome Dreams came out, but then it was put onto Lonesome Dreams as a bonus track and I never listen to Mighty so it might as well be off of Lonesome Dreams. Well that's a long enough digression). So that's the old song for today.
We left Vegas on July 3rd because the idea was to drive to San Francisco and spend the 4th there. This is a drive that could take about 7-8 hours, but we decided to go the long way around, through Yosemite. It's definitely a better drive than the "quick" route, which takes you back into California and then up the 5, where there is nothing to do or see. And we figured we may as well see something. Also, Mathias really really really wanted to go to Yosemite but we didn't have time to properly go and spend time there, so we figured we might as well drive through. It ended up taking 14 hours. But it was a damn good 14 hours. The drive out of Vegas is kind of boring, just a lot of long stretches of desert and small towns (one of which we stopped in at this fantastic, middle-of-nowhere diner that was everything you want a middle-of-nowhere diner to be, and also the food was not terrible!). We did have to make one stop at an empty desert road so Mathias could take a picture walking down the road in the middle of nowhere, on a road that just stretched onwards in a straight line into the horizon. And eventually, as we got to the California border, things got a little more exciting. We got some hills and national forests and lakes and stuff, so we did occasionally pull over to the side of the road for pictures. Really the closer we got to Yosemite the nicer it got. And then we did get to Yosemite, finally, and that's where it really got good. That place is really fucking beautiful. Like I said, we didn't have time to actually stop and see the park, but we entered through the east gate and drove across the park to the west gate to continue on to San Francisco. We did get caught in some traffic thanks to a stupid women who parked too close to the side of the road which led to her car falling off the road and into a small ravine then having to be towed out blocking traffic for about an hour, but other than that we were mostly on the move, enjoying the scenery. We did get out a few times to go look at rivers or trees or whatever, which got Mathias super excited. Like more excited than I've ever seen him. And he's not a very outwardly excitable person. But sadly no time for a proper hike or anything. As we got the west gate, we did also loop back to go and see the Yosemite Valley and Half Dome, so at least I can say I've seen those, too. Then once we were out, it was getting dark, so pretty much the only stop we made between Yosemite and SF was at Taco Bell for dinner. Yum. And 14 hours after having left Vegas, we finally made it! I did not expect it to take that long, but it was a great drive.
We spent the next 2 days exploring SF. On the 4th we walked across the entire city in the morning, from the Golden Gate bridge on the west side down to the piers on the east side, just along the waterfront the whole time. This allowed us to take in like every necessary site in the city in about 6 hours, without having to pay for much of anything. A real feat in a city as expensive as San Francisco. The best part of the walk was probably the dog beach. Obvs. So we made it to the wharfs in the afternoon, where we hopped on a boat for a bay cruise. Sadly Alcatraz was booked out for like 2 months, but we were able to at least take a boat around the island and then down along the coast over to the Golden Gate Bridge and get a close up view, plus great views of the city. It was actually a pretty awesome boat ride. You should do it if you go to San Francisco. I'm sure Alcatraz is awesome too, but I am not at all upset we didn't make it cause this boat ride was great. So until this point it had just been Mathias and I, but then we went up to meet my friend Zabrina to sit in a park and eat a drink. Zabrina is like the best picnic planner I've ever seen, so she prepared like 3 bottles of wine and all kinds of cheese and dips and chips and veggies and stuff, then took us to Dolores Park, which is a park where all kinds of people just go sit outside, listen to music, drink and smoke, and be social. If it weren't so cold it would have been perfect. But yeah, it was like 50 degrees. Mathias said Stockholm was warmer than San Francisco. So ridiculous. We got about 2 hours in the park before it really got too cold, and so then we headed across the bay to a house party in Berkeley to celebrate. It was a really great house party, and theoretically we should have had fantastic views of all the fireworks along the peninsula, but thanks to San Francisco's infamously terrible weather, we did not. We could see across to the other side, but the clouds were way too low and so mostly we just saw something shoot up into the sky and then disappear into the clouds. Sometimes we'd get like the bottom half of a big one or something, but generally nothing. Well done, San Francisco. Still fun, though. Since our first day in SF consisted of way too much walking, we kind of took it easy on day 2. We hung out with my friend Candice, drove around instead of walking around, and then once everyone was done with work we met up for drinks with Zabrina and my friends Jason and Heather whose place we were staying at, but who had gone to Sacramento to see her family for the long weekend. I really can't remember what else we did that day, except drink coffee. The 4th was really the big one.
I also don't really remember what we did on the 6th, but that's because we went up to Sonoma and drank a bunch of wine all day. We both intended to not get wasted, and then we both got wasted. Go us. I couldn't even tell you which wineries we went to. But also because it's been like a month. What I do remember is that I now know about "old vine" wines and am a fan of Zinfandels.
And the next day we started the drive down the coast. But that will be a story for either tomorrow or Friday. So now we move on to music, one old and one new.
The old one is Lord Huron. We obviously listened to a lot of music in the car. And while Mathias does listen to a lot of good music and does know a lot of what I listen to, he did not know Lord Huron. So I played him Lord Huron at some point, and it ended up being his favorite new artist of the trip to California. With good reason. Lord Huron is fantastic. They've been on the blog in the past, so maybe you know them (although Mathias reads the blog sometimes and listens to the playlists and missed them). Mathias's favorite song (and one of my favorites by them) was The Stranger, off of their first album Lonesome Dreams (Actually it's older than that. It's off of their Mighty EP, and was probably the only song I really liked by them before Lonesome Dreams came out, but then it was put onto Lonesome Dreams as a bonus track and I never listen to Mighty so it might as well be off of Lonesome Dreams. Well that's a long enough digression). So that's the old song for today.
And then the new one is Shura. She put out her debut album, Nothing's Real, this year. I listened to it because for some reason I thought she was associated with SBTRKT, which she's not. Now I realize it's because she was associated with Mura Masa, whose sound I associate with the sound of SBTRKT, and all these marginally tangential connections must have snapped somewhere. So I listened to the album and wasn't crazy about it. And then at the end I heard a track I knew, White Light. And that track is a good track. Lots of fun. And I want it preserved on my annual playlist for posterity's sake, so it's making the blog even though I didn't like the album very much. The sound is somewhere between Janet Jackson and 80's Madonna, which when I say out loud makes me think I shouldn't like it, but I do. A lot.
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