Okay, woah! I just read a friend's blog who said he got arrested (highly unlikely) for being intoxicated (even more extremely unlikely). So friend, you know who you are, email me the story, if ya want. Anyways, I have been in Palo Alto CA for three days now, starting out the fourth. I went camping this last weekend, lemme tell ya bout that first...it rocked!!! We headed out late Friday afternoon, just me and my dad and my grandmas pet poodle Molly B, who is a big (well, actually, a little dog, but a big-) wussy. We got to the campsite after getting a bit lost, and set up our tent and tied Molly to a tree. My dad's friends were already there and we ate some fantastic camping fajitas. I took Molly to go to the bathroom down at the river, and she was majorly freaked by it. I'm like,"Dude, it's a lovey river, fresh water, what's your problem?" My dad and I rode our bikes in the dark (yes, my dad got himself a bike, so that I 'will like him better' as he said) with headlamps on. That was fun but we didn't get far. Then a big deer tripped over one of our friends' tents and he sounded like a bear and grunted and stuff. The landscape was amazing; we were in a big valley, and next to the shoulders of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and could see some big crags with snow on 'em in the distance. Our site was by lots of desert-y sagebrush and big nice pine trees next to a river, which you could hear streaming by at night. Saturday, we ate breakfast and got our stuff to head down to Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain, where I may do my internship. What amazing scenery!!! Wow!!! You've gotta see it to believe it. We got to this cute little mountain town and went to the bathroom, then drove up the mountain to the resort. I went up to the personnel floor and didn't get to talk to anyone since it was Sat, but they gave me the name of the guy I needed to talk to. That day was there opening day for their mountain biking park, so there were mountain biker dudes and chicks everywhere. It was awesome!! After an expensive lunch there, we drove to right outside Yosemite National Park. Wow.....wow. My dad drove that pass, the Tioga Pass, I think, in 1973 or somethin like that. It was beautiful. I need to figger out how to put pics on here so I can show ya'll. After that we looked at Mono lake, this big, weird but pretty salt lake. We read about the bird migrations and stuff, and then we were drivin home while my dad yelled at himself for missing the turn-off for this ghost-town, Bodie. But he hadn't missed it! We drove by a sign that said,"Bodie turn-off, 7 miles" or somethin, so my dad and I looked at each other and laughed and turned off there. It was so cool. I ran out of pics, though, so I got some postcards. We looked at these old houses that were just left like so. It was an old mining town, and pretty popular for having a bunch of bad people! We drove back to the site and rode our bikes to the Twin Lakes real close, and watched a trout hangin' out in the water while we sat next to the lake and just listened and appreciated. During the stops by Yosemite, my dad admitted that all of this couldn't have simply sprung out of a Big Bang, out of nothingness. He's thinkin' different about God, that much I know. Please pray for his understanding to be shaped and formed by God Himself. :) My dad is awesome, and I love him. We had a good dinner, and then all of us were talking about satellites and stuff in the stars, then they started contemplatin' the theory of relativity, which was really funny to hear from an old, tipsy, Cheech Marin-sounding guy. "Yeah, he said you could bend time and then move from that point in time that way...I don't get it man..." He he. Sunday morning my dad drove me to Cali, and we drove through even more beautiful (to me) territory, through the mountains, covered in huge pine trees and waterfalls and boulders and rivers and snow. But unfortunately, California has a big valley in the middle, which is utterly boring and drab. But here on the coast it gets lovely again. I even got to see those wind electricity fan things on these weird golden hills; I felt like I was on another planet!!!
Yesterday I went to Santa Cruz with Glen and Paula and their friend Andrew, and we walked the boardwalk and went downtown and ate some nice seafood. That was cool. I saw an ocean swimmer and was reminded of how out of shape swimmin wise I am. There were a bunch of surfers waitin for the tide. Sa-weet!!! I went lookin for a job a couple of days ago and it is so biker friendly here I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I think I'm gonna go biking for my work out today. Paula gave me a mini-tour of the Stanford campus on Monday, and it is really cool. Okay, this is really long. Email me people! I miss you. :)