Super California Trip: Illustrated Edition!

I am proud to announce that this is the FIRST Fully Illustrated Edition Blog! SO enjoy...

This past week I made another trip to the sunny and beautiful California, USA. Quite a change from Texas it was, just stepping off the plane and going outside felt like I was in air conditioning. It was wonderful.

My dad and I made the trip to San Francisco to go see the wakeboarding championship finals in Clear Lake. We managed to tour San Francisco and Napa Valley while we were there too.

OK so, trip starts out and we go straight to Fisherman’s Wharf (PARKING WAS $18!!!) in San Francisco to get some grub and see all there is to see out there. Fisherman’s Wharf is home to the country’s most notorious jail, Alcatraz, which is a big island that only one person has ever escaped from (does Azkaban ring a bell to anyone???).

Anyway, as you can see, seeing this jail was one of the highlights of my trip... Then we got fish ‘n chips at a restaurant there on the pier which were very good but ended up making for a not-so-good car ride later on.

We also stopped at the very famous Golden Gate Bridge. I was however, slightly disappointed because all this time I’ve been fooled into believing that it was ACTUALLY golden. It turns out that it’s a rather Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Orangish-Yellow and not golden at all. I asked the ranger on site if he had any explanation for this and he had “No Comment.” WHATEVER.

Things must always be difficult for me and my dad. You see, my father and I, instead of taking the easy and most popular highway to get to our hotel a few hundred miles away, we instead took the WINDIEST highway in California that literally made you turn 90 degrees every fifty feet. Once this began to occur, I began to think back on my fish that I had eaten earlier, and then the McDonald’s I had later that day for dinner and it WAS NOT a good thing. You see, I had also tried to read Harry Potter on the way which proved to NOT be a good idea because well, like most people (besides Nicole Richie) I don’t WANT to see my food again after I eat it (and with the way my stomach was feeling, I was about to). So, I decided to stop reading and close my eyes for the duration of the journey.

HOWEVER, being that it was only me and my dad on the trip, I had to be the navigator of the endeavor… Now for those of you that know me, I can BARELY tell a difference between Dallas’s I-30 and 635, much less tell you how to get somewhere halfway across California. I had to use a 10 year old AAA map that barely had anything labeled on it and it was pitch black outside. NOW, if you haven’t been to this area of California, they do NOT believe in street signs. At ALL. There would be highways to your right and left with no labeling whatsoever. SOMETIMES there would be a sign 200 feet in front of a turn that hinted that a highway was coming up, but it wouldn’t say where. Like it was some sort of joke or something.

We’re lost. So what do we do? We of course call our hotel. Surely they can give us directions. After we were outsourced to India, the man on the opposite end of the line told us that we were going the completely wrong way and needed to turn around. So we did, and continued on for several miles. Until I discovered on the map that there were SEVERAL highways with the EXACT same name. You see, we were on one highway 29 that goes east and west, and the man on the line thought we were on the OTHER highway 29 that goes North and South. Long story short, it took us until 2am to get to our hotel. (And when we got home, my dad found an envelope on his desk containing the newly updated 2005 California map. "Wow, I bet we could have used this out there." He said. I bet we could have dad. I bet we could.

Over the next several days we made many stops in some pretty cool places. For instance, the Muir Woods just north of San Francisco. These woods are home to some of the oldest and tallest trees in America. It’s a place where Michael Jackson is rumored to visit “quite often” seeing as he loves to climb trees like a child. I also think that when he climbs the trees it helps him get closer to his home planet way up in the sky.

Another stop we made was in Geyserville, California. Home to “Old Faithful” or at least, California’s attempt at Old Faithful. We waited and waited and waited to see this incredible phenomenon of nature with nothing to be seen.

However, after about thirty minutes, at last, we had liftoff! It was pretty cool to see the steaming water shoot up out of the ground like that, until I realized that the fountain in front of our hotel did the exact same thing and you never had to wait for it…

Also at the same place as the geyser, they for some reason had some fenced in goats that you could look at. I was lucky enough to get pictures with some of them, it was so cool. I named this one Mr. Picket (for the picket fence that was up around him).

I also had a VERY close brush with fame at the geyser place. I saw a kid that looked EXACTLY like Napoleon Dynamite. It was freaky. SO I of course took pictures of him (pretended like I was taking pictures of the geyser but then would move the camera at the last second). But what was even MORE bizarre was that after I saw Napoleon, I turned around and saw a sign pointing to where some llamas were. NOT kidding. I almost freaked out. So of course, I tried to go find Napoleon so I could get a picture of him with Tina but then I got nervous and he seemed to have left the premises. So, I just got a picture of Tina by herself. (I assumed her name was Tina since that's what the one from the movie's name was.)