Welcome

This morning somewhere around 4 am I was sleeping soundly in my bed in San Francisco. All of the sudden the bed started to shake then I heard the shutters on my window flapping and the door squeeking. At first I didn't know what was going on then when I woke up fully I realized it was an earthquake. I stayed in bed till the room stopped shaking and then got up and wondered if I should do something. I listened for my roommate to get up but she just rolled over and went back to sleep. No lights went on in my building everyone acted almost as if this was normal.

I talked to a few people this morning who didn't even feel the quake in the city. It was an odd experience but luckily all is still well here.

Yeah I have been a bit busy so I haven't posted in a while.

What have I been up to you wonder well I have been spending most of my weekend exploring different areas of California.

To catch up from my last post I moved into the Marina area of San Fransisco and it is pretty nice. I have a view of the Golden Gate bridge from the roof. This was also nice for fireworks last week since they shoot them from barges on the bay. I had a great view of the fireworks and apparently one of the warmest 4ths in many years.

A few weekends ago we went to Lake Tahoe. There was a group of about 6 interns and me as the only female. It reminded me a bit of the Smokies experience. :) The first day we had breakfast in downtown Tahoe City, we then went and rented water toys. Steve, one of the other interns, and I rented a canoe which was very difficult to keep from being blown out to the center of the lake due to the high winds. We had a few moments where we had to paddle really hard just to stay close to shore. Steve also lost his balance and we almost ended up in the cold lake, fortunately he was able to regain his balance so we didn't tip. We had rented things for an hour but only made it half an hour.

The next day we decided to take on a hike. The visitors center recommended the eagle lake hike on the south side of the lake. This seemed to work out since we could use an alternate route to get home that would leave from that side of the lake. The trail went past a waterfall and then to a small mountain lake. After hiking to the lake we spent a little time there and then turned around to head back to the cars.

As we got to the trail head we saw strange clouds over the lake. We realized these were not clouds but smoke from a fire. We hurried to get on the road so we could make it out before the fire spread and closed roads. The traffic crawled along the road around the lake and fire trucks kept whizzing past us toward the blaze. We continued with our plan to use the alternate highway to get home but when we got to the split to get on it a sign told us the highway was closed due to the fire. We had to take an alternate route which added a significant amount of time to our trip.

The weekend before last Steve and I went to Yosemite. We wanted to go before the waterfalls were completely gone and it got too hot to hike. Google maps gave us some crazy directions down this two lane road through the middle of nowhere. We got a little turned around a few times and lost a lot of time that we would have spent in the park that day. When we did get to the park we were fighting darkness to see things. We did get to see pretty much everything we wanted to see in the Yosemite valley.

That night we drove through the park to the other side near Nevada to spend the night. We stayed in a small hotel in the same room John Wayne stayed in. http://virginiacreeksettlement.com/motel.html The next day we went to visit the ghost town of Bodie, CA, http://www.bodie.com/. I was pretty interesting many of the homes still had furniture and other interesting items still inside. The town is being preserved as a state park.

After grabbing a quick snack we headed back into Yosemite to hike a few more trails and then head back to San Fransisco. That day we got in at a more reasonable hour.

We are planning a few more trips this summer which I will hopefully recount the stories from sooner rather than later.