visiting california - san francisco

last week, i went to california.

the plan was to meet my friends aaron and vince in san francisco where we would stay with our other pal brian. from there we were going to rent a car and drive to los angeles.

i was particularly excited to leave new york because it was raining for about 10 days straight here and it was miserable. sunny california sounded pretty nice.

this is the morning i left. see? i told you. rain. neverending rain.


and here is what it looked like outside the same window five hours later in san francisco.

it was perfect outside.


i was greeted at the lovely oakland airport by vince, aaron,amal (brian's wife), and ayla (one of brian and amal's daughters). unknown to me, the car that aaron had rented for us ended up being a sebring convertible.

it was on this trip that i discovered something: convertibles are totally obnoxious to look at, but a lot of fun to be in.

seeing everybody was so, so great. especially vince, who had just come to america after being all over asia and europe for the last four years or so. he had just flown in from poland a day before.

anyways, after brian got off from work, we all went to the beach. it was pretty funny, mostly because it wasn't that hot outside and the water was FREEZING.

you can see vince in the ocean showing off his near-imperviousness to the cold..

it wasn't too long before the sun began to set over the cliffs surrounding us.


right above us was this house. brian says that robin williams lives there.

later, after amal prepared us a really delicious dinner, we headed out into the san francisco night.

here's our first toast since spring of 2000.

and then came the foosball...

i used to play this game for hours with these two guys in college. it was pretty ridiculous.


after a few games, this guy challenged brian to a match.
he was the iciest, most unfun guy ever. brian came from behind to beat him and it was so great.

later on though, brian wasn't so lucky.

after the foosball, we hopped from place to place exploring the city's bars. at one point we ended up in the castro district for some reason. inside of this place called 'the badlands', poor vince ran into some misfortune...

...in the form of this creepy guy licking his face. this picture was taken the second after and his reaction pretty much says it all.

we escaped from there without further incident, ending up in front of yet another foosball table.

from there, it was onto to a burrito place.

it was here where we ran across THE hottest guacamole in the entire history of the world. the burritos were exceptional though.

after eating, we found ourselves crossing the golden gate bridge, up into some steep and winding roads. we stopped for a look down at the city. that is, until someone decided it would be a good idea to climb to the top of the highest hill around...

it took about 20 minutes (i think) to get to the top.

the view from up there was amazing. we watched the lighthouse on alcatraz spin around for a while until somehow we all fell asleep.

after waking up a half hour later, we made our way back down.

along the way, i got stuck in the thickest waist-deep sage brush ever. for a while i thought that i'd never make it.

but i did.

hooray for perseverance!


when we finally made it back to brian's house, for some reason, we had a hard time getting the front door unlocked.


the next morning, after shaking off the previous night, we headed up the street to get some breakfast.


then brian threw ayla up into the air for a while.

...while vince and aaron kicked a giant blue ball around.


this is the very lovely gunderson household.

amal, brian and the girls decided to join us for a night of camping in Big Sur., which is on the way to los angeles.

amal rode with us in our stupidly awesome car. top down the entire time.


we drove through clouds along the way...