Day Number Tuesday

And what was awesome about last night is that our windows actually succeeded in sucking so much AC upstairs that Chris and I woke up in each other's warm embrace because we were so cold.  Well no but we were pretty cold.  Then we went to breakfast buffet and stuffed ourselves full of calories to get us up our climb today.  Drinks costed extra.  Yet they had milk, which had a sign saying it was for cereal only.  Ridiculous.

Time to digress though.  FIrst, it was pretty interesting going from Hollywood to Yosemite in one day.  Five hours even.  Being at Warner Bros. reminded me though of this my intense yearning at times to be part of a movie, to be an actor, to be famous, or something.  I'm not exactly sure where it comes from but when it strikes it strikes strong.  Like the momentary thought of wondering if I could really become an actor and be in movies if I tried.  I'm guessing no.  I think the desire is somewhere in between wanting to do something big, wanting to be famous, and maybe wanting to be in the fantasy world that is depicted in movies, with people being rich, famous, happy, or at least Batman.  I dunno.  

But it overlaps with the feeling I got when I arrived in Rome a few years ago, the feeling that struck IMMEDIATELY and then slowly subsided.  It finally dawned on me suddenly the first day I was there that this was really a separate country with a separate language and millions of people with a rich history and culture, that in many ways had nothing to do with or no knowledge of anything American.  It was overwhelming and cool, because when I extrapolated that to the rest of the world, I began for the first time to barely grasp the fact that there are 5.5 billion people in the world that lived in countries and existences other my own.  While you might think its easy intellectually, I think experientially its very hard to truly get outside of your own head and really see the entire world from a perspective other than from behind your own eyes.

This almost frighteningly overwhelming feeling of being one person in 6 billion immediately transformed to the desire to and realize that I could, travel the world for the rest of my life learning new languages, cultures, histories, and geographies.  And then I realized that was crazy.  Though it felt like a really fun idea.  So back to reality.

I get a similar feeling in places like Yosemite- wanting to travel the world climbing mountains and seeing sights and such.  There's a very simple macho task-oriented goal-driven feeling I get when hiking- your brain almost actually shuts down and shuts up for awhile while you completely focus on the next few steps in front of you, and though you feel as if its just for a few moments, its thousands of those moments strung together for hours on end.  Until suddenly THE TOP! and you feel an immense sense of completion and accomplishment, the desire for which has been pushing your feet the whole way up until that point.

Unfortunately I didn't quite get that feeling today, because two hours up our hike we made the mistake of asking someone how far it was to the top of Upper Yosemite Falls (which we had already found out from the rangers was COMPLETELY dry this time of the year- bollocks) and we found out it was another hour.  Our time was shorter than it shoulda been due to getting up at 8:30 rather than 7am, which was an executive decision I made based on the fact that we slept bad cause we were cold.  So we chose to be satisfied with our view of Lower Yosemite Falls, currently a barely-moist stripe down the face of the mountain.  Bridalveil Falls was also reduced to a trickle that basically blew away in the wind as soon as it reached the edge of the cliff.  We got down in an hour what took us two hours to climb, and made our way to the car.  We managed to procure views of El Capitan, Half-Dome, and Glacier Point, and of course each of the three of us took far too many pictures with our respective cameras.  

I might mention that our hike didn't begin for about 45 minutes of driving and jeffing around because we were trying to figure out how to get to a good trail, how far it was gonna be, how much time we had, and most importantly, where to park, which took us to innumerable parking lots looking for something that didn't need a pass of some sort, and almost had my dad jumping out the window.

A 45 minute journey later and we got to the south edge of Yosemite (where we should have gone first yesterday maybe) where the sequoia grove was.  Yosemite itself had giant coniferous trees everywhere and so did this.  And then suddenly there was one, two, five giant GIANT DINOSAUR red trees as wide across as the length of a large truck and 300 some feet high.  I've been wanting to see these things as long as I've known about them, right up there with the pyramids (which we almost saw instead this trip).  They were cool.  Especially the one you could walk under.  Yosemite is definitely worth coming back to (which Tiffany will be happy to know).

We still have a rockin couple of days in SF seeing some sweet architecture and landmarks and things, and a family friend and hopefully my cousin Rachel's old roommate Amy, and hopefully we'll all get stoned off our ASSES at Haight and Asbury.  Right.  Just trying to experience San Fran...