Pacific Coast Highway

Yes folks. It is official. I am back in Tulsa. My wife and I decided after much consideration that LA just wasn’t the place for us. Our decision wasn’t purely based on a disgruntlement toward LA, in fact there are a lot of people and things about LA we liked and will miss. But alas, deep down we knew our heart was back home in the good ol’ butt-hole of America. We where a little bummed we didn’t get to see much of California besides LA the year we where there, so we decided to take a road-trip vacation to see some friends while between jobs. In our original plan we intended to go to Vegas and Denver, but we had to skip those two cities due to getting scammed by a moving service who claimed to move furniture but are really in the business of kidnapping furniture.

We left for San Francisco on the morning of Friday November 21th. We took the Pacific Coast Highway all the way there which turned out to be about a 9 hour drive. The PCH starts off very tame, its has several lanes, it’s close to sea level and it doesn’t necessarily stick to the coast, so its not too winding. As you go further north, the PCH  gets much more narrow, very windy, and there are insane cliffs on the sides which at some points have no guard rails. Not very comforting while driving and looking over to a 20 story rocky drop to the Ocean. I thought it was a little tedious but beautiful, but Christy just thought it was sickening and terrifying.

We stayed the weekend sight seeing in San Francisco with Christy’s friend Claudia. I got to hang out with her friend Dustin who happened to work at this bike shop called Freewheel and he also played bike polo, so I got to geek out with a fellow bike nerd most the time. While there we mostly hung out around the Mission area. Friday night we went to a bar called Benders where I sat and watched several members of the MASH crew play pool and got to meet Peter Ramondetta’s wife, however I never got to see Pete or any of the other old Tulsa skate crew who lives in SF now. Next time. Saturday we went around to the Haight Street area to Freewheel and then walked up to Haight and Ashbury. We had some dinner and went to a really bad hip-hop show… which I will not discuss. Sunday we met up with Mike Mashes for some breakfast in Oakland then headed on to Yosemite.

Timing turned out to be a little bit of an issue during the short days of winter (our inability to wake up early didn’t help much either). We ended up not making it to Yosemite until after dark, which was a total bummer. We hadn’t intended on getting out of the car, but we wanted to drive through and see the scenery on the way to Vegas, but what we got was a long slow windy drive in the dark with a twenty dollar toll. We did get to see some pretty sites on the way to Yosemite, the sun setting in the mountains, and we saw a couple of deer when we got out to switch drivers. After finally winding our way back to the main highway in Fresno, we drove another 100 miles then decided to rest and regroup outside of Vegas.

Earlier that day we discovered a few issues with our moving service and came to the conclusion that we where going to have to cut our trip short and skip Denver. We changed course to I-40 to take the Route 66 through Albuquerque.

We stopped by the Grand Canyon and again it was a race against the sun. The detour to the first lookout is a little over a hundred miles, and we didn’t realize we had also skipped a time-zone, so I was sweating it.

After the Grand Canyon we pretty much plowed threw to Oklahoma City where we stayed the night with my buddy Adam. It was also the first time we saw him since the accident, and he seemed to be doing well, considering. I also got to hang out with Kris and several other Hellkats while we where there.

And thats the road trip in a nut-shell. Our current status is “homeless” but hopefully we are locking down a place tomorrow. We have been staying with our friend Ali downtown for the past week. I started working at Brothers & Co this monday with my friends Steven, Michael and Travis. I think we’re going to make a swell team.

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