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[Sep. 27th, 2004|07:03 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  crazy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Child Falling Asleep" - Schumann | ] |
Okay..so I figured since I just got back from Yosemite, I'd post an article on my experience. If anything, so that I will have it to look back at and remember.
It started off Thursday morning, bright and early at 7am in the parking lot of my classmate, just over on Baltimore. There were 4 of us in this car. Well, really we were the only 4 girls going on the trip in the class, so we were kinda grouped together because of that. There were like 12 guys going, but only 4 girls. Lets just say that they guys got much better selection of groupmates. Anyways, it really wasn't too bad. We amazingly found a way to pack all of our stuff for a 3-4 day camping trip into Anna's Matrix. We were basically packed into the car ourselves. The drive up took about 8 hours. We had lunch in Delano, some little barely there town in the central valley. By that point, Erica was starting to get on our nerves, but we were all too nice so it wasn't showing at all. She was getting on my nerves at least, but the other two girls seemed to be handling her pretty well, so it seemed. We got to Yosemite about 4pm, met up with our professor, and then was told to head to Mariposa Groves to walk around on our own and take in the experience, read the signs, etc. So we did. Thats were all those big sequoia are. HUGE trees. It was amazing. We took about a 2 mile hike around the grove and then headed to the campground so we could set up camp before it got dark. We barely did that just in time, so that was good.
It was that evening that I found out that Erica had kinda gotten on the nerves of another groupmate of mine, Stephanie, too. We just figured it was because she was the most actively spoken in the trip up, and we were all really tired and it was a really long ride. But she was both kinda driving us crazy already, and it was only day ONE! The girl somehow found a way to work the comment that she worked at Target into EVERY conversation, so we heard about that a bizillion times on the carride up and setting up camp. Everything was "Target this..and Target that..and OH I WORK AT TARGET!" While we were thinking "Yes..we know. You've told us." But we had camp set up, ate dinner (Stephanie had made some chicken strips and brought them for dinner that night), and then went over to hang out at the guys' campsite and talked, mostly about geography stuff, and drank a few beers. It was there that I started getting embarrased just by being associated with Erica. I mean, she's a nice girl and has the best intentions, I'm sure, but she just has the habit of interupting conversations that she had nothing to contribute in to announce something COMPLETELY unrelated that people really didnt need to know in the first place, causing HUGE awkward silences. I think we were talking about how the guys there were in Grad School and how they decided to go to Grad School and stuff, and she interupts the entire conversation to announce that she's had Ovarian Cancer. Keep in mind, this girl is 22. So there was a huge awkward silence there. I mean, what do you say to that? I just kinda hid my head in my hands during the awkward silence. Later, she explained the entire Ovarian Cancer thing to us in the car about how there was a growth of some type there, but it wasn't malignant it was benign, yet she had chemo and some friend made her a tunic (and in the story the pronoun used to refer to her friend kept changing from he to she, and back again...as if she couldn't remember whether her friend was male or female..eh..it was..hmm..interesting. We came to the conclussion that it was probably a highly exagerated story and that she had some health problem involving it and thats all we wanted to know.) So we eventually all went to bed and that ended Thursday night. Oh..somewhere in there, Anna saw a bear while she was walking to the payphone to call her boyfriend, and Steph and I were just going to bed when the rangers were walking by our site and saw the same bear and was yelling at it, shooting rubber bullets, noise makers, and a flare to scare it away. That was amusing.
Friday, we woke up bright and early. There was me, Anna, and Stephanie in one tent and Erica in the other tent (because the giant air mattress she brought along for her bad back wouldnt fit in the other tent and have room for other people in there too). But Anna liked to wake up super early, like 5-6am, and she'd wake everyone else up because she was kinda bored and cold in the morning. It was REALLY cold in the Valley before the run rose over the canyon walls. But we had breakfast (oatmeal), and then noticed that the guys in the site next to us (who were also in our class) had shown up in the middle of the night and were asleep in their tents. They apparently left San Diego at like 7pm, so they didnt get to Yosemite until like 3am. They eventually woke up and cooked this huge breakfast of bacon and eggs, while we were supposed to be gathering with the class to meet up, so we had to wait for them to finish eating. But anyways...thats really trivial information there. Dr. O'brien lead us on a BIG walk around the Valley, from North Pines through Curry Village, through the meadows and the trees where the old campgrounds used to be, over to the Awahnee Hotel, and then into the Village area, while giving us a talk about the history of Yosemite, the land management and recreational land uses of the park, the park planning and their future plans, about the flood of 1997 that took out a lot of the facilities, and stuff like that. Very informational. It was like having a lecture about Yosemite while getting to BE at Yosemite and seeing it first hand instead of in a slideslow or something. Very awesome. Then we ate lunch in the Village, walked through the Visitor Center, worked on a project and questionaire given to us by our professor, and then took a hike to Mirror Lake (which had no water in it..just sand..so it wasn't really mirror like at all in late summer). But it was fun. Erica didn't go to Mirror Lake because of "her knees" or her "hypoglycemia" that she was informing us about every 3 and half minutes. We got constant updates on the status of her blood sugar. You know, I'm hypoglycemic too, but I didn't talk about that ONCE while being there. In fact, I hardly ever talk about it at all so its something hardly anyone knows. Of course its very minor hypoglycemia that I have (my mom's is more severe), but still. We didn't need to know about hers constantly. Friday night we had a Zaterans Chicken Creole mix that was SO good, that Anna made. My feet were killing me from the walking/hiking that day, so I went to lay down. This was mainly for the fact that we didn't bring any chairs, so out options were either to stand up or lay down the entire weekend. Anyways, Anna came and laid down too and we spent a good hour joking around and talking while Stephanie and Erica hung out with the guys in the next site.
Saturday morning, it had seemed like we had been there forever. This was our day to do whatever we wanted. Anna woke us up at 6am and we went to Glacier Point. It was cool because we got there shortly after sunrise, but before all the tourist buses got there so we basically had the place, and the view, to ourselves. We saw people hang-gliding off of Glacier Point. It was awesome. Then we took a hike up Sentinal Dome, which I actually remembered the shortcut to from when Cindy's sister took us on it last year. The view from Sentinal is amazing. I effectively managed to tune out all of Erica's complaining about her knees and how she "didnt think she was going to make it" (the hike isn't THAT hard...really), and had a GREAT time. It was very spirit cleansing being up there. Me and Stephanie had some inside joke about how we needed to spend time reflecting by a pond with some grey goose and jagermister (longggg story lol)...so when I was spending time reflecting up there she was joking around with me about reflecting and telling me "DON'T JUMP!" It was funny. One of those "had to be there and understand the joke" type of deals, I'm sure. I think even Anna and Erica were confused. After that we went back to the campsite, had lunch ("Jenny-O Turkey Dogs"..because it had to be that one kind..don't ask why..I dont know) and then took a nap. I however, didnt want to wake up from the 20 minute nap, so I continued my nap for a little longer while Anna and Stephanie took a short hike around the area and Erica went to Curry Village to take a shower. I woke up when Steph and Anna came back, and we decided to take a shower, because John and Jeremy from the next site were also headed over there. So we all started walking there. We saw Erica on her way back, and felt so immature as we were hiding behind a giant RV, but it was funny. We just didn't want to deal with her right then. We needed a break from being around her. It was then we found out that the guys were finding her overbearing and irritating too. They pointed out the entire awkward silence thing after her unrelated scary announcements too. Apparently the evening before she had interupted their conversation to inform them all that she was bi-sexual, which also caused a large awkward silence. Then asked John how old he was, and when he responded that he was 30, she informed him that she would date a 30 year old..so that scared him profusely lol. But it was releaving to find that we werent the only ones feeling that way about her, because us girls were feeling bad about finding her so irritating, but once we found out it was kinda like a shared feeling with everyone, we didn't feel so mean about feeling that way. Anyways..we took showers, hung out with the guys at Curry Village, had pizza and lots of beers, talked for a while and joked around, and then headed back to camp, because it was VERY dark at the time and we had effectively avoided the campsite for a good 3 hours or so. Hung out at the guy's campsite for a while, then went to bed. Stephanie is sooo funny when she's had some beers, cause she only weighs like 120 pounds and hardly ever drinks so shes such a lightweight, but shes SUPER silly. We were having adventures avoiding bears in the pitch black on the walk back from the shuttlestop thru the woods and over the creek to the campgrounds at night, and it was HILARIOUS. We ran into some lost hikers, who were making bear sounds to scare us lol, and they had apparently hiked half dome but then gotten lost on the way back once it got dark and couldnt find their car in the park lol. So Anna gave them a ride back to their car, which they found eventually.
Sunday was the day to leave. We woke up at 6am, packed up the campsite, loaded all the stuff from our bear box back into Anna's car (which was amusing..our bear box was scary) and then left by like 7:30am, and got to San Diego by 3pm. We made good time. I was VERY happy to be home and VERY tired from the weekend. It was long, tiring, but very fun. I wanted to just come home, relax and play video games, but NOOOOO..I had a paper to write on an area of context from Momaday's essay on the significance of the frontier in American Civilization for RWS200!@#! Not what I wanted to write when I got home, but it was due this morning, so I did, and it was a very crappy paper, but its a rough draft, so it'll have to do.
But yes. That was my camping trip. |
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