Showing posts with label camping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label camping. Show all posts

Monday, August 8, 2011

Camping Under a Bridge

Ingredients for a perfect weekend:

A birthday girl


Good Friends



Pink spandex tri suits (and dudes willing to wear them)


An epic bike ride





Wine


Cheese


A cold river soak, post epic bike ride



Beer


Ladder ball




And, obviously, camp set up under a bridge

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

CAMPING

After the craziness that is 4th of July weekend in Tahoe:

I needed to do something a little more low key. Sleeping in a tent and swimming at a (slightly) deserted beach were exactly what my body required. Luckily, a couple of Katie's friends were visiting from the Bay Area, and they had scored a coveted summer site at the campground at Sugar Pine Point State Park.

We left early (too early) Saturday morning for the West Shore, and we ended up arriving something like 4 hours before we could check in. We were more than happy to hang out on the beach until we could set up camp.

Secret Beach:
I need to try stand up paddle boarding. It looks like so much fun.

These pictures don't do justice to the color of the water in person. It is seriously turquoise. Like tropical ocean turquoise. Except not warm:

Perhaps Katie and I have acclimated to Lake Taco, but we definitely didn't think that the water was that cold. We spent a lot of time in the water, practicing our "open water swimming" for the triathlon.

Better than our last "open water swim" which involved pool floaties and cans of beer.

Reading by the campfire.

It's a little early for headlamps, but we wanted to be prepared. Katie may or may not have whiskey in her orange plastic cup. Hint: she does.

I'm just eating a Tofurky sausage (#2 of the night) out of a plastic cup. No big deal.


Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Things to do when the weather sucks:

1. Go outside anyway. As a born and bred PNW-er, there are not many outdoor activities that I haven't done in the rain. Running, biking, swimming, kayaking, beach volleyball, hiking, camping...I've done all of them in the rain. In fact, I'm pretty confident that 80% of the times I've been camping, it's poured rain at least one of the nights.

Raining so hard in NorCal that this picture turned out blury.

Rainy hike in Hawaii.

It rained so hard the tent fell over in the middle of the night!

2. Watch awesome things on Netflix Instant. Specifically this- Nature: Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom. Ridiculous name, awesome movie. You won't regret watching this nature documentary, unless you hate awesome things. You may regret not being born a wolverine, though. Other awesome things on Netflix Instant: 30 Rock, Veronica Mars, and Dexter.

3. Plan your next trip. Either for realsies, or a dream trip. I've google mapped my route for "National Parks of the American Southwest" several times, as well as the timeline for my next trip to Santa Barbara.

A little of this...

A little of that.

3. Go beer tasting. Most reasonable size cities have at least one brewery. Fact: my home town has one, and also a population of 600. Go to a brewery and get the sampler. If the brewery is super small, they might give you a tour and explain everything you ever wanted to know about brewing. Fact: this will happen if you visit Golden Hills Brewing Company, and you will also be quite likely to run into my dad. Try the Ben's Brown.

Beer from Seabright Brewery in Santa Cruz, California from KJW and my California-to-Washington-Brewery-Camping-Road-Trip.

4. Go to the gym, work out your glams. Well, work out all of your muscles. You'll need them when the weather starts getting nice. When I was 15, I could squat 235 pounds. Now I can squat much less. But I am working on it

5. Write in your blog. Some certain people don't update your blogs enough! Start.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Escaping the Wilderness

I left Lake Taco today for the bright lights, big city action of Reno.

Reno? You may ask. Reno has many attractions, but today I was focused on two: REI and Trader Joes.

It's that exciting time of year where my dividend has arrived, and members get 20% off of a regular priced item, so Katie and I hopped in Strawberry and headed to the Biggest Little City in the World. I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for (dangerous!), but I definitely ended up finding stuff to buy.

While I had been considering buying a Jet Boil, a similar stove popped up for $23 on Steep & Cheap this week, which I impulse purchased at work, so I ended up using my 20% off discount for some stove accessories for camping this summer.


And because I just don't fit in when I'm back in the PNW without them, I finally broke down and bought a pair of Keens. Half off!


In an acknowledgement to the fact that winter isn't actually over in Lake Taco, I got some adorable new boots. My grey suede Simple boots that I wear nearly every day (when I'm not wearing snowboots) are starting to look pretty haggard. It's time to give them a break. These boots were also half off.





We moved on to Trader Joes, where I haven't been in five months. Apparently Trader Joes deprivation = Trader Joes spending spree. I bought way too many things to tell you about all of them. Just picture all of the things in Trader Joes; I bought about 1/3 of them. Katie bought an entire box of Two Buck Chuck.

It's a gorgeous evening here in the Wilderness, and as I have less than two weeks left to enjoy the stellar view of Lake Taco out my front window, I think I'm going to drink some coffee on my deck and watch the sunset. I love living in a place so awesome that people come on vacation here. It's really amazing when I think about it.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Summer Update

1.) I am still job hunting. I have applied for, on the low end, approximately 15 billion jobs. Out of all of these jobs, I did get a temporary unpaid internship. Woo! Actually, I am really enjoying it because I got to design my own project, which I will hopefully be able to use when I apply to PhD programs. I'm studying food access in an underserved community in south Seattle for ECOSS, an awesome environmental non-profit in the South Park neighborhood. I occasionally blog for them here. Go read it. My other job (the paid one!) is beginning to wrap up. While I'll miss the money and the intellectual thrill, I will not miss looking at the websites of nanotechnology
companies for hours and hours every day.


2.) My roommate got a dog. Her name is Harper Lee. She is adorable, even if she does whine when I am trying to sleep inappropriately late and she ate my favorite sunglasses. Her major life skills: being adorable to strangers, flopping, pulling the stuffing out of stuffed toys, eating peanut butter, wanting to eat land-otters (cats), sitting, snarfeling peoples' hair, and having allergies. Kelly and I also started a mini-container garden. Then we ignored it for like 2 months and everything died. Oh, well, we did get to make a couple of drinks with the mint.

3.) I just got back from the Third Annual Better Lover's Camping Trip. This year we went to Lake Wenatchee State Park. The weekend was filled with Date, Do, or Dump, the Alphabet Game, wizard staffs, and campfires. There was no actual book club book discussion because BLMVP and book chooser E-Thomps wasn't able to make it. Also, none of us had finished it. While the weather was not great, E-Schu and I decided to go swimming anyway. This is me running into the lake with the dogs. Don't be fooled by the sun; it was windy and cold. Michelle even came up from Portland and surprised us. She found us singing kareoke in a bar because, "It looked like the kind of place you guys would go to." I suffered minor facial lacerations and my beloved Chacos fell apart. The soles just peeled right off! Thank goodness for REI and its life time warranty. Free new Chacos!

4.) I graduated from Grad School! Luckily, I graduated into a wonderful job market, and I was immediately innudated with high paying job offers. Ha ha! Just kidding. Whatever. I don't have to start paying my loans until....October. In celebration, I went to Mammoth Lakes, California to enjoy the scenery, visit Yosemite, and do some mountain biking. Unfortunately, there was too much snow to do a whole lot of biking (they were still skiing in the bike park!) but I did manage to do a little. I only had to ride through one or two snow drifts. Yosemite was absolutely beautiful, but I wished we'd stuck to the less crowded east side of the park. Nothing like enjoying nature's wonders with 2,000 or so strangers. We did see a bear though. Everything is better when you see a bear. Unless it eats you. My favorite things about Mammoth Lakes were the Base Camp Cafe, eating 2 pounds of strawberries per day, the Mammoth Brewing Company ($7 growlers full of beer!), and the geology. Here are some pictures from the trip:




Tuesday, August 18, 2009

I like camping

From one of my favorite websites, Stuff White People Like:

Monday, July 27, 2009

Camping

If you are a Better Lover, or if you have an opinion on where we go camping, go here.