wow, what a trip.  i'm back home, 1042 miles later.  with the miles we drove we could have hit the canadian border.  now that i've had a good night's sleep in my own bed, i feel like i have my head screwed on again and i can actually remember what happened the last few days.  we drove up from la on tuesday.  i saw the same kinds of clouds coming over the sierras that i saw last time, so i was worried it was going to rain again and we wouldn't make it down the dirt road to bodie.  luckily it held off, and we spent a couple hours walking all over the old ghost town.  i got a ton of pictures, which i will post in the photography forum when i'm done retouching them.  we stayed in mammoth lakes that night, then drove down to convict lake on wednesday morning.  that place is pretty bad ass.  it's small and kind of hidden, so it's not super crowded with people.  we went for a hike up the side of a mountain, and on the way back down, we almost walked into a black bear.  i mean it was like 20 yards away.  i almost shit myself.  needless to say we made it back to the road in record time, and i have the scrapes and cuts on my shins to prove it.  after that lovely experience, we rented out a row boat (all the canoes were gone) and went out on the lake.  dude, rowing a boat is hard!  if i got a good pull with one oar, then the other one was turned the wrong way and we just went around in circles.  eventually we beached it and went for a swim.  by the way, i wouldn't recommend swimming in an alpine lake unless you really have to.  my swim lasted about ten seconds, because swimming in ice water is not fun.  i will never join the polar bear club.

after convict lake, we didn't really know what we wanted to do.  the only things on that side of the sierras are more lakes like this one, and we didn't really want to do more of the same.  so we decided to head west through yosemite to the pacific coast.  it was a much longer drive than i had anticipated, because the road is full of snake-like turns for about 200 miles.  it's fun though driving down route 120, because it's downhill the whole way and you go through huge pine forests before you make your way down to the golden hills of california cattle country.  it's so beautiful there, it's probably my favorite landscape in the state.  anyways, we got to santa cruz sometime after dark, and stayed the night there.  yesterday morning we were supposed to get up early and drive down to big sur to sheck out this spot where there's a waterfall right on the sandy beach.  it sounded pretty amazing.  but i guess with all the fires up there, all the parks and coastal access points are closed.  so we just had to drive through.  and there was the heaviest fog i've ever seen pretty much the entire time, so we only got one good view of the typical big sur pch experience.  oh well.  we ended up driving all the way down to santa barbara on the pch (another drive that was much longer than anticipated) and stopped for lunch there.  then we hopped on the 101 and hit the san fernando valley with perfect timing for the beginning of rush hour.  i got off the freeway because i had gridlock, and proceeded to get completely lost in suburbia hell.  eventually i found my way back onto the freeway and just sat in stop-and-go traffic from calabasas all the way to hollywood.  all in all it was about 24 hours of driving, i'd say?  something like that.  it was good times though.  we saw cool stuff, i got great shots, and we didn't have to sit around the apartment all week.  john's going back home tomorrow, so today's our last day to really do anything.  not sure what's on the table yet, but i think it will involve a lot of chilling wherever we are.  i'll post more pictures later, but this is big sur: