Santa Cruz

Dear Mike,

We suck at blogging. But it's not completely our fault. AT&T sucks on the west coast. Even as I type this in Berkeley CA, my phone is alternating between 3G and Edge service.

Since leaving Austin, we've been to a lot of amazing destinations: the Grand Canyon, Roswell, Santa Fe, L.A., Guadalupe national park, Carlsbad Caverns, Sequoia national park, Yosemite national park, Mono Lake, Lake Tahoe, Phoenix, and San Diego. We have seen flooding rivers, giant dust storms and snow, 105 degree days and 38 degree nights, trees taller than any building in Greensboro, tornados, wild forest fires, and hail. We've seen bats, black bears, elephant seals, armadillos, rattlesnakes, kaibob squirrels, peacocks, sheep, ravens and cattalo.

We're so far behind in blogging our adventures that we've decided to cut our losses. Yes, that's right, we are going to resume blogging our regularly scheduled lives. So, when we feel like it, we'll do some sort of magical flashback and recreate our exploits from weeks ago (though it feels like months).

Currently we are staying with a friend in Berkeley (BTW, Gabe, you're awesome). We're spending the week here to see San Francisco, and the surrounding area.

Two days ago we went to Santa Cruz. You may know it for it's famous boardwalk. Or, you may remember it (as I do) from the card sized hologram stickers that you would get in those quarter machines at Pizza Hut (while you were redeeming your free personal pan pizza from the "Book-It" program.)




In every way, Santa Cruz stands up to the sticker. The boardwalk is a year-round perpetual carnival complete with rides, carnie games, arcades, and dipping dots. Now, I'm not a rollercoaster kinda guy, but even I was convinced to ride their oldest ride "The Giant Dipper". It's right there on the beach, so you get a beautiful view of the ocean right before getting thrown around on a rickety stomach churning decent. We also enjoyed the bumper cars and the skyway. Monday and Tuesday nights are "1905 nights", where all hotdogs, sodas and cotton candy are just a dollar each.


Overall we had a great time, and it was a nice contrast to all the camping we had been doing for the last 2 weeks. We'll be giving more updates on a regular basis.

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Location:Lincoln St,Berkeley,United States

Creepy LBJ

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Austin City Limits (part II)

Dear Mike,

For our second day in Austin, Peter and Mai took us to the LBJ Presidential Library. Along our route we came across the UT Law Library, home of creepy, baby Lincoln carved from a single piece of (short) wood. I also noticed several law students studying and thought of you.

The LBJ Library is quite the museum; full of displays, memorabilia, educational videos, and an animatronic LBJ. Yes, that's right, a life-size LBJ dressed in cowboy gear sharing funny anecdotes with the museum patrons. Animatronic LBJ is quite the charmer. (video to follow this post)

The library was really pretty great. We learned a lot about LBJ's life and presidency while keeping cool in the free air-conditioned building. I highly recommend visiting if you ever make it to Austin. Also, I highly recommend air-conditioning.

Then we headed over to Brave New Books, a subversive literature store found right next to the Libertarian headquarters of Austin. In the store, you can find information on anything from the illuminati, to republican election conspiracies, to how the democrats are actually socialists. Pretty wild stuff. Mario loved it.



We spent the evening at County Line BBQ. We feasted on beef brisket, beans, slaw, potato salad, baked potato, and fresh baked bread (Mai's favorite). The lean brisket was delicious, but the regular (fatty) brisket melted in your mouth...similar to the chopped BBQ at Alston Bridges in Shelby.

Austin to be continued....




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The Tower of the Americas

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Remembering the Alamo

Dear Mike,

Our day-trip to San Antonio made us want Greensboro to have a river running through its center. First of all, did you know that the Alamo is right in the middle of downtown? I didn't, and I found it quite strange to see a 150 year old structure right across the street from a Ripley's Believe It or Not, and a giant orange abstract sculpture. We checked it out and learned about it's history, though inside the actual sanctuary we were merely sardines pushed in a shuffling counter-clockwise direction. It felt very much like when you go to see a famous building in Europe, and everyone is moving in the same direction but hardly paying attention to anything. The history of the Alamo is compelling, though, and we will always remember.



After that, we hiked about a mile and a half to the Tower of the Americas. This tower, built in 1968 for the Worlds Fair, is Texas's "space needle". We rode up the glass elevator to the incredibly windy observation deck. There, we got a view of the entire city and were able to rest for a while. The bottom of the tower also features a "4D" movie called The Skies over Texas. If you are not familiar with 4D, it is a 3D movie and the fourth dimension is when your seats move with it. So you get the feeling of a bull poking you in the back or the spray of a rattlesnake hissing. All good fun.

By then, it was dinner time, so we headed to Casa Rio for Tex Mex on the river. The place was packed and while we were waiting, we met a family from Amarillo. At one point the dad began telling us how at a waterpark earlier in the trip he had seen "those muslims with the towels on their heads." He said he was fuming mad when he saw them and that he didn't understand why people would "want to murder other people." Then, within a minute he was telling us that we should have a pistol with us on the trip and "if anyone did anything funny..." he followed that statement by raising his hand like a gun and pointed it at me, making a shooting sound. We didn't really know what to say to all this, so we just nodded, slightly slackjawed.



The meal was great, and pretty cheap, too. I had an Alamo golden ale, a local brew, since I had not forgotten about what we saw earlier in the day. We finished the night heading back to Shrimpy while dodging "displaced individuals" that wanted to "ask us a question". Got back to Austin safe and sound.

Next post we'll wrap up Austin, which will include an epic swimming hole, a sweet movie theater and a creepy animatronic LBJ.

~Mario


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