West Coast

Okay, so I'm leaving San Francisco tomorrow morning.  We're going to Yosemite Park where we are camping out in a tent-cabin thing by the curve of a river in a valley. We are equipped with pans, cups, Cliff bars, condensed milk, and dehydrated raspberry crumble.
So far San Francisco has been fun. We've stayed at my aunt Diana's condo type thing with her chihuahua Peanut. B and I have slept on couches with fuzzy blankets.
It's the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge. That means carnivals and parades for normal people, and crowds and traffic for me. We were going to go to this cool thing called the Exploritorium (I don't even know what that is, but it sounded neat) but we decided not too because it would be partied up on nearby streets.
Instead we've basically just been walking around. Saturday we basically just hung out at my aunt's house. She's been having back problems, so she has this really cool thing called an 'Inversion Table' - which is a board thing balanced just right (you adjust it to your height) that claps around your ankles in this brace contraption, and you can then hang upside down against the board. Apparently this is very good for your vertebrae. I have pictures, but I won't be able to load them off until after the trip.
Sunday we walked through the Golden Gate Park and around the Ocean Beach (which is a bunch of blocks down from my aunt's house). It sucks that the water is so cold here, because you can't swim in 60 degree water!
Then we went to Japan Town - which was EPIC. Most of Japan town was inside this bridge-building thing. There was a really cool Japanese bookstore with lots of magazines, books, and manga. There were also some restaurants. In Japan, restaurants have plastic models of each dish in a display window outside the restaurant, which actually seems really helpful. The plastic food looked good anyways.
Then there was a shop of little stationary and paper goodies. It was heaven for my nerdy little brain. There were colored tapes and note books and pens and staplers and erasers and fans and paper robot things and clip boards and all sorts of overpriced simple stuff that just really made me HAPPY.
Especially the expensive tins of paperclips shaped like animals (Cats, ducks, alligators, HIPPOS!!!) My heart broke with the Hippo Clips.
Anyways, I got a pretty little notebook - nothing especially Japanese, but just a souvenir of all the things that were in that little shop.
We had Korean Barbecue - which is SO GOOD. They bring you rice, sea weed soup, and lots of bowls of little goodies to go on your rice. Then they bring you marinated meats and you grill them. YUM!
Today we hiked around on these ruins of some sort of stone water park thing by Seal Rock and all these cliffs. The ruins were very cool and fun to explore, although it was kinds of scary because they were flooded by all this murky water. It was extremely windy all over, but you get used to the cold pretty quickly. Benjamin went scaling all these gigantic cliffs and things and I climbed a couple large rocks myself. It was hard because there was a ton of the sand on the rocks, so you had to scrape the sand of each foothold for five minutes before climbing up.
Then in the afternoon we explored the best beach ever - it was really pretty with fun sand and lots of pretty flowers we hiked around. The wind was great. A bunch of people were hang gliding. The sand was nice and powdery to slip around in. Tide was coming back in at this point, so Benjamin and I would go to the area of wet sand and try to finish drawing patterns and then running away when the tide got to close. We would follow each wave back down the beach and then would be chased away.
Then we chased Peanut over all these trails with sand and wild flowers and I felt all ROBUST and ADVENTUROUS. It was seriously very cool, and the ocean view was amazing.
Things are going fun!