Summer

For the past week I've been away from home. Last Saturday I left on a train with my dad and my friend, Constance. The trip was seven hours long, from Oakland to San Luis Opisbo. We spent this time talking about electrifying oranges, playing eye spy in the middle of nowhere ("I spy with my little eye...something dull." "Everything?" "Yes."), and counting couches on the side of the train tracks (eleven in all, I believe).

Eventually we arrived at San Luis Opisbo where we met my grandmother and her little dog. We took her car to San Simeon, where we got a room at the San Simeon Lodge. The room was drab, with a horrible turquoise carpet and lumpy beds with thin sheets. And the water in the shower tried to attack me.

But hey, they had a pool!

...on the edge of the ocean...

So after we'd eaten, Constance and I went down to the beach, which was right across the street, and picked up a lot of interesting rocks. We also found a rather large tide pool, on the edge of which was a vertebra. I picked it up with a stick and for, oh, about five minutes we stared at it and wondered aloud what kind of creature it might have belonged to.

Then I chucked it back into the tide pool and Constance was fairly upset with me and we decided to write a story about it. With characters from an existing television show.

The next day we went down the street a few miles to get to Morro Bay. The most exciting part of that beach was the random jellyfish we found (and that I poked with part of a sand dollar). We also stopped by some nearby stores and picked up a couple of bathing suits. Then we went back to the beach across the street from our hotel and found even MORE rocks.

Then we went back to the hotel and went swimming.

The next day was much the same thing, with the beach and the swimming, except that this time the sun decided that it wanted to cook me alive. The next two days consisted of agony (it felt like someone was holding a lit match to my shoulder) and further writing of the story that started with the vertebra.

On the Second Night of Agony (they deserve capital letters, they were that terrible), Constance and I went downstairs to this little restaurant sitting at the feet of the hotel to get cheesecake—and the waiters and waitresses thought we were lesbians. They lit a candle in between us on the table and the kept glancing over at us and coming over to see if we were enjoying our cheesecake. 


"Has your cheesecake changed since the last time I came over? No? Well, tell me if it does."


The next day we headed inland to get to my grandmother's house where we ended up spending a lot of time reading, watching movies, and writing random stuff on my laptop. Involving Russians. And toasters. And the characters from that television show (after all that time at the coast, this monstrosity was the result). 


And now I'm home and my sunburn still hasn't gone away and I'm pretty satisfied with the whole trip.