Back in Cali-land

Never before have I been so thankful for my age. Thankful that I'm still young enough and patient enough to drive from Portland, OR to Oakland, CA in one day. 650 odd miles. I won't deny I'm a little impressed with myself.

Before I left I was telling myself how much I missed California, and I'm still happy to be back, but I admit that I forgot about California traffic. In Scotland I never had to drive, and back in Oregon it was nothing like it is now. Once I hit the Bay area, I realized the return was a little bitter sweet. Yes I'm back in the land of Disney, back in the land of In-n-out, warm beaches and warmer weather... but I'm also back in the land of 6 lane freeways, carpool lanes, 80 mph traffic and drivers who can't keep a speed limit. I'd forgotten what it was like to drive here, but it all came rushing back when I began yelling at the first car that cut me off.

No doubt my frustrations will continue to rise, but I still can't deny how beautiful it is to sit here in the hills above Oakland and look out my window as I write this...before heading on the road again, this time inland to Manteca and my Uncle's family.

I miss Edinburgh (and the snowstorm that all my friends are getting to experience in full, sorry guys) but it's still good to be back.

Moving on....

Haven't updated this in a while. Apologies for the huge gap between my last post and this where a lot of juicy goodies have taken place, not the least of which includes my coming home. I suppose my only real excuse is laziness, which I've had in abundance since getting back on U.S. soil. Though to be a little more literate, I could make the argument that this blog is all about my ADVENTURES (hence the extremely creative title) and since I've been home I've tried to keep my activity level and adventuring to a minimum. A growing boy needs his beauty rest. I can, however, happily say that I failed at that effort, for adventure (the flighty temptress that she is) managed to find me.

On a few occasions she didn't just find me, she hunted me down and reminded me who was in charge. The most memorable of these accidental undertakings was my day trip to Mt. Hood. I expected an average day on the mountain, but I should have known better. Far from anything I could expect, my friends and I snowboarded for a grand total of 3 hours, in which time I busted my rental board on something I don’t even remember hitting, but by the look of the board it must have been HUGE (that’s my sarcasm talking, in case you missed it). This is where it gets good. My friends and I haggled over the price of the repairs I’d have to pay, soon after which we found out there was a freak blizzard in Portland. We decided to head down the mountain early to miss traffic, but I had the genius idea to stop for pizza. The pizza was delicious. The snowfall got worse and of course nobody was prepared for it because our extremely reliable meteorologists had insisted (RIGHT UP UNTIL THE SNOW STARTED FALLING) that there would not be any chance of snow in the greater metropolitan area. Oops. Back to little old me and my two-girl gang of ruffians, we actually made some pretty good distance in pretty good time considering the conditions, but once we made it to Gresham (about half way through our voyage) the traffic got to be too much to handle. We ended up parking the truck in a very shady part of town next to a MAX stop (for non-Portlanders, the MAX is Portland’s Metro). A long story short: 4 hours, 5 french-speaking children, 2 meth-heads, 1 pitstop at Carls Jr. and a partridge in a pear tree later…whew…we finally made it home.

Now it’s already January, and I’m just now starting to pack up (of course) two nights before I have to drive back down to southern California and the lovely UofR. I’m finding my packing process to be surprisingly difficult. I guess over the last three months I’ve been in another country with few possessions and always movin around. It’s slowly coming back to me, but it’s a strange feeling that I can’t place or describe. I get those a lot lately. It’s like leaving home to go home, and at the same time dusting away old habits and memories so that I can reuse them. My days in Scotland had their moments and it was definitely as fast as four months could possibly fly by, but maybe the trips made an even greater impact on me than I thought. I’ve discovered that my trip has made a bigger impact on the small things, the subtleties I didn’t think about before. Things that once seemed to be absolute necessities no longer have their old values, and other things have replaced them, the term “things” being used loosely to cover anything from stupid little souvenirs to ideas about who I am.

I still don’t have much of an idea who I am, but maybe the picture isn’t quite so fuzzy anymore. Every day it feels like I’m fine-tuning so that I can see the picture a little bit better than I could the day before.

But maybe I’m being over-dramatic. Maybe I’m making too much of the fact that I’m leaving behind my copy of “Animal House” for the first time. It’s a big step to say the least, but sometimes those things just have to happen, and you gotta... move on.

;-)