Santa Cruz Pt. two

April 21st 2012

Adrien and I woke up at 7 am this morning. I felt so refreshed, it took me a little longer than usual to go to bed the night before just because I was paranoid that we might be caught again but I eventually was too tired to even think. The car was pretty gross since we had the windows rolled up, we stopped at a gas station to clean the insides and outsides of the windows, brush our teeth, and we set off on our hiking adventure.

This was a pretty cool site, the famous "Banana Slug". Banana slugs are detritivores or decomposers. They process leaves, animal droppings, and dead plant material, and then recycle them into soil humus". I just looked that up.

It took Adrien and I awhile to find our trailhead but we eventually did with the help of some forest animals giving us directions. The name of our destination was Buzzard's Roost. It is the highest point in these mountains, a total climb of 1200 feet. The hike was moderately strenuous but it made it that much more fun.

This forest was full of redwoods, they are such a beautiful site, they weren't as big as the ones in Sequoia but they were still very impressive.  

A really nice thing about this trail was that it was completely unpopulated with other humans, which meant Toph could go off leash and do three times more hiking than both Adrien and I combined. She just runs back and forth whenever I take her on hikes, it's hilarious. This was supposed to be my intimidation pose if we encountered any Grizzlies!

This was the view from the top.

It was cool because it was a 360 degree view so no matter which way you looked, all you could see were the tops of the pines.

Toph hanging out before we headed back down. She found a cool little spot on this huge rock.

Found a dinosaur.

Even the dogs are chill in this city. This is the part of the trip where we didn't write anything down on the itinerary. And yes, that was a mistake because we did a lot of back and forth driving, there was a lot of miscommunication, and some stressed out brains.

We briefly attempted to make a fire at the beach to cook our canned soups and boxes of rice but we failed, we failed very hard. This is Adrien surrendering.

After we realized that we failed and we recognized our defeat, we accepted it and found a cool place to just hang out and eat the junk food that we had. I felt so gross at this point because I hadn't showered since Thursday night. Don't judge me. We settled in pretty late that night, and as we were setting up the car for sleep, we both decided that we weren't going to stress out over what we were doing anymore. We decided that we were just going to hang out, just find a cool place to park, and people watch the next day.