So many roads...: On the road again, sure as your born, natural born easy on the road again

Well I have finally picked up and gotten a move on once more. It has been an eventful...5 weeks?! Things are going to be picking up again now that my wheels are set to rolling. Let's catch up, shall we?

Bay To Breakers

My last post was 2 days before the Bay To Breakers 12k. We can blame B2B for keeping me in California past April. I was told not to miss it. "What's so special about it?" Well, if you're a runner, you get to the starting point on time and run 12 kilometers. Everyone else arrives not so promptly and it turns into a massive party that crawls across the city. A lot, if not most, of the people who go to the race show up in costumes.

I was in a group of about 10, 6 of which were dressed as dinosaurs:

It was a lot like Halloween in New York City.

Some people wear nothing at all, so I did see some boobies.

Yosemite

The next weekend, I went on a group ride with some local riders to Yosemite: A great and beautiful national park here in Central California.

Now, the scenery out here in the hills of Central California is a little alien. Back in April all the local riders were saying we should go riding while it's "still green", because apparently the green of spring only lasts about a month. After April, all the grass turns golden. Now Californians are a little jaded to it and I can understand getting sick of it after a couple years, but for this North Easterner, it creates a weird green and gold color scheme that looks pretty cool:

On the way up through the mountains, at the end of May, there was still snow on the ground:

Yosemite itself is gorgeous.

The other bikers stayed in a hostel, but I chose to couchsurf as I do. While everyone else went home the next day, my host took me back in to the park to explore it a little more in depth. As we were going in they pointed out that from this particular entrance, the trees on one of the mountainsides forms a natural Grateful Dead bear:

Dead center of that picture. I think that's pretty cool and appropriate.

We went right up to Bridalveil Falls which was overflowing at the time, so much so that the path leading up to it was like a river unto itself.

We got to the base of the falls and got thoroughly soaked.

Last Hurrah: Los Angeles

The weekend after Yosemite, I went down to Irvine again for one last visit with my friend down there. This time, it was Palomar Mountain or nothing. But before we went to Palomar, we went to a showing of "The Room" at the Sunset 5 Theater in West Hollywood.

Now you may not have heard of The Room, so allow me to enlighten you. It is, perhaps arguably, the worst movie ever made, but therein lies it's saving grace. It is comically bad. Watch it alone and you're in for nothing but painfully bad cinema, watch it in a group and it's comedy gold. Such has been my experience. I had heard that it is screened on the last Saturday of every month over at Sunset 5 on 5 screens, and better yet: The Writer/Director/Star attends every screening! Me and one of the people I went with got our picture taken with Tommy Wiseau.

Too bad my camera is just awful in low light conditions. You'll just have to take my word that it's him.

Tickets sell out on a regular basis. Just take a look at the line to get in. The front of the line is to the left of the picture, and the line extendeds behind me by another 100 people or so.

"The Room" is the new Rocky Horror picture show. It's constant audience participation kept us laughing almost non-stop from beginning to end. Few events have been more fun than that.

The next day, Alex and I finally made it out to Palomar Mountain.

People talking about Palomar Mountain often call it the most technical or most difficult road in California. California riders will tell you otherwise because whoever said that hadn't ridden too many roads out here. Now it was fun, but only because I was riding with a friend. I would have been sorely disappointed if I had ridden all that way (90 miles from Irvine) expecting this amazing road only to get there and be let down. Expectations aside, a good time was had by all.

U2

Hey remember a few paragraphs earlier when I was couchsurfing in a town next to Yosemite? Well my host and I got along especially well and she just so happened to have a free ticket to go see U2 in Oakland in 2 weeks. I may not be the biggest U2 fan out there but I don't know what kind of a fool I'd have to be to not leap at this opportunity. The original plan was to leave California on June 2nd or 3rd after getting back to San Jose from my last visit down South.

Instead after returning from SoCal, my new good friend Heather came out to San Jose to hang for a few days.

Around San Jose, we went to Kelly Park, saw the "Japanese Friendship Garden" there:

Also, what appears to be a real live Truffula Tree:

The Lorax was not present.

We also went out to the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden because sometimes it's important to stop and smell the roses.

Sometimes it's also important to get a job, hippie!

Then of course, there was U2. It was a pleasant surprise that the opening act was Lenny Kravitz.

It was unfortunate that the crowd seemed dead for Lenny Kravitz, but luckily U2 lit the place up. Both literally and figuratively.

Now again I say, I've never been much a fan of U2, but they put on one hell of a show. It was a great time.

We were lucky to be going by motorcycle because it was estimated that 2000 people missed the concert do to this awful California traffic that we were able to just slither our way through.

The Great Lick Refractor

Our next adventure took us to the Lick Observatory which at the time it was built, was home to the world's largest refracting telescope.

The Lick Observatory was built to honor James Lick, who's body is interred right below the Lick Refractor. James Lick was a piano builder who apparently became so wealthy that he could decide to have the world's largest refracting telescope built as a memorial to himself. And so he did.