…Julie and Tahia made it back to the room as they were returning from their day out. Julie told me about a scary moment when an Uber driver ran the red light and they almost got broadsided…

Not recalling that I had to go that far up to continue the ascent, I briefly descended to where there was a familiar steep climb though it definitely lacked the vegetation that I swore was there…

She suddenly started to do things like picking her nose and smearing the byproducts onto me. Or she would be snacking on puffs and leaving crumbs everywhere…

Julie quickly handed Tahia a spare plastic bag, and roughly a few minutes later, she hurled into the bag. The foul smell of bile and other stomach acids or other nasty things definitely didn’t…

We also saw lots of cars looking for parallel parking and that parking situation looked pretty hopeless. It kind of made me wonder if we should abandon our attempts at…

When Julie finally got back to the trailhead at 12:25pm, she told me that she saw a ram! And she made sure to let me know that I should have taken the main trail back instead of the alternate one…

So given all of those factors, today’s excursion really felt like we were shaking off the cobwebs and getting back into the old MO of doing waterfall hikes opportunistically while writing about our…

There were people…rowing just outside in the harbor in plain sight from the restaurant. Then, suddenly, we heard loud booms, which rattled the windows…The waiter said that they were from cannons.

Apparently, there was an issue with the profile of our boarding passes as somehow we were classified as students under age 30. I recalled we had a similar issue back at LAX but it didn’t result in…

…even after trying to apply the brakes, I leaned too far backwards and managed to fall back onto the track. I felt something on my elbows immediately but I was more concerned about Tahia…

At this point, I then walked back through the village and started asking people if they had seen “eine frau und eine tochter”. The firefighters near the trailhead said they hadn’t seen them…

…the losing of the power plug on my laptop was definitely not-so-great news. And so I was mentally already in the mindset of finding a stop to find such replacement parts (if they still exist)…

For myself, this late start kind of exacerbated a day that wasn’t going that right for me as I was fighting a toothache that started last night and wouldn’t go away this morning. So I couldn’t…

…just when I was about to check the handheld GPS for reception and to see how close I was to the car park, I saw underneath the rain poncho that only the attached battery cover was in my hip pouch!

Just when Julie was about to get into the car after using the restrooms here, she smelled something burning. At first, I thought it was something with the car. But she said it was more like a fire…

It was a bit of a strange experience being on this bridge looking at the sign periodically go dark then the letters outlining in green before sparkling in the font while cars were whizzing by…

About five minutes later, the large group caught up to me though I wasn’t sure if they rememered me or not because one of the ladies said to me, ‘You’re brave, dude!’…

It wouldn’t be until around 9:35am when we finally got to the customs person, but when she asked what was in our cooler, we revealed that we had eggs, some bread, some kefir, as well as a bag of…

I wasn’t sugar coating it telling them they had at least another hour or more just to even get up to the 3rd Chilnualna Falls, which would be the next opportunity to cool off…

And so we were merrily driving up the Hwy 39 into San Gabriel Canyon en route to Crystal Lake. But we were doing this drive without much preparation as we didn’t bring Ann Marie Brown’s book…