arr.

quick notes.

camping at olympic peninsula this past weekend with lenard. it ruled. so fun. most notably: exploring some far parts of rocky ocean beach (with mini tidepools), weird sand that was like snow patterns we saw in iceland, and lotta weird rocks, including the following specimens: [a] weird amalgam metamorphosis rock; [b] jabba da hut rock. seriously. it looked like jabba — same shape and even had eyes and face. lenny snapped a photo and i will show when i get a copy. as for my own camera, i accidentally forgot to bring my battery, and as a result, could only take pictures with the film camera i brought. finished a roll of 36 exposures finally, though. thank heaven!

stopped by aberdeen/hoquiam on the way back and went to a couple garage sales… highway 101 passes through aberdeen and as we were driving through the town yesterday, we told ourselves that we would stop by the garage sales we saw the next day because we passed by sOo many of them yesterday. so today we stopped by one on the main road that was mediocre — just got a couple of cookbooks — and then a really epic one where we had to follow signs to this guy’s house… and got allllllllllllll sortsa junk. including but not limited to: [a] three awesome tapes! yeah!; [b] cool lace circular patterned thing; [c] really awesome pillow with a top side that has this cool geometrical/nature-ish crocheted (maybe) pattern; [d] nostalgic mcdonald’s limited edition batman glass cups (chose the one with riddler on it); [e] hilarious family portrait of two babies to hang on our wall (it actually fits the decor of our household and i just thought it’d be funny); [f] old ass kodak disk 8000 camera (which they don’t actually make film for anymore but it has 15 exposures and 12 are already used up, but they will be a funny surprise and even better — i have 3 of this weird film format to work with…)

i also ate WAY too many marshmallows this past weekend and was a major fatass. diet begins tomorrow. but most of all: i made what i now call a “it’s s’more” (in the sound of “when the moon hits your eye… blahblah… it’s amore!”)… which began as a marshmallow sandwiched in wheat thins but then turned into marshmallow sandwiched in wheat thins with spreadable cheese. FUCKING NOM!!!

anyway, i haven’t bought stuff randomly in a while, so that felt kinda good, and only cost $5.00 for all that (from both garage sales). yeah, garage sales! yeah, garage sales in hoquiam!

uhh and then tonight i went to a show and it was pretty funny. but first. holy crap. the middle performer, pete swanson, blew my fucking mind. he probably played like a 12-minute set, but both cole and i agreed that we were transported into some other realm devoid of time. as for me, i lost myself in that music and about 75% of the way through it discovered that i had put my arms in some weird way so that they no longer had any feeling, but it didn’t even matter. the music was so, so, so fugging amazing. it… was amazing. it’s one of the best things i’ve seen (even though i didn’t actually see it — i only heard it) in a long, long time. it was… ace. so good.

as for the headliner. i’ve got some mixed feelings about it and am not sure how i’m going to write up the review. even more importantly, though: [a] she broke a beer bottle and evidently got glass in someone’s eye and cut someone else; [b] she had come off stage and was walking around and i just happened to have started to text someone and she was walking up to me and actually saw me texting! oOps. ah, well.

so much so much.

I’m watching… “Australia”, cause my roommate rented it. It’s um… interesting.

00:25 on June 24th, 2009
So much to write up, but feeling much too lazy to do it all :L I’m writing this well after the fact. But whatever. These events took place June 12th to June 15th… ish.

Saturday, June 13th
Got a ride down to the Olympic Peninsula with some Couchsurfers who were silly as fuck and seriously paid $200 to rent a vehicle for two days!! WTF!! I only paid them $20… cause it was just too expensive… as I was leaving, I unfortunately left my camera in their godamn car. I called them and told them to hold onto it. Later, upon returning, I discovered that they’d lost it… and that they were splitting payment for a new one for me… so I had to pay for 1/3 of a new one. Kinda sucks cause I woulda liked to you know… not pay for any… but I left it in their car… although it was stupid that they lost it. Someone must have taken it. Who could have taken it? Nick, one of the CSers, was super communicative though, so I appreciate that. :L

When we got to near where Josh and Regina were, near Dosewallips State Park, I told them they could drop me near the side of the road, and they’re like, “REALLY?!!!” but it was fine… I got dropped off near this jerky truck!! I was hoping to go to the store to get some food but there was no freaking places open even though it was mid-afternoon.

Jerky truck!!

Campsite homebase at Dosewallips State Park in Brinnon, Washington. Josh and Regina picked me up from where I was dropped off, and then by the time we got back, food was READY. Clam bake and potatoes with carrot mix stuff. Pretty good And very plentiful.

I took a lotta pics of the fire cause it looked so awesome while it was burning…!! It’s crazy how different it looks while burning and after. Silly as that may sound.

Campfire nighttime action! This evening, I got to chop firewood for the first time ever. SO FUN. SO FUN. But so much harder than it looks!! But I made a little fan torch thing at one point, simply because I couldn’t chop in the same godamn spot and kept chopping a new spot every swing til there were like 25 unique cuts. Haha.

Josh and Regina, in TRIPPY mode!!

Part fire, part sky. While around the campfire, Josh told us some interesting military strats for stuff, such as “running the rabbit,” which is like, when you’re in a school and you have doors on all the sides and a door down the end of the hall… and that running the rabbit is letting the lowest-rank guy run down the hall at full speed so that the people behind him can come out and shoot anyone who pops his head out wondering why some dude is running down the hall. Pretty smrt.

Oh yeah. How could I forget? Some lady… who was kinda weird… came over from the adjacent campsite and was like asking if she could have some wood to burn, and we said okay, and then she came over later and asked if she could sit down because she had “nothing else to do.” We were reluctant to answer, and she was like, “You all are probably wondering who is this strange lady!” but despite saying that, she didn’t leave or get the message. Eventually, Josh told her to sit down. Sat down she did. Initially she was tolerable, although just kinda off… at one point, her friend called, and she said, “I’m sitting with a bunch of Chinese people,” which is a funny assumption to begin with, and I guess someone on the phone said something along the lines of, “Is anyone hitting on you?” and she said, “No one’s hitting on me,” and I said, “I’m hitting on you,” and she laughed, and told the person on the phone that I’d said that, and that I was cute. LOL. Later, she got off the phone and started being all demanding, telling Regina that the allergies she has are not “really” allergies because this lady KNOWS bad allergies cause she has bad allergies… and she no longer has allergies this late into the year, so Regina’s allergies must not be allergies, either. Silly sauce. And then she’s like demanding we put more wood on the fire even though we didn’t want to… soon, Josh and Regina head to the bathroom because they want to get ready for bed. She excuses herself and says she’s going to go to the bathroom. We assume the camp bathroom. Josh comes back from the camp bathroom and sees her near his car and asks her what she’s doing. Evidently, she’s peeing. Right next to his car. Her mother, who was supposedly “sleeping”, hears the commotion from her tent and immediately starts calling for this lady to go back to their tent. She must’ve been eavesdropping the whole time!!!

Sunday, June 14th

Woke up at around 11:00am. I pulled some charcoal out of the fire and was drawing on random things while we were waiting around doing nothing. This is what I came up with… hopefully it’ll make someone think twice. I dunno why I picked that message, but whatever.

Worshing of feets.

We went clamming, which I’d never done before. But it was not very fun at all… I just pretty much took a lot of pics while everyone else digged. I dug for like… 20 minutes until I found one live clam, and then I called it quits. Not cause it was tiring, but it’s pointless. And frankly, digging them up doesn’t make me want to eat them. Going clamming made me want to try being a vegetarian again.

“I’m awesome.”

Digging, digging, digging.

Look at all those poor oysters and clams :/

Soon, Lenny appeared after taking FOREVER because he decided to take the ferry instead of just driving around (n00b mistake). He was excited, as always, by the crabb0rts.

Shortly after clamming and stuffing our faces with junk food Josh and Regina had brought, we started to drive northwest over to where Hurricane Ridge is. We’d be camping at Heart O’ The Hills for the evening, right next to Port Angeles. I didn’t take any pictures of Port Angeles cause I’m a noob. We went back to town after settling into our campsite because Lenny wanted a steak. SICKO. We also had some leftover hot dogs and zucchinis and stuff that Josh and Regina had given us… so we grilled that over an open fire… which caused the steak to “supposedly” be one of the tastiest steaks Lenny has ever made (yo no lo probe), but these zucchini and mushroom skewers we made (using tent stakes) turned out to be covered with soot since it was an open fire and there was no tinfoil. Pretty much uneatable, although I wiped them down with wet rags. But haha. They were like, BLACK! On all surfaces!!

Heart O’ The Hills campsite!

Monday, June 15th
The next morning, we got up early to drive to the freaking Hurricane Ridge which is supposed to be “the best thing to see,” say some lazy peoples.

Awesome car on the side of the road. I WANT EET.

The top of Hurricane Ridge was pretty nice, I reckons. Very crisp.

This thing was a major WTF. A good idea, but have you ever SEEN such a thing?!

Mountains and glaciers.

So the coolest part was this big block of unmelted snow and the reflections it was casting in the parking lot. We also kept running into German couples, from Germany, and all of them were there independently. Like, seriously, four different groups of German tourists — neither of whom had run into each other. I can always identify Germans right away, which totally throws them off-guard. Haha.

This dog (which belonged to a German couple) LOVED the snow SO SO SO SO much.

The awesomeness.

Mountains and sky, oh me, oh my.

We were pretty much purposely taking glamour pics.

Lenny enjoying the snow. I wasn’t enjoying it, though, because I had no socks on and the shoes I had on were terrible for walking in the snow… so I boycotted a walk-in-the-snow hike although it woulda been really cool, I’m sure. :{

Its’a me! Vee!

Next stop: a campsite on the beach, and whatever stops we wanted to make on the way.

Including this stop at a Humane Society… there were only cats, though, and it smelled like shite balls, and also, Lenny got like immediate allergies from being in there for less than five minutes.

I loved these weeds growing out of these old toilet bowls. Loved them.

On the way, we stopped by the town of Forks, which is now a major tourist attraction despite its out-of-the-way location. The reason? The vampire book, Twilight, is based there. And people are obsessed with that shite.

LOL.

LOL. (And my clothes are terrible.)

LOL. Guest book in one of the (many) Twilight shops.

All these were from ONE DAY. And one of the previous pages, too. INSANE. Read the last entry. It’s hilarious. Coming out of this shop made me feel SOOO weird about life, like I was in some movie, some corny b-rated horror movie where vampires exist and are seen as superstars and everyone wants to be a vampire because it’s so glorified and they’re so cool. That’s what I feel like in these twilight-themed stores. It’s so trippeh.

LOL. LOLOLOLLOOLOLOLOLOLOL. In the giant supermarket place.

LOL.

On the way to the Kalaloch beach campsite, where we would be staying for the evening, we passed the Hoh Rain Forest. We went to the campsite first and then drove the 20 or 30 miles back to the Hoh Rain Forest to scope it out. It’s only a partial rain forest, but that’s okay. It was a beautiful time of day… and we went on a pretty brief, one mile hike.

Me and a HUGE Sitka Spruce.

Mossy McMoss.

There was this awesome swamp-like thing. Probably my favorite part, honestly. It was so beautiful, especially since we were there during the witching hour!

On our one mile long hike or whatever, we saw these nifty trees… there’s four trees growing out of this one fallen one! Actually, there were five, but the last one wouldn’t fit in this freaking shot.

I just looooove how the vegetation grows up the side of this fallen log bridge. Some lady stopped us and asked if we’d seen these clear crane flies that are supposed to look like little puffs of dust. We did not.

Best. Phone. Booth. Ever.

On the hurried drive home, because we wanted to catch sunset on the beach.

Kalaloch Beach. We were afraid we wouldn’t make it all the way to our campsite, so we pulled over on the side of the road and found a way down to the beach through the fallen rocks. It was fucking gorgeous, I gotta tell you. That kind of beach… makes me able to like beaches. Not your typical touristy stuff… but just beautiful, beautiful flat, fine sand… AMAZING. I want to go back. I aim to go back. This summer. Soon.

There were all these super round rocks that were strangely out of place… like river rocks, but flatter and perfectly round. They were AMAZING. You can sample what they look like in the message some random people wrote above.

Lenny chasing after seagulls.

Fallen tree Looks like it’s growing out of the sand kinda.

<img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_RqrWKVC07xM/SkE6nUS-rpI/AAAAAAAAR5E/E5jCRoX-9_c/s576/DSC_0767.JPG"
My favorite picture from the trip. So untainted. So few people on that beach to spoil it. Fucking. Amazing.

By later in the night, like 10:00pm, the sheer number of seagulls had multiplied x 100,000 and they were fucking dominating the seaside. It was crazy!

Dinner this evening consisted of this instant pasta stuff, some sauteed pea sprouts (which were harvested by Regina’s friends at the riverbank and were REALLY good), and a hot dog dribbled with cheese. So delishhhh. Eating like pros. Not enough exercise on this camping trip, though. Too much eating.

Chez Lenny.

The end.