Road Trip
The road trip has come to an end. It was a mixed bag of emotions and scenery - from dry dust bowls to green forests to sparkling waterfalls; from excitement of new adventure to boredom of the vast stretches of road to loneliness of a campsite at midnight to the thrill of seeing friends in San Francisco. When I left off last week, I was still up in northern California at a hotel typing away with all my pictures and stories, but the trip wasn't over yet.
Monday I drove south from Eureka to San Francisco to meet Gus and Diane who were driving north from LA. We all met up in the city with his brother Sergio to have dinner at a great pizza place in the Mission District for Gus's extra-innings-birthday. So great, in fact, you get a free item with purchase - we're pretty sure that free item was a very large mouse or maybe a rat. Still, I'd recommend the place to friends - the pizza was that good. It only barely tickled Sergio's ankle once, otherwise just ran around on the floor a bit. After that, we were off to drinky drink in the Castro. The first bar we went to - Badlands - was having a 2 for 1 night, which means you get two identical drinks per purchase. Yay! I can support a place like this. The music was a bit loud, we couldn't hear ourselves at all, so we went off to 440 Castro from there. Underwear night. Hot. Sergio's boyfriend Adam joined us here, but we didn't stay long. It had been a long driving day for most of us, and a working Monday for Adam and Sergio, so we called it quits just after midnight. The next day we did a few touristy things - the Ferry Building, Pier 39 - and then it was time to go home to Glendale. I said goodbye and finished my return drive, getting home early Wednesday morning. It was a good trip.
Hollywood Heroes
The rest of the week went by slowly - I caught up on sleep, did all the laundry from the trip, and rested. By Sunday, I was needing to get out and have fun, so Don and I decided to go hunt for a shirt on Hollywood Blvd. I don't recall the last time I just did the tourist stroll along all of that Hollywood & Highland area. It was fun. A nice day for a walk, and lots of people to see, and even a nice Caesar salad at Mel's Drive-In. Now, I hadn't charged up my camera since coming back from the road trip, so I snapped off a pic of me and my hero Spongebob Squarepants, when the battery died. Shit. Me without a camera? So we quit H&H and I dragged Don to something called Swagger at a bar called Barbarella's in Silverlake. It was kinda nice - not exactly what I had expected, since I'd been told it was a Silverlake "bearish" / "leather-lite" crowd. I didn't know why there were so many lesbians there... turns out, it was still Lazy Bear Weekend up north, and it was also something called Hard Heroes at MJ's, an annual fundraising event. Which I missed. Again. Damn it. But Sunday ended as a nice day with a nice friend and next year I'll remember Hard Heroes. Honest.
