SCHOOL IS OVER AND IT’S SUMMER!!!!!! We so excited. We gonna have a ball. My finals went extraordinarily well, and in the last week I was able to have a lot of last-minute quality time spent with my amazing friends. On one night, about 30 of us went to see the sunset from 5 mile, which is a place with an incredible viewpoint of the sun setting over the distant mountains. Gorgeous. I also spent afternoons playing Frisbee and basketball (which I totally suck at) and evenings staying up late just talking with friends. I went to The Old Spaghetti Factory again with about 20 people and saw the replacement window of the one that I broke. It was quality. The manager recognized me and we talked a little bit. What a nice man!
Before I knew it, the week and the school year had come to an end. On the last night (Friday) before everyone left, everyone who was left went to the “smoke shack” where we had a bonfire, sang songs, made s’mores (some more what?), and said good-byes. Then I stayed up until 4am with Levi and Gabe because I was going to pull an all-nighter, but got really tired so I decided to sleep a few hours. I got to bed at about 4:30 and woke up at 7:30 so I would have enough time to get everything together by 8 for my checkout. That morning was so hectic. I had to store a few things still, help Aaron get his stuff together and help move and store his stuff. And we had to mail his giant boxes and some of Caitlin’s, as well. Aaron and I stashed our stuff underneath a little cove under Duvall (his dorm) while we did our last minute storing and mailing and hoped that it wouldn’t get stolen. At about noon, we went to Silverwood!
Silverwood is a theme park in Idaho, a little over an hour away from Spokane. Aaron and I met up with 6 guys from 4th floor of Duvall, where we’ll be living next year. We went on this little roller coaster called the corkscrew, first, and it was soo short. What happened was we went up a chain hill, down a hill and through a corkscrew, then around to the start. I was very disenchanted. Then we went on this ridiculous water ride with the other guys in which we ended up sitting in two feet of water. I spent the rest of the day with drenched jeans and a saturated wallet. Fortunately I took my phone out of my pocket in time and held it high above my head. It was hilarious how much water came into our car, though. We hit up a few more roller coasters and headed back to the swim house to hang out and sleep for the night.
That night I slept for ten hours because I had only slept for three the night before. I got up, hung out awhile, and went with Aaron, Abby, and Mel to hang out downtown before graduation. We went to Manito Park, which is beautiful, and got some coffee before graduation. It was a waste though because the stingy lady inside the Spokane Arena made us chug it or throw it away before we could go in. Graduation was really long but it was cool and went by fast because I was being sassy and talking the whole time. I gave last good-byes to the seniors and Aaron and I met up with Caitlin and we hightailed it out of there!
That night we drove to Gig Harbor to drop of Caitlin at Elisabeth’s house and to stay at Aaron’s Uncle and Aunt’s house. We talked to Aaron’s Aunt for a while, and she’s really nice and likes me so yay! We got to bed at about 2am and then were woken up at 7:30 by his adorable little cousins. After breakfast, we brought the kids to the bus stop and went to get Elisabeth and Caitlin. Before we got them though, we went to this little coffee shop to see Kelsie for a little while! After we got them, we headed out of town and passed into Lacey, which is about 20-30 minutes from Gig Harbor on our way down to California. We stopped there to visit Sam, and it ended up taking us about 30 minutes to get to her house because she thought we were coming from the opposite direction so we went in some giant and small circles for a while because of bad directions. At about 1 o clock we finally left Sam’s house and headed to Portland to meet up with some other friends, Bethany and Ester.
We met up with them at the Lloyd Center, which is this really cool mall in Portland with a ton of stores and an ice skating rink inside of it. Aaron and I learned a lot about bras while the girls tried on a few. Wait…I might have worded that badly. Anyways, after walking around in there for a while, we decided to get Donuts from this place called Voodoo Donuts. Apparently it’s a really well-known chain in the Northwest, but I’m from Wisconsin so what do I know? They have a ton of really…interesting… donuts. If you’ve ever been there you know what I’m talking about. Seriously though, they have a huge variety of donuts. We got a dozen and had a communal donut-eating party behind the store. After that, we went somewhere else downtown to Powell’s Bookstore, which is way bigger than any Barnes & Noble I’ve been to. I called my mommy to tell her I was doing okay, but she had to grade papers or something so we didn’t talk for too long. We left Powell’s after a little while and stopped by a thrift store to check out what they had. Aaron and I found a pair of neon yellow cut-off belly shirts that said “Dr. Muscles” on them that we really wanted to buy for the beach later, but they were $12 each and we figured we could just make our own, so we didn’t buy them.
We said bye to Ester and Bethany, and continued the voyage to Eugene where the Brodys live! When we got there, I was super tired so I wanted to stay behind to go to bed. The Brodys own a chain of grocery stores, so Matt took everyone to see one and they went to the U of O afterwards. I stayed back, chatted with Mr. Brody for a while, showered, and went to bed. I was so sad, my air mattress deflated throughout the night so I basically slept on a wooden floor that night! The next morning, we moved at a pretty leisurely pace. We had breakfast and left by about 10.
We had to stop and get gas, so that was the first matter of business while we were still in Eugene. If you don’t know, Oregon has at least two prominent weird laws that I’ve learned in my time in the Northwest. The first is that there are no taxes on stuff so they get tax breaks in other states. The second is that you are not allowed to pump your own gas. Well, we were at the gas station in Eugene and the guy did an excellent job washing our front window (seriously, he was pro), and he told us we had a screw in our tire. Great.
We ended up going to a car shop in town and waiting 45 minutes to get the screw removed and the tire patched up. Fortunately, we found a coffee shop (Fine Grinds—tell your friends! And “like” it on facebook!) with wi-fi to wait at. Finally, we left Eugene at noon with 8 hours of driving standing between us and Placerville.
After about two hours, we spotted a sign for a wildlife safari. Our curiosity was as piqued as Mount Shasta(which we saw later—it’s HUGE!). So, naturally, we got off the highway, and drove a few miles down this windy road to find ourselves in this safari place! On the way, we were a little bit sad because all we saw were cows and some birds so we thought that that was the safari. However, when we got to the ticket booth, we found out that we could get a big discount if any of us were zoo members. Elisabeth is a member, so we got 50% off and Aaron paid for us all!
Aaron brought a Flip, which is a little video camera thing. So, we took a ton of video footage of the animals we saw. There were llamas, turkeys, Canadian geese, cheetahs, bears, lions, a monkey, emus, yaks, antelope, sheep, camels, elephants, giraffes, and some other animals with weird names. An emu almost pecked Caitlin through the window! And the yaks were all in the road so we had to yell at them to move…which didn’t work, but they moved eventually anyways. And they kept peeing all over, too. And two of the yaks got in a little fight RIGHT in front of the car, it was scary! Oh, and we saw a giraffe poop too…and got footage of it. Aaron and I will be posting a video compilation for your viewing pleasure later!
After the safari adventure, we returned to the highway. A few hours later, we stopped at this bakery called “Heaven on Earth”. The name of the bakery wasn’t too far from the truth. I bought a cinnamon roll bigger than my head and we all shared it. It was amazing!!!
The drive has been overall pretty great so far. We’ve been blasting music, talking about random things, speaking in Spanish, taking multiple coffee stops for Aaron’s caffeine addiction, and enjoying the breathtaking view of the mountains all the while.
We made it to Placerville in one piece after stopping in Old Sacramento for a spontaneous midnight run and search for a bathroom stop. More to come later!
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