Marco-YOLO

This was a 10 day road trip along California’s famous coastal highway in a convertible.

San Francisco – Met up with old Capital One friends, Tsvetan and Jarisara, for lunch, took my cousin Alizeh, a freshman at UC Berkeley, to dinner, and did some tourist stuff again.

Carmel – I love the vibe of this town, relaxed and happy, a great place for the low-key kind of Dolce Vita.  It was also near Pebble Beach, which was cool to see.

Hearst Castle – This may be the coolest building I’ve seen in the US. The beauty and opulence of this mega-mansion is something to behold and crown jewel for m was the pool, maybe the most iconic in the world.

Pismo Beach – Just a stopover, nothing special.

Los Angeles – LA is a fairly known quantity so not much to say. At Colleen’s behest, we took a TMZ bus tour, which was the corny guilty-pleasure type fun you’d expect it to be. I also rode a mechanical bull for the first time and did miserably.

San Diego – Nice city by the bay. Highlight here was a shore dive into the kelp forest off La Jolla. It was my first cold water dive so I was wearing a 7-9mm wetsuit with hood, gloves and shoes. The hood confused a playful seal (photo below) who initally though I was a giant awkward seal, but even after he figured out we weren’t seals, he still hung out with with us for several minutes. But the oddest thing was being 40-50 feet under water and seeing birds swimming by you like rockets. Cormorants seem remarkably at home under water for a flying species, and the amazing thing is some Cormorants can dive to three times that depth!

We went skiing at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe. Being a novice to intermediate skier, I found the double black diamonds I was able to navigate with relative comfort on the East Coast only equate to easy blues here. Even the harder blues gave me a very hard time. I suppose that’s why Squaw has twice hosted the Winter Olympics.