Day 14

This post is a part of a series on my three and a half week adventure road tripping to the west coast with three of my best friends in the Summer of 2018. I was challenged to write every day of the trip to document the adventure, so I did! My aim was to be as real and raw as possible while I was documenting and writing. Because of this, some days, I was honestly just not interested in writing, so I wrote very matter of fact “this is what we did.”

Check out the first part of the series here: Day 1 or check out a list of the days here: WCT2018

I wrote everything on my phone’s notes app, and below is word-for-word what I wrote each day. Nothing taken out, no elaborations.

As part of the challenge, I also made sure to take at least one picture every day, and each evening when I wrote, I picked one photo that I wanted to feature from that day. Some days it was hard to pick them, and other days I had only one to pick from.

A couple of notes: Each day that I wrote, I wrote the date, where I was writing from, and how many pictures I had taken that day. So the location doesn’t always reflect where the picture was taken.

August 4th
Folly Foot Frolic Hip Camp - 15 miles East of Monterey
Pictures taken: 28

Since we were all ready for a relaxer day today, we just figured out some chill stuff to do around the city. Tension was a little high this morning as we were trying to decide what to do, but after doing laundry, then getting some groceries we decided to do the 17-mile drive in Monterey.

It was a little too touristy for my taste, but honestly, I’m trying to find the balance on that. I want everywhere I go to have no people but the truth is, if it’s worth seeing, there are probably going to be people there. What can you do? I definitely still don’t love places that have a lot of crowds, but I think I’m becoming more accepting of it as I visit more places. It’s at least nice to still see people enjoy this type of thing.

After this, we went back to Captain + Stoker, the coffee shop we went to the first day, but to our great sadness, they closed at 2:00! We got there like 5 minutes after closing time. It ended up working out though because we found another coffee shop that had a nice private upstairs area and we were able to have some really good conversations there.

It’s interesting because you think “Oh man! We have to be sightseeing and hiking this whole time to make it worth it.” But it was so special to just be able to have some good conversations with the guys. We sat for a good couple hours in the coffee shop just talking about important things going on in our lives. One of my favorite nights so far and to think, we could have done that back in Kansas. Or did the new environment make us more open to having deeper, more meaningful conversations? Who knows, but in any case, it was a really good time.

We ended the night by getting some In-and-Out, paying for over-priced ice cream, and then we found a peaceful parking garage bridge to keep our conversation going.

Also, then we got to drive 45 minutes over some super curvy California roads to get back here to our campsite.

Despite being a rest day, I feel exhausted.