Day 20

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 10th
Lyon’s house - Thousand Oaks California
Pictures taken: 5

The best way to describe today is that nothing happened like we thought it would.

First off, we had actually planned to leave this morning to go towards the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, Stephen’s knee has been acting up since the Redwoods, and some of the rest of us have had some uneasy pains, so we thought hiking a lot in the Grand Canyon might not be a great idea. We decided to just stay with the Lyons an extra day in L.A. We had plans to do quite a bit today, but we kind of ended up just chilling.

Through a weird turn of events, Mr. Lyons ended up meeting my brother-in-law Andy at a local private airport to discuss some future business things, so the rest of us went to the airport as well, then we went back home for a bit. Noah and I went on a hike at a local park that had a little waterfall called Paradise Falls. It wasn’t the most spectacular hike ever, but it honestly was really nice to get out of the city feel and out of the house. Also there weren’t too many other people on the trail, so it actually ended up being really nice.

After Noah and I got back, all four of us ended up going up to the hospital to meet up with some of the Lyons kids who were already there. Their sister-in-law was in the process of having a baby. It was a little awkward for the four of us being at the hospital while this super personal thing for their family was happening, but oh well! It was kind of fun!

After that we headed out with some of the Lyon’s to something called a “night farmers market”...haha, it was not what I expected. None of us really knew what to expect or knew what it was going to be, but it was basically the equivalent of a pot fest carnival for college aged kids.

We would have at least gone in to see if there was actually anything worthwhile inside, but it cost money and none of us wanted to spend money on something if we didn’t even know if it was going to be enjoyable.

Soooo, we ended up just going back to one of the Lyons kids apartments to play some games...or so we planned. But after having some struggles with getting their WiFi to work so that we could play some Jackbox games, we all decided we were pretty tired, so us four guys just ended up coming back to the Lyons parents house to get some sleep for our trip tomorrow.

All in all, the city of L.A. has been a bit of a disappointment. We had a great time surfing, but other than that, the actual activities were a bit of a bummer. On the other hand, getting to stay with the Lyons and hang out with them was great! We all really enjoyed getting to know them and had some really good conversations with them!

It just goes to prove that a place is made by the people, not the stuff. We are excited to move to the next step tomorrow! Grand Canyon here we go!