Right after school ended, I found myself en route to California for an 11 day trip up the coast, a trip that me and about twelve of my best friends from school planned back in first semester.  We jumped on buying plane tickets while they were cheap, not knowing what else we were really going to do.  Our only plan was to meet in Los Angeles on May 20th and somehow make it up to San Francisco and all the way back by May 31st.

And guess what?  We did it.  Though we may have not known where we were sleeping at night, we managed to find space on floors, in random Cal Poly dorm rooms, and cheap hotels.  We were our own Kerouacs, “On the Road” to find something we didn’t even know existed.

The best thing I did while in California was keep a handwritten journal.  I journaled a few times every day.  Here’s my favorite entry, written while laying in the sand watching the sun go down on Venice Beach:

may 21, 2009

1:44 PM
we had our first small roadtrip today. from thurmon’s house in brookside to venice beach. it’s great here, not at all what i expected. there aren’t any graffitied skate ramps or bowls, but it’s very colorful and the streets are lined with palm trees (which is how i think everywhere should be). becky texted me this morning saying how she’s always wanted to move here, even though she’s never been.

california, i’m learning, does that to a lot of people. when you’re not from here, you always want to come here. starting with the gold rush. land of beauty and opportunity and streets lined with palm trees. i wake up happy here and spend my entire day happy. “island in the sun” just came on. it makes me feel so fine i can’t control my brain. when you’re on a golden sea you don’t need a memory. right now, they could film this scene for three minutes and twenty seconds and capture the nature of the song perfectly. look at us, with our books on french existentialism and conversations about fate and love and life and everything that i still feel too young to even think about. we’ll run away together. it’s nice to run away every so often. a standard break from life. i’m honestly not worried about anything that’s happening back home. it’s probably due to timezones. three hours worth of worries and unsent text messages and trying not to wonder where someone is … all disappear into thin air. like 11 AM, where did it go? i left it somewhere 3,000 feet above new mexico.

Not to mention, I got some of the greatest pictures ever taken out there.  The Pacific Coast Highway, though dangerous looking, is one of the most beautiful roads in the world.

Along the PCH

All of us!

Impromptu parking lot picnic.

Impromptu drunken dance party at a dorm in Cal Poly.

Our goal was to step foot on a different beach every day. This is near SLO.