Outdoor Travel Geek

  • cloud’s rest

    Last year I finally got to hike up to the top of Half Dome, crossing one of the world’s epic hikes off of my bucket list. I was hoping to do the hike again this year, so at the beginning of April I applied for a permit. This year they changed to a lottery system,…

  • home sweet home

    In general I try to spend as little money as possible on home furnishings. I tend to spend a good amount of time away from home anyways, and nowadays I don’t entertain much, so I never really cared what my furniture looked like. My house was filled with mostly non matching stuff that I inherited…

  • reno, rest, relaxation & return

    The drive from Seattle to Glacier National Park took almost ten hours. Originally our plan was to hit up Yellowstone after Glacier, and then Arches and Zion, and then hit Las Vegas before heading home. But looking at the map, we saw that each of those drives would be at least a good eight hours.…

  • glacier national park

    Often when car camping for multiple days in a row there’s a bunch of leftovers. Those leftovers are great when thrown into a pot with some ramen noodles. In this case we had some leftover seafood soup from the Korean restaurant we ate at outside of Seattle. It made for a really tasty breakfast. It…

  • seattle

    Most people know this about me: I like to bike, I like to eat, and I like photography. Apparently Portland exists at the intersection of all three of those. Seriously I liked Portland so much, it was hard to leave. The distance between Portland and Seattle is not very long. In fact, I biked it…

  • portland gluttony

    I ate so much in Portland that I decided to dedicate a post to all the food I had… Spanish anchovies with lemon aioli. This food cart was named Euro Trash– they had all sorts of stuff including escargot and foie gras. Kalua pork slider. Very tasty, but kinda pricey at $3 for such a…

  • portland

    Please excuse the crappiness of the photos in this post. They’re all cellphone shots, I didn’t use my SLR a whole lot in Portland… We arrived in Portland pretty late in the evening. We found a cheap motel in the outskirts of town. Our motel is next door to a Chinese dive bar (never knew…

  • crater lake

    I think part of the reason why I like road trips is because my family used to go on them when I was a kid. I have good memories of road trips in our family minivan. My dad would be driving, my mom would be riding shotgun and my bro and I would each have…

  • lava beds

    Tonight we’re staying at a campsite at Lava Beds National Monument. The drive from Burney Falls to Lava Beds was pretty ridiculous. The GPS kept wanting to take us on dirt roads, and for a long time I kept trying to force it to recalculate by continuing on paved roads. Finally I just gave up…

  • burney falls

    A long journey began today. Gid and I went to the Sacramento airport to pick up a rental car for a long road trip. We had reserved a compact car, but we ended up upgrading to a Prius V. My first impressions of the car are that it accelerates really slowly and the handling is…

  • bullards bar

    It’s been a while since the Subaru’s been loaded up with mountain bikes. I’ve mostly been road biking lately. It’s been a while since I’ve gone mountain biking, and when I do go, it’s mostly been alone. It’s good to have the car loaded with three bikes. Today Geo, Dave and I hit up a…

  • socal sojourn

    I’m not really a huge fan of socal. I think I’ve mentioned that before. I mean, there are some great things going for socal. There’s an abundance of awesome food down there, some stuff which is not really available up here. The beaches down there are great, not like the cold water beaches we have…

  • livestrong

    Most people who read this blog know that I like to bike. Each year I try to channel that love for biking into doing some good by doing a charity bike ride. This past Sunday I rode in the Davis Livestrong Challenge, which supports the Lance Armstrong Livestrong Foundation, a cancer advocacy group. The day…

  • kid’s day

    Today my work had it’s annual kid’s day. This was my first time seeing it, since I was out on vacation last year. I was expecting it to be super boring, just a bunch of bored kids sitting in their parent’s cubicle. Instead I found that my work has just about the most awesome kid’s…

  • cardiac case closed

    Today I met with my doctor to go over the results of all the tests I’ve had over the past few weeks. Basically the conclusion is that everything’s healthy. The chest x-ray, the blood work, and all the cardiac tests show that everything’s normal. That was a huge load off of my chest. My doctor…