Maybe it is because I never prepared for this trip.  I mean I booked it on Wednesday night and left on Friday morning.  I hadn't really thought about it before I came.  Since I've been here, though, I've been walking on the moon.  Nothing seems quite right.  I've been a Stranger in a Strange Land.  The natives seem happy.  It is I who have landed out of touch.

I stayed with my friends in Yosemite, the  ones for whom I officiated their wedding.  Now they have children and things have changed.  They have by necessity.  But it is more than that, too.  Something gained, something lost as they say.

I won't talk about it too much other than to explicate the effects on me.  To keep me comfortable, they set me up in the V.W camper van--The Vanogon.  The top was popped so I could stand up straight.  The electricity was hooked up so I had light.  Everything was good but that the new carport was built to drain water at about a 20 degree angle.  Or so.  I had an inflatable mattress, and it would slide all night, as would I, so that I would wake with my feet hanging toward the floor.

In the morning, I would go into the house.  My buddy was already up with the kids.  They'd be eating breakfast and I'd make coffee and then eat some of the pancakes he made with nuts and fruits mixed in.  Afterwards, we'd adjourn to the t.v. room where dad would put on recorded reruns of Lawrence Welk.  He said he read some studies that said the quick visual editing of television shows was bad for developing brains, so he only puts on the long-cut shows of the sixties and seventies.  I saw a lot of L.W. the last week, and now I want to research what happened to all those characters after the show ended.  As nice and sweet as the show seems, I know there is a dark underbelly to be revealed.  Larry was a black tyrant, I'm certain, and all those homey, folksy singers were having '60's style drug orgies whenever they could.

That's what I kept thinking, anyway, as I watched it with the kids, certain that the writers and costume and set designers were all taking heavy doses of LSD.  Lawrence Welk is certainly the progenitor of Saturday Night Live.  There could be no Will Ferrel without the L.W. Show.

A bit later, Mom would get up and come down to breast feed the baby.  There is crying and screaming and mom and dad trying to work out the strategics of the day, all with the requisite tensions and stress.  Then dad would go to work and I would go on a hike.

Diapers and feedings.  It will last a good long while.

Yesterday, my last day in Yosemite, my friend recommended that I hike up the mountain behind his house.  Follow the old road, he said.  It goes all the way to the next town, about seven miles away.  It will kick your ass.

And so that is what I did.  Stupidly.  I felt like a refugee.  I left too late with only a gallon of water and a Tiger's Milk bar.  It had to be over 100.  But I kept walking and walking thinking that it would get better, up and up over one waterfall, then another, then another.  I was ready to turn back when I spotted a house.  I had done it!  By the time I'd returned home, I had covered fourteen miles and five thousand vertical feet.

When I got back, they were impressed.

"I've never known anyone to go there and back before.  Most people only go one way."

Destroyed and in need of calories, I ate what they had prepared for dinner which was not enough, and drank beer and wine then Mojitos like a sailor.  Not the best road to recovery.

This morning I said my goodbyes and made my way back to Berkley.  I have had one good piece of luck and it came today.  I must confess that I love to drive a rental car in California at top speeds.  Today, however, I was mellow.  I did not have my foot to the floor.  Still, I was passing everything on the road but for one car, a white Mazda with a crazy driver who thought to keep in front of me.  And so mile after mile, we wove in and out of traffic, he one way, me another, only to meet up again with one of us ahead.  Great fun.  Until I spotted the CHiPS motorcycle parked on the side of the road.  Shit, I thought, I owe money for a ticket in California.  I'll be going to jail for certain.  I thought of you all immediately and what a story that would be.  However. . . and this is the lucky part. . . the Mazda was ahead of me at this point.  I slowed down and pulled into the flow of traffic being careful to stay far behind the Mazda.  I couldn't stand to look in the rearview mirror dreading what was coming.  And suddenly--swish--the motorcycle cop flew by me and dipped in behind the Mazda.  I felt bad and good all at once.  The driver of the Mazda was surely bummed.  It would be a very big ticket.

I cruised into Berkley at a more tepid pace listening to KAT Country and the American Country Countdown with Kix Brooks all the way to #1 with the Zac Brown Band and Jimmy Buffet singing "Knee Deep."  Yessir, I was a lucky cowboy for sure.

I must confess that I have not taken any photographs this trip, and I've figured out that I needed a break from both the factory and image making.  Today, though, I took out my iPhone and snapped a few pictures down on 4th St.  It is a chi-chi part of town, but it is in what had become a derelict factory/warehouse part of town.  I remember stumbling upon it eighteen years ago by accident.  I think.  It is not as it was then. . . but I am too tired to tell the story now.

But there is that to tell sometime.