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 Mojitoes like a sailor.