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It's an Exciting World

The life and times of David Geisert

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July 2018

Kayak Camping in Tomales Bay

I got a group of 7 together to go kayak camping in tomales bay.  Five of us got there on Friday around noon and got onto the water as quickly as possible.  It was a 5.6 mile paddle to the beach we had been given, Tomales Beach.

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We had a long stopover on Indian Beach, which was approximately the halfway point.  There we pulled out the stove and cooked a bit of sausage.  After everyone got some food we got back on the water and made the final push to our campsite.  The fog was rolling in low and it was difficult to make out the far shore.  We started up a nice fire pretty quickly and got everything nicely set up.  A Prius showed up later from the service road and a few guys got out and set up a camp.  I was pretty sure that they weren’t allowed to drive in.  They looked like they were crabbing and fishing. We had a good fire that night and good food.  Riley cooked up a storm, and had brought way too much food, but we weren’t complaining.

The next morning Riley cooked up a lot more great food, and I headed out to meet up with Tina and Amit, who were coming in a day late since Amit had to work on Friday.  I got some good alone time on my paddle back, and made it to Inverness much faster than anticipated.  It only took me 1:45 to paddle the 6 miles back.  I got in early enough to have a nice meal and rest at the diner next door, where I got a huge veggie omelette.

Tina and Amit got in and we got onto the water pretty quickly.  The wind didn’t gust as fast on the way out with them as it did on Friday, but there was a lot more consistent of a wind.  We did a break at Indian Beach again, after which Amit took off and outpaced us by a large margin.   We were paddling near a large group that was heading towards Marshall Beach.  They were somewhat annoying, and had been slowly leaving behind their slow members.  The fist ones they left behind I don’t think made it to the campground.

Once we got in Steph got the fire going again.  She had a log with lots of sap on it, and once it started burning it put off a huge flame and lots of black smoke.  I was pretty impressed.  We had a great fire that night, as we had only gone through a third of the wood on Friday.  The food was amazing again, with Riley providing asparagus and bacon, with Adam providing spit-forks to roast them on.  We sat around the fire and talked for hours.  Eventually we ran out of wood and went to bed.  The next morning we had a long trek back, that was mostly uneventful.  We grabbed lunch in Point Reyes Station and dropped by the Cowgirl Creamery.   We got back and took care of the gear and vegged the rest of the day.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Michael and I had a fun day together, with a hike in Pacifica along the coast, then an evening where we went to Cupertino for Shakespeare in the Park of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It was very well done, and the picnic with everyone was lovely.  The show was much funnier than I was expecting and the acting was some of the best I’ve seen in any play.  I brought some of the rosemary cider from Redwood Coast that was made with the rosemary from our yard.

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Andrew’s 36th

Steph and I went over to Lost Colony for a cookout.  There were a dozen or so other people there. The food was amazing, and Debby was nice enough to make mac ‘n’ cheese for Steph.  The main draw of the cookout, the smoker, wasn’t ready and had to go for a few hours after everyone had left.

A few of us played a game of survivor that Debby had set up and Shareen was running.  We did immunity challenges, the first of which was how well did you know Andrew, with Debby handily winning.  I was the fist voted off, so I did a quickly confession to the camera to keep with the theme.  The second challenge was memory, with George taking immunity.  Adam S was the next to go, and that left only the asians.  Shareen picked out a challenge of moving rice from a tupperware to a cup.  Steph tried some alternate strategies that didn’t work out.  George took immunity again and voted out Steph.  The final two were Debby and George, and we had some invites to the others to take part in the final vote.  Debby’s strategy fell apart when she kept the aggressive stance into the final round.  Andrew voted for Debby, but the rest of the votes went to George.  It was a good time had by all.

Debby made a compilation of the confessionals: pretty funny.

 

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Pinnacles Hike

Adam planned a hike for us to go to Pinnacles National Park, and it was an interesting time.  We headed to Tina’s in the morning to carpool the two hours there together.  We got in a little early and I grabbed a few apricots from the tree that overhangs Tina’s driveway.  They were delicious.  We drove to the park which had a surprising amount of traffic heading south on 101.  Once we got to the side roads there wasn’t any more traffic; although there was a little construction.

We got to the park and took a few minutes to get situated before starting on the hike.  The first part was steeply uphill, and directly into the pinnacles for which the park is named.  They were gorgeous formations with lots of bright red/orange and green/yellow lichens.  We got up to the high pass and I was already running through several liters of water, despite it only being about two miles of hiking.  We stopped by a reservoir on the way down so I could filter some just in case.  Then we got into the first cave system.  It was a short bit, but the caves were nice and cool compared to the 90’s and sun that we had up to that point in the hike.  We scrambled around the caves, eventually finding the exit and continuing down to the eastern parking lots for a lunch at the picnic tables there.

Adam pulled out a salami and ate it, while the rest of us had nuts and trail mix.  A few miles later Adam was regretting the salami, as it was strongly messing with his hydration and thus temperature regulation.  The hike was mostly flat on the second half of the day, with a longer caves section that was prettier in my opinion just south of the western parking lots.  We emerged a little worse for wear and tired.  Tina was amazing enough to drive the entire way back home, and we all crashed pretty hard that evening.

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