Purisima Creek Redwoods

I was anticipating a late departure with a group of droopy eyed, hungover you know whats.  To my surprise everyone was in bed relatively early on Friday night, catching their ZZZ's for the morning trek.  

We met at Steve H's place around 9:30 a.m. on Sat.  Justin K, Dempsey, Steve H, and I headed down to Moss Beach to meet up with Ricardo for some fun in the unusually warm January sun.  We started the day off wandering the famous tide pools just down the beach from Ricks house.  I got Dempsey and Justin to stick their fingers in one of these guys.  It feels pretty funny.

After about an hour of tide pooling we decided to drive to the Purisima Creek trail head.  This pink is actually the exact trail that we followed on the map.  It ended up being a 9 mile hike.  It took us a few hours but that's because we stopped quite a few times to enjoy our surroundings.  We saw many birds of prey, butterfly's, rabbits, lizards, nutes, banana slugs and man were the lady bugs out in full force.   The boys were kind of loud, like four tall boys loud, so I decided to hang back just out of earshot.  I'd let them walk ahead and I'd stand real still.  Soon the birds would be chirping again, rabbits would be scurrying, and the butterfly's would be circling my head.  It was nice to be out there, in the silence, with myself.  

The thing I noticed the most while out there away from the boys was the contrast.  I was so strong, so apparent.  I had no idea I had so many things that needed venting.  I remember being out there and I could actually feel, and this is going to sound really corny to say but there's really no other way to describe it, I could feel the event horizon of where my jarbled up thoughts and stress ended and where everything else started.  It's like if you have an injury that you neglect.  Instead of getting better it gets worse and soon other things start to go wrong as well because your body is trying to over compensate.  I felt like I was finally aware of that injury and that being out there could help heal it.  That things would start coming together and soon my jarble wouldn't be so loud.  

Call me a hippie and I will elbow you in the face....seriously.
To further denounce the hippie within I'll tell you a little something about the meal we ate when we got back to Ricks place.  We did a quick stop at a market and picked up about 6 lbs of meat.  We got a bunch of spicy Italian sausages and bratwurst, 3 lbs of ground beef,  a wedge of blue cheese, onions, tomato and lettuce.  Man, I was on veggie detail cutting and slicing and dicing up the toppings as well as caramelizing the onion.  Dempsey was busy seasoning the beef and shaping patties stuffed with blue cheese, justin was making us all tea, Rick was manning the grill.  Man, when it all came together, oh man, it was the best burger I've had in a long time.  We each had a 1/2 lb burger stuffed with cheese, topped with sweet onions and hot sauce and mustard and lettuce and tomato.  So good.  And those sausages on the side.  Oh.  We all sat around the fire, our faces dripping with juice, our hands greasy to the max, the floor speckled with sauce.  We were silent, except for a short chuckle or grunt or snort when our eyes would meet and agree on just how blissful this food was.  Again,  A.Mazing.