road trip -- 06/10/2005

day 1 - 06/10/2005
we said our goodbyes to shalini and gaurav and headed for stanford university to meet Tristan, who was going to be spending the first day of our road trip with us. he had planned a hike for us at bigsur. we met Tristan at about 2pm and started heading towards bigsur. while in the car, amit and i tried our level best to synch the ipod with the radio but as expected both of us couldn’t get the damn thing to work :-) we plan to call for tech support albeit gauri or dada when ever we get a chance to get their expert opinion.

believe it or not but we took 7 hours to reach bigsur. as per tristan's calculations, we should have been there within 2 hours but somehow; it just took forever to reach to our desired destination. we all were not sure as to what was the reason for us being so late...we were so engrossed in our conversation that we just didn't notice the traffic that was barely moving....then we overshot Salinas and lost about an hour in that...and of course, amit's third eye twitched at every vista point for a photo :-) i was a little skeptical that tristan might not like our attitude but he seemed to be enjoying himself. by the time we reached bigsur, it was too late and dark. amit and i thought about our favorite campsite - julia Pfeiffer burns and decided to camp there....we barely managed to find the site (did i tell you that by this time, our oil tank was almost empty and that there was no gas station around...so it added to the uncertainty). but we found out that the site was already reserved. since it was too late we decided to find some flat ground and camp there...even though it was not allowed (we were encouraged by some people who were camping right next to the "no camping" signboard). we did manage to find a flat ground (very close to the stinking bathrooms). we pitched our tents happily and went off to sleep in our not-so cozy sleeping bags...