California

The waves lazily rolled onto the beach as fluffy white clouds drifted through a light blue sky during my afternoon in Ventura. My pasty skin blended into the white sand but was burning quickly enough to have me stand out as a painful pink mess before too long. Some of my friends played volleyball by the water while my other friends and I sat in the shade and watched the water. Palm trees swayed in the breeze, people jogged down the walkways to the pier, and fanny pack wearing tourists shouted at one another in languages I didn't understand. All in all, it was a typical great day at the beach.

The next day I drove back to my hometown to visit my parents. While I drove along the east side of the Sierras up Highway 395 I watched blue-gray clouds rolling over the peaks to either side of the Owens Valley. Lightning flashed as cloudbursts opened up in the rolling mountainsides of the Inyos, and the granite walls of the Sierra Nevada to the west stood purple and menacing against the thunderheads above them. I sat with my father and watched rain spit on the valley below and the sky turn a menagerie of colors above my old hometown, and when I mentioned the change of scenery I'd had over my weekend he simply said, "Welcome to California."

I take my home state for granted a lot. I've been in just about every corner of it, from the freeway mazes of Los Angeles to the winding narrow roads through the redwoods up north, from the flat agricultural expanses of the Central Valley to the mountainous regions of Eastern California that I've lived in for years. It has its economic and political faults, sure, but it's so diverse and interesting that it never ceases to keep me interested in exploring it. Deserts, forests, plains, coastlines, alpine territories, the list goes on and on; even if I forget sometimes, I realize now that I get to live in a pretty cool place.

I still need to make my way up to Lake Tahoe soon, and I'd really like to see Eureka again. I've explored Southern California two weekends in a row, and I plan to be in Mammoth Lakes again Saturday I think, so hopefully this California adventuring trend continues north some more. My backyard has a lot to explore, but if the whole Eastern Sierras are my backyard then the state of California is the whole neighborhood, and I wouldn't mind exploring all of it.

Basically I want to keep driving and hiking and exploring, but that's nothing new. I'm just realizing again how stoked I am with how much California has to offer.