Indian Lake 2010
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
It’s never fun returning from vacation, but this one was a bit crummier than normal. We had had a water heater issue while I was gone that had to be addressed first thing the Sunday night of my return. Namely, we had no hot water. Ashleigh only had to deal with it for the first part of the week, before taking off on her own road trip to Chicago and Denver. She had her friend Jamey come to take care of the cats. So on Monday, June 21, 2010, I had to be late to work on my first day back while getting Korrect Plumbing to replace the thermocouple. And would you believe that I had another water heater issue later in the week? They had to return on Thursday to replace the expansion tank that was causing water to constantly run into the overspill pan. Short version: I was $245 poorer after the first week home. Read the rest of this entry »
So the convention was underway. It was Thursday, June 17, 2010, and I was quickly being absorbed into the old spirit of the Sons of the Desert conventions. We had to get up relatively early on this particular morning. Bob chose to go down to breakfast, while I preferred to take my time getting ready and tinkering around on the internet. We all assembled in front of the hotel and caught a bus over to Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park, which was our first activity of the day. 
Bob and I were rising and we were most definitely shining very early on the morning of Sunday, June 13, 2010. We got ready and got our stuff packed up from the Motel 6 in San Simeon, California, in time to get down to the lobby, eat some breakfast in the adjoining Sunset Grill restaurant (where I enjoyed a delicious and very filling seafood benedict), and head out to our first and foremost major destination of the day. It was a little country cabin in the hills known as Hearst Castle. 
My friend Bob and I had been traveling for the bulk of the day, having journeyed from Reno and through Lake Tahoe. After being on the road for the past five days, it was kind of nice to arrive in Sacramento, where we could rest our heads in the same spot for the next four nights. We arrived around 4pm on Wednesday, June 16, 2010, at the Holiday Inn Capitol Plaza, which was about as a convenient location that one could have found. It was situated right between a shopping mall complex and the entrance to the Old Sacramento historic district. I was pretty exhausted from the past few days, so I had no qualms about retiring to our room once we checked in, getting on the internet for a bit, and then trying to doze for a few seconds.