velocidad, leònes del mar, curvas y puentes

Laura and I started speaking predominately in Spanish as we left Walla Walla. We decided to listen to Spanish radio the entire way to California. At times there were no more stations which gave us a welcome break from lots of accordian music. One of the words we learned in Oregon is velocidad which means speed. We learned this word the hard way after getting pulled over in the 55 mph beteen Bend and California. We weren´t going dangerously fast and the cop let us go with a warning. I was sad to have been pulled over for the first time in my life and kind of annoyed because people(including a semi) had passed me already. No one was sticking to 55.

That night we found a state park, threw my futon mattress on the ground and slept until it started raining. We moved under a tree and were really glad that the rain stopped quickly because we were sleeping on a giant sponge of a bed. We were very grateful to Alan(Laura´s boyfriend) for looking online to find places without rain because it rained for a large part of our journey to LA.

Laura and I decided to go to San Francisco instead of continuing down the five. We took the road to Napa which had tons of curvas(curves). I got kind of sick but she told me it was good practice for the buses in Peru.
Napa was really pretty and it was interesting to see one of the big wine spots that was around long before Walla Walla became famous for wine.
We drove over the Golden Gate puente(bridge) which was really pretty. It was so much nicer to be on the coast than driving down the five even though it probably took five more hours.

After more curvas driving along the big sur we were driving, speaking to each other in Spanish, when we suddenly were shocked into English: "what are those bodies?" We pulled the car over to a beach absolutely covered with leònes del mar(sea lions). They were fighting, swimming and wiggling around on the beach like giant slugs. Laura speculated that they would be more graceful in the water. We learned that they could for three months without eating while giving birth on the beaches in California.

Next drawn by the olas(waves) and arene(sand) we stopped in 20 minute parking in a state park on highway one and jumped into the ocean. Everyone else was too timid to get into the mildly cold water but Laura and I both love the ocean enough to jump in.

That night we stayed with my friend Jamie, and got up at 4:20 am to take a cab to the airport. In hindsight it was a pretty wonderful and uneventful cab ride.