Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

We had quite the week, I'll say that much. We are now California residents...we both have driver's licenses, the car is registered and we thought of a new mnemonic phrase to help us remember the new license plate, and we even have a local bank to our names. Well, to Wayne's name, since I didn't have a "valid" government photo ID (at that point I had a paper CA license and my old UT license, which the CA people told me would be valid but the lady at the bank wasn't convinced).

Wayne had more first classes this week. He said they were "scary," but he also talked about the interesting new people he met and some discussion they had in one of the classes. The figure painting professor, who remembered Wayne's portfolio (the robot paintings), was surprised to learn Wayne could paint a different style. Can most MFA students only do one style? [it really depressed me to learn that SJSU didn't know what to do with me because of my artist statement/application essay; apparently they thought that my portfolio was really impressive but couldn't understand "what I would do in grad school"... it makes me think that other schools were in the same situation with my application. "live and learn" rebecca says to me. - wayne]

We hung out with lots of friends this week. We had an old Michigan roommate of mine, Erika, over one night (she likes our gyros, yay) and she told us about a relevant case on hobby versus job tax law for future reference when we declare Wayne's art a profession on our taxes. We visited with Kate and Robi (my friend from Austin who lives here, and her fiance) when we helped them move stuff Thursday. And we showed some new friends in our ward, Chris and Alyssa, Wayne's Knights of the North Park film Monday. It was fun to hear their opinions on the film, especially since they don't know much about us and are into documentaries. [they recommended that i watch a british documentary called "7 up." I only watched two of the five programs and that was plenty for me. each program was approximately 2 1/2 hours long. fascinating documentary though: I recommend it.] Though Wayne realized this week that the reason he has trouble explaining the film to people is that he created a film about art that he and some friends created (the experience), and it is neither a documentary nor a story-based movie. [i've always had a hard time talking about this film with people from either film or documentary side. I realized why when i finally talked about it with some new media artists. one guy is even doing these fantastic explorations into "bacteria paintings."]

And then Friday we took off for Northern CA. My work gave me both Friday and Monday off, and Wayne had no classes Friday (or Monday since it's Labor Day). And we talked Jon and Faith into meeting us in the Redwood National Park to hang out all weekend. What a wonderful weekend it was.

It started off a bit painful though. We stopped for lunch on our way out of town (among a bunch of other errands), and after deciding our digital camera is one of our three or four most expensive possessions, took the camera in to the restaurant with us. And left it there. [d'oh!] It was only when we reached the golden gate bridge and wanted to take a picture that we realized our folly. Fortunately, Kate came to the rescue and gave us the number for the restaurant and took time out of her busy pre-wedding schedule to stop and pick up the camera. Yay for wonderful friends.

After that experience, though, we were less prepared to deal well with holiday traffic and the hot weather on our drive. Somehow we had forgotten in the last two weeks that the rest of the nation (including our last home in Provo) was still in a heat wave. San Jose area weather has been good to us, to say the least. After a long drive, we finally arrived at the campsite we had reserved online and set up our tent in the dark. Jon and Faith met us there much later than they had planned as well; I had already fallen asleep!

Both Wayne and Jon, I must say, doubted Faith's and my plan to only reserve one night at Elk Prairie Creek State Park. We just wanted a place we could meet where we would all know ahead of time what campsite number we were at (since cell service was unreliable at best). It was a very full campground, packed completely full of people. Loud and crowded, it felt generally like a hotel with no walls. Saturday morning we woke up early and searched immediately for a primitive campground. In general primitive campgrounds are smaller, cheaper, and first-come first-serve. We talked to the ranger at Prairie Creek and got a couple of good suggestions, and we went with the first. What a good move that was!

We highly recommend Flint Ridge if you want a cheaper (i.e. free) campground in the Redwood National Forest. It was beautiful, especially in the fog, on a cliff right along the coast. We could hear the ocean as we fell asleep and there were much less people at the campground [total silence]. The weather was so cool...highs of 60 and lows in the 40s. Even with sweatshirts we were a little chilly! What a nice change from the hot drive the day before. It was a quarter mile hike from the parking lot, and we had to drive on a gravel road for a while, and we weren't supposed to have campfires because of "fire danger", but otherwise it was perfect. The so-called fire danger was on the other side of the National Park, but they enforced it across the whole park. Kind of silly if you ask me. We had a fire both nights we were there though, because we thought "no open fires" meant no fires outside the protected fire rings. Why distinguish if they really mean no fires at all? But the cops were very cool about it. :)

We went to the beach after setting up camp again, and enjoyed the ocean. We tried to fly out sport kite, but the killer whales we saw distracted us! We saw four killer whales! None of us had seen whales in the wild before, so we were surprised when Wayne said he saw whales in the ocean just off the shoreline. We tried to decide if they could possibly be anything else, but they spouted water and had the tails of whales and were too large to be dolphins.... Each of the four had a different personality, some more shy and popped up less to spout out the blow hole, and one that waved good-bye with its tail fin each time it came to the surface. They were very consistent, all four coming up to the surface in the same order each time, and each sequence was four and a half minutes apart.

Later on, we played games back at the campsite and enjoyed a warm fire and smores. We were exhausted and slept till noon the next day. Then we went on a hike through the Moorman trail, a beautiful part of the Redwood Forest. We climbed inside trees and over logs and under huge trunks and all over the place. It was great fun indeed. We enjoyed the company of Jon and Faith, and the nice cool weather, and the beautiful area.

The trip home wasn't so bad, though it was hot and we still hit traffic, but we left earlier in the day and took long baths. And Star Cat sure is glad to see us.