So after months of me asking, I finally got people to go camping with me. We went to Hodgdon Meadow (more on meadows later) Campground, Site 038, from May 30th to May 31st.

05/30 — Day 1

The group dwindled to Mason, Liz, and me going. That kinda sucks, but it makes it a lot easier for packing and preparing, as we each have all of our own equipment and have the most experience compared to the others in the Bay. We left pretty early on Saturday morning, with me waking up around 7am and us departing around 730am.

We took Mason’s R1T, aptly named ‘Hulk’ for its green color, and started our three hour drive to the campsite.

For context - the group left the details up to me this trip, since they were (understandably) too busy with work. Thus the plans were not as established as always. That’s something I could talk about another time though.

So we started off in Hulk, vibing to Liz’s chill music. Eventually, we stop for supplies and coffee in Oakdale, about an hour from the campsite. We decided on wraps for lunch on both days with gnocchi for dinner. We got the most random stuff though:

• tortillas
• bell pepper hummus
• bread & butter pickles
• pickled red onions
• tofu

If that’s not a vibe, I honestly don’t know what is.

Afterwards we got our coffee from Dutchbros: Liz got some iced coffee, Mason got a redbull drink (which was DELICIOUS), and I got a shitty hot oat milk latte. These drinks powered us to the site, but maybe I should’ve gotten another shot of espresso in mine.

As we were driving to the Meadow, we decided to go to our planned hike first (Carlon Falls). We parked, changed, and took off on the 1.5 mile trail to the falls. While the hike itself was pretty boring, the falls were amazing. We were pretty much alone the entire time, and we spent at least 4 hours there.

We ate our cursed lunch together and talked for a while.

Eventually I decided to do what I always do when in water, and explored. The dogs came out shoes came off and I started walking around the rocks, heading upstream to a spot I found. I got some great pictures of Liz and Mason, as well as the water, and some of me :).

The other two goobers decided, as is their tradition, to do a cold plunge. I guess I forgot to mention: the water was fucking freezing. Like almost as cold as California’s ocean is. Definitely the coldest water I’ve been in inland. But alas, these guys did their cold plunge. And truthfully, they looked really happy. I wish I could’ve joined, but they did it when I was 30ft away.

After getting some shots of the plunge, I turned and went downstream this time, hoping to find some better rocks to jump on. I don’t know why, but half of my joy from hiking is simply climbing things or jumping off things. Maybe I should get back into cliff jumping? Nevertheless, life will be good once Juliette comes back, as she seems to be the same way.

I found a cool downed tree going over the river, which of course I tried to cross. I, however, didn’t decide to look ahead and see that the end of the tree was sopping wet and slippery, causing me to crawl backwards. This somehow summoned Liz and Mason, with Mason joining me on the rock that the tree was leaning.

I guess Mason was really eepy though, because he fell asleep in the sun.

One thing about Mason is that he is a huge follower of the idea that ‘sunscreen stops the tan’ and that ‘you need to get red first to get some color on your skin’… not that skin cancer exists or something. I digress, I got some really funny photos of him sleeping there. I’m so surprised that he didn’t get a terrible burn on his face given he was covering half of it with his arm.

After abandoning Mason, I went further downstream to some cool parkour-y rocks. Here I kept trying to take some selfies on my Canon Powershot A3400 IS, but the 10 second timer was NOT enough for me to get to a rock and pose. Plus the auto exposure was kind of shit. Here’s some of the better photos.

I really like these kinds of photos, I just need to get better at posing.

In time, we ended up sitting together, feet in the water, simply yapping. Our bottles kept trying to float away, which was hilarious. We all brought our Rivian Nalgenes, which are light, so they were floating in the freezing water.

Almost two hours of yapping later, we decided to leave. We packed, I carried the awkward, leaking backpack cooler to the car, and we took off.

This was our first time at the campground, so it was a little bit of a shock seeing how hilly and open it was. Our campsite had only a tiny area for the tents, because the rest of our site wasn’t flat. To make it even worse, we didn’t even have trees near us that we could put our hammocks on. We had to walk to a different campsite and take their trees, since the site remained empty the whole night.

And then y’all, and you won’t believe this, but I saw my first bear. A fucking brown bear showed up to our campsite. Wearing what looked like a grey bib. (Later we learned this was for tracking him). Mason had to run and close our food storage with the bear not even 100ft away (thank you so much Mason). The entire campsite started yelling “bearrrrr” and “booooo” to get him to go away. I laugh everytime I think about it, hearing that many people so nonchalantly try to get the bear to leave.

(This was the last photo I could take before my camera died - I really need to order more batteries)

We explored our campground a bit after the bear left our immediate area. Liz’s friend was apparently staying in one of the group sites, so we went in search of her. She (I forget her name :skull:) is a fellow vegan!!! I was invited to smores and pancakes, but couldn’t go :(.

After some time exploring we did get our hammocks up, though Mason had a … creative way of getting his to the right height. We chose a cluster of five trees for our hammocks. Liz and I get pretty stable and thick trees and Mason chose younglings, barely able to support his weight.

That tree was not supposed to be leaning like that.

We yapped, set up the rest of camp, and took some edibles. Luckily Mason and Liz had accidentally (?) bought some vegans ones which was great. I took 8mg of THC, though all I really felt was a headache and slightly delayed reaction time. Liz and Mason kept telling me ‘you have to pretend to be high until you actual do’ but like I’m (probably) autistic, how do I do that. They seemed to be having a lot of fun.

We got our fire started with some difficulty and made our food. Our pitiful, miniscule fire was completely outclassed by our neighbors. They had two large group tents with about twelve people total. They had a big fire that they used to get charcoals to grill a lot of food. They were cooking for hours while we tried to make pasta.

And our pasta was actually really good surprisingly. We had to fish it out of the water using plastic spoons, but who cares about a few more microplastics in their body. We ate and everyone went quiet. I ended up taking a second edible (up to 16mg THC) after eating to see if that would help. It did not. I kept trying to start some conversation, but it seemed Mason and Liz were in their own worlds.

05/31 — Day 2

We eventually went to sleep, where I proceeded to wake up not one, not two, but four times in the night. I ended up fully waking up around 5:50am. That’s insane for me by the way. I got up and went to the bathroom and just walked around. At around 7am, Liz woke up, which was kind of nice. We both retired to the hammocks in blissful quiet. We Mason-watched for about two hours, until he finally decided to wake up at 9am (kidding Mason).

We yapped in the hammocks for a good two hours after he got up. Then we slowly, pretty methodically packed up camp. Our destination: Yosemite. Specifically, I wanted to go to Sentinel Dome and Taft Point Trailhead. It was Mason’s first time in Yosemite, though, so we did a lot of driving around. We charged at a RAN and ate round two of our cursed wraps, this time without tofu. I added on one of my granola bars to combat the lack of food.

Throughout the drive, we somehow ended up discussing the topic of meadows (I told you it would be relevant later). We kept going back and forth on the definition, pointing out various fields to prove our points. In the end we asked Rivian Assistant, which mostly agreed with me. Though from here on, I fear everything is going to be a meadow.

Finally, we were ready for the trail. Reddit had woven me stories of people staying in Yosemite Valley (where we were) and going to this trailhead. This, sadly, was a lie. The trailhead was actually an hour’s drive away, a mere five thousand feet higher. One quiet drive later, and we got to the trailhead. Honestly, this was one of my favorite trails I’ve done — the Sentinel Dome and Taft Point Loop. It was a little more than five miles, with 1,108ft of elevation gain.

We got views of the valley from both Sentinel Dome and Taft Point.

Starting the trail, we headed towards Sentinel Dome. There were a lot of people up there, but they all seemed to be doing a short out-and-back as opposed to the full trail that we were on. I got a few photos I really like, as seen below. Apparently they didn’t notice me taking them, which I found funny. I was positioning them to be in frame and equallyish spaced. The view itself was beautiful. We were so high up and it was breathtaking.

Mason somehow got signal on the Dome and Facetimed his Mom, where she promptly berated him for not taking enough photos.

The answer to how he got signal became evident very quickly. As we descended the Dome and continued on the trail, we stumbled into a very man-made area. This peaked in a cell tower on top of a mountain that sounded like it was powered by gas generators.

The trail became less clear as we continued. There were multiple new streams, fallen trees, and detours we had to maneuver across. I really liked these, though, as we had to jump on rocks or cross not-so-stable downed trees, all of which are what I wanted to do anyway.

After what seemed like forever, we arrived at Taft Point. This had an even better view than the Dome, with a majestic angle on Yosemite Falls. Of course, I got a lot more photos. We were on a cliffface it seemed, with a bunch of fissures in the ground opening to nothingness. Liz and Mason crawled to the edge, but I could never do that. I way too scared of heights for that says the guy who went skydiving on a whim.

We spent maybe twenty minutes up here, just taking it all in. Of course we had to leave eventually, being the nature of a day and all that, but I wish we could’ve stayed so much longer.

The drive down the mountain was so much better than the drive up. We were singing, vibing, just talking to each other. So much better than the quiet night and morning we had had together, in my opinion. After about an hour, we decided to get food on the way home. Liz and I did some searching, and we ended up on a random town about an hour from our houses. In this town, we found a restaurant called DJ’s Restaurant & Taphouse. This placed was described as a ‘brewpub’, which inherently scared me, being vegan and all. Liz and Mason, though, were immediately obsessed. They were convinced it was a BJ’s clone, so we beelined there.

Upon entering and seeing the menu, it was, in fact, a BJ’s clone. They even had the stupid cookie cake with ice cream that BJ’s is famous for. I got a bland, boring small pizza with spinach and no cheese, alongside a Shirley Temple (my favorite bar drink). The two goobers went crazy together, getting a large burger and a pasta dish, as well as the cookie cake. They somehow devoured it all and they loved it. I fear my pizza had butter on it, but alas: what can one do when faced with self-imposed dietary restrictions.

After eating they even went to the waitress to tell her their tale of expecting dogshit off-brand BJ’s, but discovering glory. The waitress seemed to not care (lol).

One hour later, and we were at Mason’s house. Liz left right away, and I went upstairs to see Ryan and help carry Mason’s stuff. A few minutes later, and I left for my house (!!). We were finally home after an amazing weekend. I just had to pack (again) for my Irvine trip the next day. My flight was at 9am, and I got home a bit before midnight, so that was fun.

Definitely worth the microplastics.