As promised, here are some of the highlights from the trip I took to California a few weeks ago with my coworkers, Sondra, KV, Harold and Justin.
The first day consisted of driving to San Francisco, which took over 9 hours. Justin stayed with his brother, Sondra stayed with her aunt, and the first night the rest of us stayed at a little inn in Berkeley just down the road from the UC Berkeley campus. It was called the Rose Garden Inn, and it was really cute. Here are some pictures.
We stayed in San Francisco the next two days after that and mostly we just hung out around the pier area and in Berkeley, but the thing I was most excited about was going to Alcatraz. I had never been there before and I really enjoyed it. We took the ferry across to the island and then took the self-guided audio tour of the main building that housed all the cells. The tour was very informative and fun and definitely exceeded my expectations. Here are some pictures of that as well.
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| The view from the ferry approaching the island |
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| One of several rows of cells. One thing I learned on the tour that surprised me was that even though there are so many cells, at any given time when the prison was operational the prisoner population was only around 200. |
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| One of the cells that was furnished as they would have looked when prisoners were there. |
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| Some cells in the higher area where the less well-behaved prisoners were held. |
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| One of the solitary confinement cells. I walked inside it, it was pretty creepy. |
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| The view of the city from the island. It's less than 2 miles away. |
After San Francisco we drove to Monterey and camped there for one night and explored the town a little. After that we drove down the coast on Route 1 and stopped to admire the ocean a few times, including one beach with elephant seals. It made me miss living on Cape Cod near the ocean!
The last 2 days of the trip we spent at Joshua Tree National Park. It was a really cool landscape there, obviously with lots of Joshua trees in many areas, and there were also lots of neat rock formations and things that we climbed around on. Another spot we stopped at was a cholla garden, an area where the vegetation suddenly changed from mostly Joshua trees to mostly cholla.
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| Cool rocks! |
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| Cholla! Even though it's not very friendly if you touch it or accidentally brush against it, I like cholla. |
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| More cool rocks! |
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| Scrambling around amongst the rocks |
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| Climbing down from the top of a tall rock we climbed. |
Since that trip, we have had two weeks of leadership training that have been pretty awesome. This past week was basically just a normal project for us so that the new hires could get used to how a normal week usually goes, and it was that exciting because our only task was picking an invasive weed, but the first week was different. That week we talked a lot about what leadership is, did a lot of self-reflection and discussions about our goals, expectations, strengths and weaknesses, and other things like that, as well as doing team-building exercises and getting to know each other. All of the new people who got hired are really cool and it seems like we all get along really well and it's going to be an awesome group of people to work with and get to know for the next few months. I'm really excited about all of the opportunities and experiences were going to have, even though some of what we're going to do makes me nervous because it will require me to be more out of my shell than I am used to, but even that I'm excited about because I know I'm going to learn a lot.
Well I guess that's it for now. I'll keep you all updated as exciting things happen, which hopefully there will be a lot of in the near future.
