It is not that I’m not having a great time over here in California, but for the record I just want to emphasis that not all days are sunshine and beach time despite what it might seem from what I’m posting here. This weeks top happenings included writing a difficult midterm and fixing a blockage in the kitchen sink. The latter required all forms of tricks and crawling around on the kitchen floor in dirty dishwater in an attempt to play plumber. Very unglamorous, but we managed to solve it in the end.

When the weekend rolled around, so did a friend from my class back in Lund who has spent her summer working in Kansas. Saturday morning we took off on a roadtrip, together with a Los Angeles based friend of hers, with a little hike and some hot springs as our goal. But nothing went quite as planned.

Google maps took us down the wrong road (or maybe we did wrong by trusting Google maps?) and after some serious off-road driving, on what I would hesitate to even call a dirt road, in a small Honda Fit (doable, but not something I would recommend for the faint of heart) we had to get out of the car and walk to the gatekeeper at the start of the trail. After a little detour (we had to walk back to the car, drive it around and come back another way befor they let us in…) we were finally walking along a sandy path with great views.


The path was a part of the PCT, (Pacific Crest Trail, a legendary trail along the North American west coast) and there was a river and geothermal hot springs at the bottom of one of the ravines. Maybe I was expecting somewhat more of a ”untouched nature” experience, but there are a lot of people here in California (about four times as many as in Sweden, on the same area), and the clock was drawing towards the late afternoon, so of course we were not first on site.

And would you believe, we’re sitting in one of the hot springs speaking Swedish and a voice says ”Är ni också från Sverige?” (”Are you from Sweden too?”) and that it turns out to be a bunch of exchange students from Lund University attending UC Santa Barbara, and we realise we have a bunch of mutual Facebook friends. So yes, the world may be big, but in certain places there are a lot of people in it.

We crawled out of the ravine and caught the last rays of sunshine as they made way for the impending night sky which was a sight to see. Once we were back in civilisation (paved roads were a nice change of terrain) we realised I had missed the last bus back to San Diego, and I prepared to stay the night with the others in LA and catch a bus back in the morning. About the hit the showers, my friend realised she had misread the departure time for her flight back to Kansas, and that it was early Sunday morning, not late at night. So we did a midnight run to LAX and dropped her off before heading for bed for a couple of hours. As the sun rose over suburban Los Angeles I caught an Uber with a driver who took me through a misty LA down to the bus station in 90 miles per hour, all while blasting Lady Gaga over the speaker system. I boarded a Greyhound bus, watched Southern California blanketed in fog through the window and arrived alive and well in San Diego about 30 hours after first leaving.

Like I said, nothing went quite as planned, but it was pretty fun anyways.
The blockage in the kitchen sink too. At least afterwards. There is a silver lining to every cloud.

This week more midterms awaits. And Halloween.
Not sure what scares me the most.

Thank you for reading, and have a lovely week!