Sometimes you wonder where the time went.
The week passed by faster than I could blink. Midterms are coming up and thus plenty to do in school. And for some strange reason it seems like times with a lot of school work always coincides with a lot of things to do outside of school. It this a coincidence? Or maybe it’s because you’re trying to escape from school stuff and therefore you come up with a bunch of other stuff to do as well?

This week I’ve wrangled difficult homework and course books that feel they are written in Chinese and not English (and I only speak the latter, not the former…). But we’ve also been to the movies and watched ”A Star Is Born”, which was very good, and we managed to scramble together a little camping trip over the weekend (like I said, things tend to coincide).

We rented camping gear from school over the weekend, and Saturday morning we crammed all our things in a rental car and headed for Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. It is located about an hour east from San Diego. A rocky and dry landscape with small villages consisting of only a couple of houses along the old highway 80. We summited Stonewall Peak at 5730ft (about 1700 m above sea level), kept an eye out for rattlesnakes and could draw patterns in the dust on our legs afterwards.

Then we headed even more east along Interstate Highway 8 and passed endless boulders in a landscape that looked nothing like I’ve seen before. We ended up at an old Desert Tower built in the 1920’s. Today it is a quirky museum and curiosity shop run by a quaker family with a bunch of dogs, chickens and peacocks around.


We had reserved a campsite ahead of time (no such thing as ”allemansrätt” in this country…), and set up our tent amongst stones and cacti. Regarding the cacti, they are a curious thing. There are videos on Youtube, and stories going around, about a cacti species called ”Jumping Jollas”. Described as some sort of man-hunting, thorny monsters that can literally jump onto you, if they get a chance they will put their roots in you via their thorns. Of course we couldn’t help but poke at them a little with a stick, but the ones we met seemed very meek. Other cacti just looked cool.

Eating our packed dinner of nachos and salsa (and some vegetables too, a very balanced diet…) while the sun disappeared behind the mountains, when then lay down under blankets watching a gazillion stars while the day’s desert heat slowly made way for the night chill.


With four people in a tent with extra thick down sleeping bags, the chill was no problem though, and the next morning we packed up the car and headed back to San Diego. We had a somewhat bizarre breakfast stop at a casino with a view over the iron fenced border to Mexico. At 10 am on a Sunday morning the casino was already filling up and the ethnical division between guests and staff was just what you would have expected. The breakfast menu in the restaurant was probably as American as it gets (though they had oatmeal for me), and the portion size too. With full stomachs and amazed minds we headed back home and spent the rest of the weekend studying.

There will likely be more of that this weekend, studying that is, and maybe some preparations for Halloween which is coming up.

Adios amigos,
Take care!