Bachelor Weekend

What a weekend! The last long weekend of my life as a single guy was packed with events running from an airport pickup on Friday night through an airport dropoff early Tuesday morning...

Gokarting
First on the agenda was a gokarting session at GoKart Racer in Burlingame. As wimpy as it sounds, gokarting is actually pretty grueling, especially since our session included practice, qualifying, and a race. Thirty minutes in a gokart without the luxury of power steering made for an exhausted bunch of guys when it was all said and done.



Having done it once at a corporate offsite, I already knew I was terrible at gokarting, finished last in practice, and almost last in qualifying. I'm generally risk averse and I think the Prius has only made me even less aggressive. With a little bit of luck avoiding the big pileup accidents and gradually going crazier on the racetrack, I managed to finish 7th!! Eric's gokarting experience shown through as he consistently did well and finished 1st in the race.

Football
From cars and driving, we then moved onto the wonderful world of sports, setting up shop at the Stanford Oval for a couple of hours underneath the sunny Californian skies. Football was the game of choice and we finally had the chance to bust out the flags that were purchased last year but never saw the light of day with the continuously wet spring.



It was a fun time and that was the first time I remember every playing QB, which was pretty fun despite my lack of touch in just randomly chucking the ball. Part of the benefit of playing QB a fair amount was also not having to run as much! We didn't really keep score, but I'm sure my team won =)

Food and Drink...
The wonderful place that is Buca Di Beppo played host to our dinner. Lots of tasty, heavy Italian food was a great way to recharge after an exhausting day. We got all the usual goodies: garlic cheesy bread, calamari, chicken parmigiana, and chicken marsala, among other things. It's definitely good to go with a bunch of hungry guys to order a lot and try a bunch of different things.



Along with dinner came the drinks, which I were pretty punishing, given the lightweight that I am. More on that later...

Poker and Wii
The original plan was to head to a Bar and Lounge place after dinner, but we changed course and headed for Chang and Andrew's place to gamble and play video games. I partook in the poker tourney until I busted out and decided that I needed to lie down. I'm a talented sleeper, so I managed to even doze off for a little while:



Meanwhile, I think the other guys finished up the poker tourney and competed across various Wii games:



I eventually woke up when everyone was about done and we called it a somewhat early night since the plan for the next two days was...

Yosemite!
The most awesome national park played host as the wedding party headed up for an overnight trip. We lucked out into getting a recently canceled room at the Yosemite Lodge, which usually requires extremely early bookings, more so for the most popular Yosemite weekend of the year. With the popularity came a ton of cars as we inched our way around the valley to our place right next to the picturesque Yosemite Falls:



After a restful night, we then headed out to the Mist Trail on Monday, which was thankfully much nicer as most of the crowd headed home that day, leaving us a relatively empty trail on a gorgeous day. The first stop was Vernal Falls, which soaks hikers in mist as they navigate their way to the top, where we devoured our packed lunch of cheese, salami, and crackers while we enjoyed our surroundings.



The final stop was up a more grueling segment to the top of Nevada Falls, where we relaxed for another half hour and enjoyed the view of the valley floor. Before starting on our descent, we took a brief respite in the icy cold waters:



The episode included the highlight reel of the trip as Richard lost his footing and miraculously bounced back on his way to a rock in the middle of the river:

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Thanks to everyone who came out and made it a memorable weekend!!

We believe

Sore as can be

It's a little frightening when you are cognizant of factors that make you feel old. A classic one is when you catch yourself saying to kids, "Wow, you're so much bigger than when I last saw you." It's the standard old person line to a young kid when you have nothing better to say.

I finally got off my lazy butt this weekend and exercised, which is the source of all my aching and now blogging from the comfort of my bed. After our weekly Bible study small group on Saturday, we hit the tennis courts for an hour or so of tennis under the now summer-like sun, which was already enough to exhaust me. Looking forward to a relaxing nap at a park as part of a Cinco de Mayo gathering only resulted in more athletic activity to the tune of a lot of grass volleyball and a smattering of football. After lunging and running for a couple hours, I couldn't jump anymore without it being accompanied by a twinge in the calves or a cramp in my feet. Pretty pathetic. Throw in the fact that most of the gathered folks were '06 and (gasp!) '07 at Stanford, and I was downright ancient.

Fast forward to today and my entire body hurts. Being the foresightful (is that a word?) person that I am, I did all of that knowing that I had to pitch in a set of doubleheader softball games today. I thankfully got through it in one piece (and we won both games!), although I was particularly happy when the guys behind me walked after I got on base so I didn't have to run as much. I don't know how I'm going to make it up the stairs at work tomorrow.

In other news, I'm excited that Ruth and I are tentatively planning to meet up with a couple of my high school friends (Loren and Kaori, for those who know them) while we're on our honeymoon in Australia. One of the key perks to attending international school is definitely having familiar faces in a lot of places!