alcatraz | Nos Klatos

The Road to Neverland

When a waiter shouts out “You again?” when entering a restaurant you know that you are cultivating a serious addiction. After our obsession with Yogurtland’s Frozen Yogurt aka Froyo and Starbucks’ Frappoccino (Iced Cappuccino which Antony accidently picked up at the airport simply by ordering coffee with the funniest name), we hitted some other fixations in San Fransisco… and we hitted some of them pretty hard.

The Cheesecake Factory

Silke and Antony wanted to share their sweet thoot cravings for cheesecake with the Nos Klatos party. Little did they know that the Cheesecake Factory was there to turn their perception of the culinar world as we know it around. For a grand total of three times we faithfully waited in line for 45 minutes in what must be the most crowded restaurant we’ve ever been to.

While we grew fatter and fatter, we had to come up with alternatives and solutions, wich lead us to the next set of hooks.

The Go Pro

The Go Pro is a little camera that you can mount on about almost everything and must be the greatest gadget in the modern world. Right now we’re making our decisions about where we are headed based on where the Go Pro leads us to shoot some stunning footage.

American Trampoline Dodgeball

This is our most recent and by far biggest fetish. After a match of bowling in an uptown San Fransisco neigborhood, we hitted a place called the house of air. The house of air simply is a former storehouse that has been renovated to cover the floor with trampolines back to back. Once you enter the Trampoline Dodgeball court, no sport will ever be the same.

After our stay in San Fransisco we headed for Lake Tahoe. Happily trading our occupied Big City Life for the road, we felt as if our adventure finally had begun. Relieved that we shut the gates of mordor behind us, we found that corporate america was chasing us as our first stop at Lake Tahoe required a 5 dollar fee simply to gain access to the beach.

Apart from that uncool setup, Lake Tahoe offered us breath-taking scenic views, blue skys and the sun burning hot on our skins. Our hotel was located on top of a mountain, which functions as a ski-resort during wintertime. We saw several signs that told us ‘don’t suprise bears’…. To tell the truth, peekaboo’ing wildlife isn’t really our thing.

Since we left our penthouse apartement in San Fransisco, the Jetset Lifestyle is what we signed up for. Today we started our day at the pool, relaxing in the sun. In the afternoon we traded that pool for the beach (cheap bastards as we are, we found one that didn’t require an access fee by driving twenty minutes further down the lake). At night we hitted the hottub with a bottle of Malibu.

A journey is like a marriage. Travelling in group means being married to one another for a short time. So it safe to say that the learning curve on all things marriage was pretty steep. They say that marriage is give and take; you’d better give it to her or she’ll take it anyway.
These are the little things that frustrated us in eachother from living close together:

– Silke her failed attempts to catch just about anything we threw in her directions.

– Silke and Klaas had to trade in there ‘European names’ for the real thing since no American can prononce the names they got from their mamma’s and pappa’s. After a mix-up on their coffee cups at a Starbucks drive-by we now call them by their new American ‘trucker-friendly’ names: Silcoo and Calls.

– ‘Social media kills social reality’. Since Liesbeth is the only one in our party with no iphone she doesn’t have anything on her hands in the quiet moments. She found that traveling with wifi-addicts sure is alot of fun:

– When we first enter a new appartement the first important question is whether there is a WIFI-connection setup or not.

– Checking in at a hotel doesn’t happen anymore trought the lobby, but first takes place on the foursquare app (as does every check in; from restaurants to monuments and everything in between that can stoke your facebook-friends’ jealousy.

– ‘Bedtime’ doesn’t mean that we all go to sleep, but usually envolves taking our iphones for another 60 minutes of sweet talk under the sheets.

In a reaction to these phenonemons, Liesbeth unfollowed us on all social media platforms.

Tomorrow our party continues at Yosemite National Park, which name stays unpronounceable to many of us (Liesbeth cultivated the worst accent on this one). We will keep you updated…

Don’t Stop Believing

Let’s start where we finished last time…our last day in Los Angeles.

Sunday, July 1st. Euro cup finals. With two of our Nos Klatos members being huge soccer fans we had no other plans that day than finding a place where we could watch the game live. In our case, with the time zone difference, that ment at 12pm. An odd Mexican bar in Venice Beach seemed the perfect spot to do that. We had our predictions ready and after changing seats for at least four times we were more than ready to get our Euro vibe alive. Luckely, for some of us, we also had the X Games Street Skateboarding Finals on one of the television screens. With Spain winning the finals 4 to 0 against Italy, Klaas and Silke their day was already more than perfect and while Sheckler took silver in X Games we could leave LA with a good feeling.

Driving along the Pacific Coast away from Los Angeles we all got excited for the adventures that would come our way. And the change from a big city to a small town came just in time. Santa Barbara is like this really cosy, cool surftown just outside LA. The vibe that goes around in this city is one that goes straight to the heart, a feeling that we’re going to cherish. After 24 hours at the city of Santa Barbara we moved a little bit up to El Capitan Canyon (still located in Santa Barbara), a nature lodging campground. And as we drove past the entrance we accidentaly arrived at the El Capitan State Beach, which is up untill now the best thing that has happened to us. An amazing beach with zero tourism. Epic lightning and breathtaking views that filled our hearts with joy. While walking along the beach we saw wild dolphins swimming only a few feet away from us and with that some of us ended our stay at the beach with a sunset swim session. Although there were moments that we felt like Jack Dawson hanging on that door in the water, it was more than worth it.
While arriving at the campground none of us has ay idea what to really expect of it, but with a campfire, swimming pool and premade BBQ-meals we felt like we arrived in heaven.
And with late night evening talks around our fire we all agreed that the past hours were just perfect.

With a bit of pain in our hearts we left our little magic place the next morning to cruise along Big Sur to end up in Santa Cruz, where we would encounter our first couchsurfing experience. At the beginning we weren’t exactly sure if Klaas had really booked through couchsurfing or if he had mistyped and ended up at cocksurfing but all together they were pretty relaxed people that made sure we had a great place to stay at. July 4, 6 am, we were all planning on going to embrave to waves at Santa Cruz but with one of us feeling sick, the fact that it was raining and that the waves weren’t really good afterall, Antony ended up being the only brave soul going for a surfsession.

The weather over at Santa Cruz made it clear to us that there was no reason to stay any longer so around noon we said goodbye to our couchsurfing hosts and moved up to San Francisco – with a legendary stop at In-n-out Burger and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts – Our second place we booked through airbnb.com, a 2 bedroom penthouse with skyline views. And I have to say … gosh this place just looks picture perfect. So right now we’re kinda feeling like multi millionaires – or at least some of us. Knowing that the first day that we arrived here was the fourth of July we had one plan for that day in San Francisco : see the fireworks t the Golden Gate Bridge. The fireworks weren’t all that spectacular and the songs that went along with it were kinda nerve-racking but it still was a great way to start our San Francisco adventures…

Adventures that included the long hike over the Golden Gate Bridge, Alamo Square, The Palace of Fine Arts, Alcatraz… and back-to-back movie nights.