During my internship with Boeing , I have all this free time and a ton of fun people to hang out with! Sometimes during the school year I can forget how amazing it is to live in Southern California and how many fun things there are to do around here. It is way to easy to get caught up in campus life. However, EVERYONE at work gives the advice to make the most of that for as long as I can, and I intend to!
But don’t think I’ve been spending my free time laying around my empty apartment and watching Smallville. Well not all of it!
In July, my sister got married! I took a week off of work and stayed with her and her new German Shepard puppy, doing last minute planning for the wedding and honeymoon. It was a beautiful ceremony, and I made my mom cry a little bit during the maid-of-honor speech. I also sang ‘Lullabye’ by Billy Joel for the Father of the Bride dance, which our dad used to sing to us when my sister and I were little. Now she’s starting the rest of her life, with a full-time job and a house of her own. I guess that’ll be me in a year or two!
I also decided to take the time this summer and do some of the things I’ve always wanted to do, which included learning how to ride a motorcycle! I signed up for a class at Cerritos College, paid $150, and showed up on a bright, sunny Saturday at 9am to begin my training. I’ve driven a stick-shift before, but I thought it would be really difficult to get the hang of the hand-clutch and foot-gear on motorcycles. Also, the hand and foot brake combination. However, I caught on pretty quickly, and the instructors walked me through the steps: practice with the bike off, transitioning from neutral to first and letting out the clutch, then turn the bike on and let 1st gear roll you onto your toes and shift back to neutral, then roll along in first gear, walking your feet on the ground, then take you feet off the ground! and you’re off!! If I lived in any other place than Los Angeles (and a couple of other places like Boston or NYC) I would buy a bike in a heartbeat, however, I don’t feel like sharing the road with THAT many other people (who don’t use turn signals) so I’ll just keep my license in case I ever want to go joy riding out in the country. Oh! The picture shows the bike I learned on, if anyone is interested, a Kawasaki Eliminator, a smooth 250 engine.
My most recent summer adventure was this past weekend, a kayaking/camping trip to Catalina. I’ve missed out on the multiple opportunities to go to Catalina Island in the past with the Engineering Honors program and with Association of Trustee and Presidential Scholars, and I was determined to make it out there this summer and to really experience it. What’s really cool about the island is that thanks to Mr.Wrigley Gum, the majority of it is unaltered wilderness. Therefore I decided to spend a night channeling my inner Bear Grylls. I made plans with a friend who’s got all the required camping gear and we took off Saturday afternoon on the Catalina Express ferry to the little town of Two Harbors. We grabbed some essentials like water and hot chocolate, packed up our 2-person kayak rental, and hit the ocean. Now, we were headed south in the afternoon, so the wind was against us and made the water kind of choppy. However, with a good partner, good conversation, and a mutual love for songs from the 90’s, it’s not too bad, and we got there in under 2 hours. Our destination, 4.75 miles from 2 harbors, was a private, reserved campsite only accessible by boat: Paradise Cove
The site doesn’t have running water or electricity, and it doesn’t allow fire. So we cooked some mac-n-cheese-n-chicken over a little propane torch, we swam in our cove, skipped rocks, and sat back in the sand with our hot chocolate watching the annual Perseid Meteor Showers. We didn’t know that they were scheduled for that day, and for a heart-stopping moment, I thought it was an alien attack, but it was really beautiful from our campsite. So the next morning, we found our food cleverly scavenged and eaten by birds, even the uncooked macaroni, so we packed up quickly and headed back to civilization for breakfast. About half of an hour from 2 harbors, a sea lion popped up, right in front of us! I wanted to make friends, but since we didn’t have any food, he didn’t seem very interested. We’d planned on snorkeling, which is apparently pretty good, but my blisters were refusing to get back in the kayak, so instead we stayed the rest of the day around the town, sunbathing and hiking around the hills. I definitely recommend the trip to the island if you haven’t gone.
Anyway, the summer is almost over, today is the last day of my internship, and then I’ll have a whole week to sit in the sun, read books, and plan an awesome upcoming year for SWE!! Yacht Party!!
Hope your summer has been enjoyable as well! Fight On!
Haha this post was so fun! I’m glad you didn’t get attacked by aliens and I’m sad that you couldn’t befriend the sea lion. Maybe next time! 😀