Birthday Suprize
Yesterday was my 27th birthday. Tracy has been conspiring for a few weeks on a neat birthday for me. I tried not to guess it like last year...but I wasn't even close this time.
She got me up at 7:30 am to hit the road north in the Civic. No idea where we were headed, but I was starting to think she was gonna try to push me out of a plane. After an hour or so, I got a sneaking suspicion that David had some involvement...since Tracy had some secret e-mail thing going and I figured that it was probably with a family member. But she was still not telling me what we were doing. Until we got lost. Finally she spilled the street address to me to help out with the directions. Getty Drive. Well, I think I know where we're going now. Cool! Tracy had set it up so David and Anne would meet us at the Getty, then we'd head to Malibu for some hiking, head downtown for some Dinner and then finally back to David's for cake. How cool! I haven't seen my brother in a long time! So the Getty is the bomb. I took lots of pics. It's such a pretty place. While explaining to Anne some gemoetric math type stuff, David got busted by a guard for touching a 600 year old ceramic tile arrangement. To which he responded under his breath "it was worth it." Hehe. We saw dozens of HUGE extremely old paintings, most of which were painted back in the 1600's. My feet were killing me after a few hours so we went out to the gardens and relaxed for a while and took some more neat pictures. I sat on the damp grass and contracted a mild case of 'swamp ass' for the rest of the afternoon. Then we looked at some more sculpture, had some lunch and decided it was time to go. I highly recommend going to the Getty if you haven't been.
So then we drove North up the 101 to Malibu Creek State Park, a 4000 acre park west of L.A. It's where MAS*H was filmed, so it "looks like Korea". Except we turned on Malibu Road or something like that and ended up just south of where we needed to be, but still at what we thought was the park. Signs pointed us to a place to park the car and hike so we tried it out anyhow. It was deserted and kinda scary. One of the first things muttered on the trail was "we're gonna die out here", followed by the discovery of a building with no windows, a 15 foot wall around the permiter, razor wire and another chain link fence around the whole thing. It could be nothing other than a high security prison filled with raving lunatics. At one point, we were hiking along merrily and all of a sudden a horse comes trotting up behind us and nearly ran over Tracy and Anne. Anne petted it for a bit and then it farted when it walked away. After a while, we just turned around, the trail didn't seem to go anywhere. We made it out alive. I think a few chiggers hitchiked out on my leg tho.
Since it was too late to get dinner downtown, we decided to eat closer, sooner. The drive down the coast was beautiful...the sun was setting, it had turned out to be a very nice day, despite the June Gloom. We had excellent meals at a little Italian place in Malibu that David picked out on-the-fly. The food, service and atmosphere were all great.
After dinner, we headed back to David's for cake and hang time. David and Anne played piano and cello for us, while Tracy took pics of me opening my birthday presents. Mom called right as we were lighting the cake, and she got to sing along and hear me blow out the candles.
The drive back to SD wasn't bad either, mostly because we left at 11:30pm on a Friday night.
All in all, it was a great day. Now, I need to start thinking up something equally cool for Tracy next year. :)