On Saturday, October 16th I spent nearly the whole day out of the house:
- 7:20 — Apple Watch buzzed with alarm, rose out of bed and got dressed
- 7:30 — Prepared myself a big bowl of Organics granola + almond milk
- 7:35 — Realized that most of the others had bailed out on our planned Castle Rock hike @ 8am.
- 8:05 — Called my friend Eric to ask about the hike, got no answer
- 8:15 — Walked to the original Calabazas Park meetup point in the slim hopes that there would be someone there to hike with. (There wasn’t.)
- 8:50 — Went through a majority of my physical therapy stretches
- 9:04 — Got a text message response from Eric; the two of us agreed to meet at 9:45am
- 9:20 — Joined my parents for their morning coffee
- 9:44 — Got picked up by Eric Chung
- 9:55 — Had a second breakfast at Jack in the Box on De Anza. They gave me the wrong order (“Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit” instead of “Supreme Crossaint”), but I didn’t complain.
- 10:10 — A heads coin flip decided that Eric and I would go to Castle Rock as planned (the other option was Valley Fair / Santana Row)
- 10:40 — Parked at the Big Basin Vista Point and started a hike down the Skyline Trail
- 12:00 — Finished hike and drove over to downtown Saratoga
- 12:15 — Explored downtown Saratoga for 15 minutes, almost ate lunch at Big Basin Burger Bar
- 12:55 — Arrived at Lanzhou Hand Pulled Noodles where Eric and I were joined by Robert Sui
- 1:20 — Found a bench at Calabazas Park to eat our beef noodle soups. All of us went for their signature “Lanzhou Handpulled Noodles”; Eric and Robert got large flat noodles and I got regular round.
- 2:00 — Drove over to Monsters of Rock smoke shop
- 2:25 — Eric, Robert and I were joined by Velu Ganapathy; drove over to TP Tea
- 2:35 — Ran into Patrick Tiet and his wife Diane at TP Tea. The two were in town from Foster City to visit Patrick’s parents.
- 3:15 — Finally got our TP Tea orders. The Mulberry Cheese Creama I tried was a little sweet, but otherwise great.
- 3:20 — Drove back to Calabazas Park. Chilled and chatted on the shaded baseball bleachers for over an hour
- 4:40 — Parted ways with Velu; Robert invited the rest of us to Sunnyvale to watch a movie in his shared rental
- 6:40 — Finished watching Kate (released in September 2021, directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan) on Netflix. (FYI, Boom Boom Lemon is not a real drink.)
- 7:02 — Arrived back home
- 7:10 — Started winding down (took a shower, browsed the webs, wrote in my diary blog, read Dune, etc.)
- 10:15 — Went to bed
