After a nice full 9 hours of sleep, we met up with Saamra, Katie’s old co-worker, for breakfast at St. Francis’s Creamery. Just two days prior, Saamra had been traveling the world for 4 months and gave us several stories, tips and advice on enjoying 100% of our adventure. Best of luck at Stanford Saams!
We got on the road south just before noon, and we made our way down to our free beer waiting at the Tied house in Mountain View, CA. Dermot sampled three of the original beers, and then we made our way to one of Katie’s favorite old burrito joints, La Costana. We picked up super burritos as well as Jordi, our French boy piñata.
Since we were in the neighborhood, we made our #2 Google office stop at the headquarters in Mountain View, CA. We ate our burritos, checked our email, and picked up some snacks for our trip out to Marq’s mountain bungalow in Sequoia National Park in Three Rivers, CA.
After a few necessary pit stops, such as Target to get candy to make Jordi our piñata 1 lb to 35 lbs, we arrived just after sunset to Marq’s Labor Day Party. We got to meet several of Marq and Dawn’s friends—including Michael’s girlfriend Natalie who went to the same college as Katie! Small world—they have a few friends in common, and she was also able to confirm the story about Billy Joel’s new wife being a 2003 Miami Grad, Katie.
Due to the weather being 120 degrees during the day, it was still around 95 degrees after the sun went down. We had a delicious dinner including bbq’ed bratwursts, chicken and Marq’s potato bake. Jordi was a huge hit (no pun intended); however, he started to give some attitude, as you will find from the slideshow above. Our dreams of hanging Jordi from the basketball net fell short, when Jordi accidentally ran his head into Michael’s knee and his head exploded… and then continued to jump to his demise from the deck.
Needless to say everyone loved the dessert of mini dark chocolate bars, sprees, nerds and we continued to enjoy Labor day with a game of celebrities (where you have to guess the name on the card) – with a twist where you have three rounds: 1.) similar to taboo, 2.) can only say one word to have people guess the celebrity and 3.) Charades
Due to the heat, most of us had a huge pajama party in Marq and Dawn’s air conditioned house, along with the 5 dogs…. It was an absolutely fabulous holiday!