Climbing trees and other things

So, yesterday I got to visit a couple of friends of mine, and we decided to go spend the day wandering around doing whatever we felt like and wherever the day happened to take us, which was absolutely awesome. It's been a while since I've just hung out with people and wandered around all day like that. It started off with going to a bookstore and buying four books: two recommendations that one of my friends gave me ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, and some book by a guy named Wodehouse, or something like that), one replacement for a book I used to have ("Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez, in Spanish of course), and a book of short stories called "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges book was something that I should have had in my book collection, but for whatever reason I didn't (I discovered this recently while organizing and alphabetizing my library for the first time), nevermind the fact that I read lots of his short stories in high school for the Spanish AP exam. So I'm very excited to have new books, although I know that I don't have any bookshelf room for them since 7.5 40" tall bookcases evidently is barely enough room to house my book collection.

After the bookstore, we picked up our other friend and wandered over to the coast and found a straw maze to wander around in, which was kinda fun. It wasn't incredibly hard, but we had fun screwing around in it anyways. There were a couple rooms in the middle that looked exactly like another room further towards the edge, so that was confusing unless you noticed that there were either more doors in the side or purple flowers in one room but not the other. We even discovered a rotating door! And we also kinda scared this little kid by sticking our hands through the hay bale really quickly from the other side.

Then we wandered down the coast, stopped on a beach and watched the parasailors and continued on towards a local college that had this climbing tree. It's this tree that someone tied a rope and a rope ladder to and so you climb up this rope ladder and keep on going up the tree until you reach the top, about 300 ft up. Only one of our group went past the rope ladder (my other friend and I are scaredycats :( ) and he ended up climbing all the way up to this natural chair formed from the trunk and 7 branches extending outwards like a spiderweb. I've decided that one of these days I need to get up the nerve to go up that tree because it sounds amazing, especially if you go up around sunset so you can see the sunset from above the trees while the forest gets increasingly shadowy below you. 

All-in-all it was an amazing day and it makes me miss living up here.  :(

In other news, I got an early Christmas present today! Mostly because I decided I couldn't wait until Christmas, so I decided to go buy it now. It's a bike! I asked my mom for one for Christmas, but we're going to be up at my parents' retirement home during Christmas and I'm flying up there because there's going to be snow on the ground and it's going to be too hard for me to drive up there. So my mom was just going to give me money for it, and I decided that I'd rather have a bike now so it'll make my commute to school easier. So whee!

Life is good and very exciting.  : )