Climbing high on a horse path

Last night was cold in the dorm and I can't help but remember what it would be like to be tucked tight into my sleeping bag right now...and I have an odd nostalgia for the comfort of my tent.  I get up at 8 am and lazily get dressed and make my pancake breakfast.  My hostel friend John and I talk while he checks out and I pay for another night.  I leave the hostel at 10:26 am for the 11 am bus.  It never comes, so I walk from the Monterey Aquarium on the bike path to Lover's Point, then past Point Pinos Lighthouse.  I continue along the pedestrian trail at Asilomar State Beach, past the Spanish Bay Golf Course and Point Joe.  I walk along a boardwalk until it ends at the Cypress Point Golf Club.  From there, I follow an equestrian trail uphill through deep sand and then it gets even more tricky.  The sand has been difficult to walk in, but now I must follow an endless amount of short wilderness trails, that are occasionally intersected by very expensive homes and roads.  I walk the paths between billion dollar homes until I reach Carmel-by-the-Sea.  One of my old housemates from Whitman, a guy named Benja was from here...I never knew it was such an upscale town.  It has taken me five and a half hours to hike 12.25 miles, because I paused many times when I was lost on the vague system of wilderness trails.  Although I was in this same area yesterday, this hike has given me a new perspective on the landscape.  A thick layer of fog has moved into the area, and the banners and signs that so lavishly decorated the golf course are now taken down.  The beach was empty and I spent most of my day wandering between the sand the uphill climbs of several narrow trails, far from the roads I traveled here yesterday.  I pay $2.25 for my two buses and get back to the hostel at 5:25 pm.  I drop my stuff off in the room and head to a vegetarian restaurant three blocks away, named Tilly Gort's.  I get the "no meatloaf" which is incredible.  It comes with a baked potato, but I too stuffed to even attempt eating it.  After I mention that I am staying in the hostel, the waitress says "hostel guests get free tea" so I order a raspberry iced tea and know instantly that I am really too stuffed to drink it all.  I waddle back to the hostel...or at least it feels like I am waddling.  I meet my new roommates: 3 German girls (2 from Southern Germany and 1 from Northern).  All of them are coming from San Francisco and have many things good and bad to say about the area.  I go to see the movie "National Treasure" with the Northern German at 9:30 pm.  We leave the hostel at 8:30 pm so that we can get gas for her rental car (a candy red Ford Mustang, which was apparently the cheapest car they had available when she went to pick it up).  Gas costs $3.26 a gallon, which seems reasonable for California prices.  Geez...when did that seem like a good deal?  We drive to Century Cinemas and buy our movie tickets, $9.25 a person because today (Monday) is a holiday, but no one seems to know which holiday it is.  How can any Monday night movie starting at 9:30 pm be marked up for a holiday price?  Why should they charge more?   She gets a slice of pizza from a nearby place that is decorated with a giant clock on the ceiling with surfboards as the minute and hour hands.  We watch six previews, all very juvenile (not a good sign) before the movie starts.  The movie theater has a Starbucks, gelato counter, and so many other crazy foods, that it is hard to remember that this is a cinema.  Weird.  The movie is good, but very predictable.  We make it back to the hostel at 12:10 am and luckily I have today's door code.

I have walked all of these areas in the last few days...today I will walk them all in a row. I wonder why I bother.