A Sense of Accomplishment

My aunt and cousin flew over from China to spend some time in the SF Bay Area with my grandpa and also to get some stuff taken care of. Of course, I also flew over so that we could all spend time together. We all stayed in an airbnb together and we even invited my godmom’s son to stay with us since his school was nearby. I quite enjoyed being together as a strange family unit for those two weeks (not quite).

Honestly, most of what we did together is not very interesting to write about, but for me, travel is more about who I’m spending time with than what we do. We mostly drove all around the bay, running errands, visiting my granduncle, meeting people for dinner, etc. I managed to work in two museum visits into the schedule – both of which were well received, I hope. In the first week, we explored the California Academy of Sciences (Cal Academy for short). Then, in our last evening all together, we toured the Winchester Mystery House. In the one weekend we had in-between, we drove up to Tahoe (sans grandpa) and introduced skiing to everyone.

So where does my sense of accomplishment come from?

1. First, I must preface with this: even though I’ve had my driver’s license for about 10 years now, I have rarely driven in the past. But starting with the last visit, my aunt has been making me practice every time she comes over from China. So, in the beginning, I only drove in what I consider ideal situations: daylight, good weather, no traffic, mostly straight, wide roads with few traffic signals (aka highways).  Somehow, this time around, I managed to survive driving at night, in the rain, in traffic all at once! Furthermore, I was brave enough to drive inside SF and what I found was that the steep hills were not as scary as I believed them to be. Finally, I drove 50% of the way to Tahoe and only briefly on the way back, but it was all on a windy, narrow strip of mountain road. I still haven’t driven on snow, but at this point, I feel like I’ve tackled everything else.
2. This time last year, I was still skiing beginner runs, even though I had technically started skiing in 2015. Technique-wise, I was good enough to move up to intermediate runs long ago, but I was too scared of heights to try. On this Tahoe trip, I was so confident on the intermediates that I was able to record video at the same time! Also, after much coaxing, I attempted my first top-to-bottom advanced run (groomed) and it wasn’t bad at all! Granted, we went to Northstar, which is known as “Flatstar”, so it was an easier black compared to other resorts, but still!!
3. Okay, this has little to do with the trip itself and it was more of a timing thing, but I finally have an in-person interview somewhere! Hope everything will go swimmingly and I can go back to having a more “normal” life.