This weekend Amanda and I went up to Chester, CA (Where? Here.) to work on Sara's parent's cabin. In exchange for us providing manual labor, her parents paid for our lodging and all our meals. We shared a place with Sara, her husband Jeff, and their AWESOME dog, Dora. The place we stayed at was...interesting. I'll just say that before we arrived, Sara told us "I apologize a thousand times over for the place we're staying." It wasn't actually that bad, but it definitely had its quirks. But hey, it was free!

We arrived late Friday night and hung out with Sara and Jeff for a while before going to bed. We woke up early Saturday morning, and after getting dressed (and after I had spaghetti for breakfast because the only other breakfast option was cereal with lactose-y milk), we headed over to the cabin construction site. The day was spent mostly doing cleanup at the construction site (wood scraps, tar paper, rocks, tree branches) and doing runs to the dump. At one point Amanda overturned a rock and found a bunch of huge ants and their little grub-y babies, so I covered them in bug spray, then felt bad about it when they instantly died. I'm not sure what I expected to happen. We took a break in the late morning to watch a cattle drive down Main Street towards the rodeo grounds. It was pretty much like it sounds. After we finished up at the cabin, we all headed down to the lake to do some swimming (or wading in my case), then went back into town for dinner, followed by a chocolate-dipped soft serve cone for dessert. Yeah, life is hard.

Sunday was a much shorter work day, though I did get to use an electric saw to cut up some wood scraps and a belt sander to sand down some of the big logs inside the cabin. Yay, power tools! After about a half day of work, we had lunch a bit outside of town, then headed out. On the way out, we stopped by a waterfall to hang out for a bit. Jeff and I tried fishing until the line got tangled, but we didn't catch anything. On the way back to the Bay Area, Amanda and I stopped at Picante in Berkeley for dinner, and to wait out some sort of waste spill on 80 west. The Yelp reviews bounce from 1 star to 5, but I really liked my chicken tostada salad.

All in all, a great, relaxing weekend. Hopefully we'll head up sometime later to help them out again (and hopefully I'll remember to bring a swim suit). Pictures coming soon.

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