Summer Plans

So now that I've bought the tickets, I suppose it's official: I'll be heading out to the west coast in early July. I'm taking a week and a half-ish off and flying out to Seattle and LA to see two of my old college buddies.

The first leg will take me to the Seattle/Redmond area to stay with Dustin, a fellow I met in my second year of college and took most of my classes with from there on out. Currently he's employed at Microsoft working on program testing. I've never actually been to the Pacific Northwest, but I've always imagined that I'd like it. I do like the sun, but a place where it rains every day and stays in a relatively mild temperature range year round? Sounds good to me, at least for a little while. My friend Brittany lives in the Tacoma area, so I plan on going out for coffee (I don't drink it, but this is what normal people do, right?) and catching up while I'm in the area anyway.

On the seventh, I'll be plunked in the middle of LAX and hopefully Scott'll be around to give me a ride back to his house in Santa Monica. I've only been out California way once, on a long, long trip to the Sacramento and San Francisco areas when I was about thirteen. Driving from Minnesota to California was kind of a drag, but we did hit up a lot of things on the way - Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and Reno, NV. Thus far, I've done very little research on the things I can do in either place - any suggestions?

Things are looking up! I just realized this trip was just over a month away, so I figured I'd better start getting prepared (and buy tickets).