Story time

Last Saturday I decided to go out to a summit to attempt a SOTA activation. It was the scrappiest SOTA activation ever, I just looked up the summit, registered an account and drove there with my wife (I was hoping to bundle geocaching which she loves with SOTA for me!)
Took with me two HTs, and Alinco DJ-MD5 and a TYT TH-UV88 and some water and snacks for the 40min drive to W6/NC-150
The first surprise was finding that I couldn't actually reach the SOTA summit because the paved road ended about 1 mile out and I didn't came prepared for the hike. Honestly it was mostly laziness but it turned out that to park in order to take the hike I needed a permit so... that was that. Still the view was amazing! I could see from there a huge chunk of the bay, the Apple circle thing, and all the way to the mountains at the east of the bay area.
So from the side of the road I decided to call CQ on 2m... and I made a contact! Actually I made a contact to a guy that was actually doing SOTA activation too! He was at W6/NC-338 at about 40 miles away! I was pretty stocked because that was the first simplex communication I've made and also because I didn't know if SOTA was something that was still active, so contacting another ham doing SOTA was pretty awesome!
I then switched to 70cm and called CQ and made contact with a guy in saratoga, about 12 miles away!
It was simple but a really awesome experience and from the moment I made that first simplex contact I was hooked! Everything else I've done before that was working repeaters and that didn't feel that exciting to me...
So in the end I didn't ended up doing a SOTA activation but ended up being a chaser which I think is still pretty cool! Next time I'm getting ready for the hike to activate that summit!!
Anyways, just wanted to share the short story with y'all.
73!