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Last Days in San Jose
Leaving San Jose was a bit sad for us. Not only because we had to sell our coast-mobile dream car 🙁 but also because we really had made some significant connections there with people who we were now close to. We also both really loved the area – with a special fondness for San Francisco in particular. We spent our last few weeks in SJ re-visiting old favourites (especially making sure we got our fill of Mexican food). Let me take you through our farewell to San Jose in a few photos…
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Hwy 1 Road Trip – Part 1 (Hearst Castle)
For those who don’t know, State Route 1 (SR 1) is a major north-south state highway that runs along most of the Pacific coastline of the U.S. state of California. (from Wikipedia) “California State Route 1” by User:NE2 – Email me if you would like a copy of the GIS data I created for the highways.. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Since moving to California, Nick and I have had it on our list to drive highway 1 all the way north, and all the way south. We drove the northern portion during our road trip to Seattle in February of 2013, and we’d driven as far south as Monterey together. Earlier this year, we…
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Napa wine tour
Back at the beginning of May (omg, I know, I’m so behind on blog posts), Nick’s mom and two of her friends came down to visit us! We had such an awesome time showing them around the Bay Area. We took them to many of our favorite places and a couple of new places as well – namely, to Napa! Nick and I hadn’t been up to Napa yet, despite visiting a few other wine areas (Sonoma, Livermore) several times. Napa has a reputation for being a little snobbier and a little more expensive than the other regions (since they were the first big region and have a lot of…
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Tourist adventuring with P&K&D
Back in April, some very good friends of ours from Canada came to visit for a week. We had a busy week showing them around and taking them to do some of our most favorite things around here – beach, hikes, SF, and sports. The day after they arrived and got all settled in, the first order of business was a surfing lesson in Santa Cruz….at 7am. Santa Cruz is about a 45 minute drive from us so that meant we left at 5:45am to be sure to be there on time. It was a pretty grueling morning with a bleary-eyed stop at McDonald’s, but we made it. Not all…
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Berry Creek Falls Hike
The Berry Creek Falls loop has been on our “to hike” list for a while now, pretty much ever since the first time we went to Big Basin State Park last June. It’s rated as a strenuous, 11-mile hike with about 2,000 feet of total elevation, and we’ve overheard park rangers telling others to set aside 6-8 hours to complete the full hike. If you’re curious, you can read a lot about this hike at the following links: http://www.redwoodhikes.com/BigBasin/BerryCreek.html (beautiful photos) http://www.bahiker.com/southbayhikes/bigbasin/waterfallloop.html (bahiker.com is the bible of Bay Area hikes) http://www.everytrail.com/guide/berry-creek-falls-loop-at-big-basin-redwoods-state-park (detailed walkthrough with step-by-step instructions) We finally decided to embark on the hike this weekend. We had a huge breakfast…
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Drought
While everyone back home is dealing with ice and snow, we’ve been lucky to have absolutely beautiful sunny and warm weather here in California (sorry for swears). However, it’s not all fun and games, since California is having this beautiful weather as the result of a terrible drought. We haven’t had rain since July, and before that we hadn’t had any since January of last year. Even our cacti are dying (really – here’s a picture of the one beside our house): The National Weather Service put together this graph showing typical rain levels in California, which illustrates how bad it actually is: The scientific reason behind the drought is…
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March Updates
I’m cooking some collard greens right now!! Using this recipe. It smells absolutely DIVINE. I’ve never had collard greens before – I guess they’re a southern American thing – but the way that these smell, I think I could love them!! Another thing that we really love here are food trucks and Mexican Coke, which is made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. I guess this shouldn’t make any difference, but there definitely is some kind of different flavour about it! I don’t know if I would say it tastes more “natural”, but it’s a different taste from regular Coke- I would say less sweet, and with more “spiciness”,…
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Road Trip to Seattle & Back
I think I mentioned a while ago that Nick and I were planning to drive up to Seattle over the President’s Day weekend (Family Day weekend for those back home). Well, we did it, and survived, and we even had an amazing amount of fun despite being in a car less than a foot away from eachother for at least 7 hours a day. Honestly, I was worried I would not enjoy a road trip (it was my first), but it was SO much fun and I’d definitely do a long drive like that again! This was our planned round-trip route up the coast along highway 1 on the way…