Road Trip...

With our extra time between school ending and Patrick's new job starting we planned to visit Linda. We then realized that maybe we could drive up the coast together over a few days. When we suggested the idea to her she immediately said she was interested. So after our weeks in California the three of us began our drive.

Day One: Soup and Solvang

 Our first stop was Andersen's for their famous slip pea soup. Linda was really looking forward to this. This was her face after her first bite! Turns out the soup isn't that good and our lunch experience was less than we imagined.

 We walked around downtown Solvang and had fun checking out the shops. We ate some Aebleskivers and got some delicious desserts from a bakery.

 After checking into the hotel we got pizza and enjoyed dinner on the beach.

 We found a bunch of cool shells and sand dollars.

Day Two: Hearst Castle

 We were all looking forward to seeing the castle. It has been on Linda's to do list for a while. Since we were excited we splurged and took two tours!

 We learned that Mr. Hearst basically collected art ranging from paintings, lamps, and tables to ceilings and so he built the house around everything.  His idea was to create a museum type home.

 We stopped to check out Big Sur after touring the castle.

Day 3: Monterrey & Santa Cruz

We ate dinner in Santa Cruz. Our hotel was pretty close to the downtown area so we walked there. We ate at Pizza My Heart. It was tasty!

For dessert Patrick found a place called Penny Ice Creamery on yelp. It was fantastic. Everything is made with local ingredients and tasted so fresh. We were able to sample some before picking our flavors. The mint tasted like real mint leaf, it was crazy.  I went with burnt cinnamon.

Linda enjoyed strawberry. It tasted like real fresh strawberries.

Patrick stuck with the classic chocolate. His was topped with marshmallow fluff and then the worker used a blow torch to toast it. After dessert we enjoyed window shopping downtown and then headed back to the hotel for the night.

California sun...

We spent a few weeks with Linda before the three of us headed up the coast.

 We hiked to the Hollywood sign on Saturday morning.

After our hike we visited Page Muesum at La Brea Tar Pitts. Tons of animals have been excavated including wolves, saber tooth cats, coyotes, bears, horses, sloths, camels, and mamoths. And by tons I mean over one million!

 We stopped at a funky little store after lunch and they had a lovely little art exhibit inside as well. Look at this picture closely, do you notice the squirrel stabbing the deer? Yes that just happened.

 Stephanie had a baby shower while we were there. I tried out some new cupcake frosting recipes and they were a hit. German chocolate and lemon with fresh raspberry icing. Linda made chicken salad sandwiches. The two ladies that put the shower together did an awesome job. It looked like a pinterest baby shower board exploded in the lady's house. It was lots of fun and Stephanie got tons of baby girl clothes which was just what she needed for baby Emery.

 We celebrated Linda's birthday early at the Carr's. We had burrellenos and a raspberry layered ice cream cake.

 We got to see this guy and Stephanie a lot. He has some pretty sweet dancing moves.

We went to the tide pools and beach one day after kayaking.

Patrick taking out the dead tree in the backyard. He also fixed a toilet, made a budget excel file for Linda, and then updated our budget file.

 

It was a pretty relaxing trip and nice to spend so much time with family and with each other. It was also nice that we got to eat insane amounts of Mexican food  :)

I ♥ Patrick...

Our 4th Anniversary celebration was a day full of awesome! We spent most of the afternoon at the aquarium.

This little lorikeet attacked Patrick as we entered into the exhibit. It landed on his hand first and was drinking the nectar like crazy!

We were able to touch rays and sharks in three pools. Patrick loved it and it made me a little nervous.

 They replaced part of shark egg case with plastic allowing us to see the baby shark as it was developing. So cool!

 I really liked all the jellyfish. We even got to touch moon jellies.

 We got to touch these guys too. The sea cucumber was really squishy even though it looks spiky.

 Patrick's favorite was this crab. We thought it looked like an anime creature.

 We were looking at the fish and a lady came over and asked to borrow our camera to take a picture of us since she thought we looked cute. Thanks random lady!

We also saw tons of other fish, frogs, penguins, seals, otters :)

For dinner I found a Peruvian restaurant through yelp and was a little nervous since we don't really eat that type of food. But turns out it was a lot like food from Ecuador so Patrick recognized many things on the menu from his mission. Everything was tasty and we were happy we tried it.

To end our celebration we shared s'more fondue. It was a great way to end the day!