A few lovely things for today, when I’m back in Arizona for 11 days in a row, the longest unbroken stretch since May.
A few lovely things for today, when I’m back in Arizona for 11 days in a row, the longest unbroken stretch since May.
It’s funny how you move to a new place, and for awhile every day is an exciting discovery, but then eventually, that new place becomes just the place where you live. When we first moved to California, we were exploring new places all the time, but after awhile we settled down to regular life, and most of our travels were to SoCal, or out of state.
Angel Island has been on my list since I first found out we were moving and started creeping for fun things to do, but somehow it never happened. The nice thing is that we still have friends and family in the area and we go back to the Bay pretty often, so just because we haven’t done something yet (I’m looking at you Alcatraz) doesn’t mean we won’t.
We ended up going to Angel Island this summer, finally, with Derek’s brother, his girlfriend, and their daughter. We left from Sausalito (one of my favourite places) and took the ferry across on a beautiful sunny Sunday in July.
The ferry ride was $15/person, plus $1 per bike. If you are thinking of visiting and you have a bike, definitely bring it. Rentals are pretty expensive, so $1 to bring your own bike on the ferry is a steal.
When you land at Angel Island there is a little pier area with a couple little restaurants (some of them look really good, and the prices weren’t terrible either) and a place to rent bikes. They also sell wine, which is a useful tip for after the bike ride is over.
When you first start riding up you are on a narrow little dirt path that is very steep, and you last about 15 seconds before you get off and start pushing your bike, and wondering when the next ferry back leaves.
But once you get to the top of that little area, the path widens out, and is paved, and is generally not very steep. There were lots of families doing the bike ride together, so it’s not super difficult but there were definitely a couple of times when I was exhausted but had to peddle really hard to beat a little girl up a hill. Not today, Pigtails.
The only part of the ride that is really hard is when you are around the opposite side, with the best view of San Francisco. In order to get to the magnificent view of the Golden Gate Bridge, you have to ride up the side of a hill that recently made a cameo in Everest. It feels impossible, but the view once you make it to the top is worth it.
After the hill, it’s mostly flat or downhill. It’s really the last place where you need to put in any effort, so keep telling yourself that as you struggle for breath and turn the colour of a cherry tomato.
Angel Island used to be an old military base, so there are some really neat old buildings to look at as you pedal, and we had a rare hot day in San Francisco, so we stopped and hung out on one of the beaches while we ate lunch.
If you are planning on checking out Angel Island, especially in the summer, make sure you bring sunscreen, there isn’t a lot of shade, and lots of water. Once you leave the pier area, there isn’t anywhere to get more water, although there are some picnic tables at the top of the aforementioned mammoth hill.
The BEST thing about our Angel Island trip is that my brother-in-law proposed to his girlfriend while we were there! So not only was it a beautiful fun day, but now I get a new sister, and I get to wear this dress to a wedding in the Spring. Wins all around.
And speaking of things I haven’t gotten to do in California yet, we are still deciding whether or not to spend Christmas there (I’m 28 and I’ve never not been with my family. Yes, I’m a baby.) but if we do, I am slightly cheered at the prospect of spending a few days camping in Big Sur between Christmas and New Years. We may die of exposure in our tents, but live dangerously or not at all.
We’ve been coming to Flathead Lake in Montana for almost as long as I can remember. We would load up in the motorhome when my dad got home from work, and he would drive through the night.
We would wake up in the morning in Montana, at the campgrounds in Big Arm, and we would spend two weeks boating, having campfires, swimming and feeding the geese.
About 8 years ago my parents bought a cabin in Lakeside, and we’ve been spending most of our summers and a lot of our Christmases here ever since.
In all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever spent any actual time in Glacier National Park, although I do remember driving through it, and stopping to play in the waterfalls along the Road to the Sun.
So this summer, on a day too cold to spend on the boat, my mom and I drove the hour and a half to the park to go hiking. The park is absolutely gorgeous, and there are so many hiking trails and gorgeous lakes to choose from. We ended up going up to the top, to the Logan’s Pass trail. It’s a long, winding drive to the top, but the view is spectacular.
We were dressed in light layers, and we brought our bear bell and bear repellent, just in case, although if I ever had a bear come close enough to use it I would probably just lay down and wait for it to finish me off.
We stopped at the gift shop at the top to see if they had any snacks (they had these AMAZING oatmeal chocolate chips the size of your face, and I ate it in about two bites) and then we set off. We kind of randomly picked a trail and started walking.
The beginning of the trail was a wooden boardwalk through fields of multi-coloured wildflowers, but eventually it became a dirt trail with puddles everywhere from the runoff, and it got snowier and colder as we got closer.
My feet got wet, which wasn’t a problem at first, but after we’d been outside for a few hours and it started getting windier and colder I thought it was going to be Alive all over again.
The first animal we saw was a Marmot, it looks like an enormous fluffy gopher, but it was just chilling along the side of the trail so we left it alone.
The end destination of our hike was Hidden Lake, but we didn’t really know how far it was, so we kept ambling along. We passed a few people having a snowball fight, tons of waterfalls and a few little lakes before we got to the viewpoint.
When we were almost there we ran into one of the park rangers, and he told us he had seen a grizzly bear with her cubs down by the lake.
We walked for about 10 more minutes, and then we started to see little white dots moving down the mountains across an open field. They were mountain goats, there were 4 of them, and they were coming straight towards us.
We watched them for awhile and then went to continue on, when all of a sudden one of them popped up right in front of us on the trail, about 5 feet away. I’m not sure if mountain goats are dangerous, but he did have horns, so we tried to give him some space, but it was really cool to see him up so close.
We made it to the Hidden Lake Viewpoint, the view was amazing, and we did get to see the bears, although they were so far away that it was like a brown dot with two smaller brown dots walking around by the lake, which is fine because that’s about as close as I want to be to a grizzly bear in the wild anyway.
Eventually it started getting really cold and windy, so we made the trek back down, and headed for home, or more accurately, to the Moose for pizza. It was a really fun day, but there is so much to see in the park that I’d need at least a week to do all the hikes and see all the of the beautiful views.
There are so many amazing places there, like St.Mary Lake and hundreds of hiking trails, but there’s always next summer.
We were in L.A. last weekend for a birthday party and visiting some of The Boy’s family. On Sunday morning we got up early (we left Long Beach at 5:30 am, nobody knows why) and drove to Laguna to Thousand Steps Beach.
We were there for sunrise, it was pretty empty except for a few people doing yoga and some surfers and boogie boarders. I think it gets pretty busy there later on so it was nice to chill out and enjoy the quiet.
Thousand steps is a little misleading, it’s probably not even a quarter of that, so I wore my runners and brought a bottle of water, expecting a treacherous climb, but I wasn’t worried after Pura Lempuyang last year. That actually was 1,700 steps, and that was only once you were at the very top. So this wasn’t quite the workout I was expecting.
We walked down the beach to the end to watch the surfers and check out the tide pools, they are man made, with cement around them, and they are tucked away in the back corner of the beach. It’s such a great idea, I’m surprised there aren’t more around.
The whole cove around the beach is filled with the most amazing houses, it would be the best view to wake up to every day.
Before we left, we walked down to the other end of the beach to check it out, and we saw a viking, Deadpool, and some kind of princess fighting with the cops because they had slept on the beach (it was Long Beach Comic Con last weekend).
They were yelling, and I’m pretty sure the viking got arrested, but it was pretty hard to take his righteous indignation seriously when he was wearing a horned helmet and fur vest.
After the beach we grabbed breakfast at a little restaurant with a beach view in Laguna, and then headed for home. We ended up driving down the PCH instead, and added an extra 45 minutes to our drive, but it was worth it for the views, and to be by the ocean for a little bit longer.
We basically decided then and there that we don’t care where we go after Arizona, but it needs to be near the sea.
This summer I was lucky enough to spend a week in North Dakota visiting my sister and her family. I don’t remember the last time I was able to do that, but it has definitely been a few years.
And even though North Dakota is about the last place in the world you want to be in the winter (unless you are bundled up by the fireplace drinking Rumchata), it sure is pretty in the summer.
A few pictures from my favourite place with my favourite people. I spent almost a month in Montana this summer boating, surfing and drinking Twisted Tea.
Summer is not even officially over (and honestly I live in Arizona, so it is ever really NOT summer?) but I already can’t wait for next year.
I recently spent a couple of weeks back in the Bay area, working out of our San Francisco office, and I was reminded of how much I love that city, especially because the weather was amazing, and all I wanted to do was be outside.
That got me thinking about other times I’ve been there, and things that have happened, so here, in no particular order, are the most memorable things that have happened to me in SF.
-The time I walked around a corner to see a chubby, bearded man standing in front of me wearing nothing but a fuzzy purple vest (it was Bay to Breakers.)
-The time I was walking down market and a random man tried to spit on my sister and I, and then a big group of large scary looking men standing nearby offered to kill him for us.
-The time I was walking down a busy street and a man was standing off to the side, masturbating.
-When I first started working in the city and I was lonely and friendless and would walk from 2nd street all the way to Haight because there was this little store that had the best Gingersnap cookies. I would get one and wander through the thrift stores looking at old jewellery.
-The time I was walking down the street on a cold, rainy day, and a random man stopped and gave me his umbrella.
-That time we did a Halloween bar crawl in North Beach dressed as a peacock, a parrot, a hippy, a pirate, a banana and Psy from Gangnam Style.
-That time I was walking to AsiaSF and came around a corner to find the coolest building ever, covered in graffiti with furniture hanging out the windows.
– The Avon Walk for Breast Cancer I did with my mom and sisters. The route took us all over the city and across the Golden Gate up into Marin county. Definitely the best way to see the Bay.
Apparently I spend all my time walking around when I’m in the city, and I’m OK with that.
My little brother graduated from high school a few months ago, and we were able to get family pictures done for the first time since our wedding. Love these so much.
On our last full day on Kauai (we flew out later that evening) we did the Holo Holo Na Pali coast boat tour. There are a few different options, but we ended up picking that tour because we would get to go over to Ni’ihau.
Ni’ihau is another Hawaiian island, it’s called the Forbidden Island because nobody outside of the people who live there are allowed to go. You need a special written invitation to visit, and it’s very hard to get one.
The Holo Holo tour doesn’t land on Ni’ihau, but it does take you on a cruise around the island, and then stops for snorkeling at the crater just off the coast. The crater is supposed to be amazing to snorkel because the water is very clear, and it’s a sheltered area so there is great visibility and lots of fish.
The tour leaves from the South side of the island, and at 7:45 am so we had to leave our place at 6:30 to get there on time. We arrived a little early and milled around a bit. After check in and a speech from our captain, we were off. There were about 40 of us on the boat, but it was plenty big enough, at least at first.
It wasn’t the nicest day, it was actually kind of cloudy and windy, but the weather was quickly forgotten once we pulled out of the harbour and encountered a pod of wild Spinner dolphins. The ride to the start of the Na Pali coast was about an hour, and they chased the boat the whole way. By the time we were almost there, it was getting pretty windy, and everyone at the front of the boat was getting drenched from huge waves coming over the front.
My sister and I decided to embrace it, and went to the front to get soaked and ride out the bumps. It was really fun for awhile, but eventually one of the deckhands came to get us off the front, because the waves were getting huge and apparently we were in danger of getting catapulted off the front.
That’s when things started to get a little weird. Everyone was clustered inside or at the back of the boat to try to stay warm and dry, but then people started to get sea sick from the waves. By the time we got to the coast, about 1/4 of the people on the boat were sick. I was seasick one time on a ferry in Cozumel, when I was about 13, and it was scarring enough that I am pretty much religious about taking Gravol before going on a boat on the ocean.
Once we got to the coast we were sheltered a little bit, and we slowed down to enjoy the view (it was gorgeous), so most people started to feel better. The sun came out, and we had a delicious lunch. Unfortunately, the captain had told us at the beginning of the day that because of the wind he would make a call later about whether or not we’d be making the journey across to Ni’ihau, and I was pretty devastated when he decided we couldn’t go because too many people were sick.
But we made the best of it and cruised back down the coast, and the boat stopped for snorkeling in a little cove on Kauai instead. We didn’t end up getting in because the water was super murky, and there had been shark sightings in the area, and based on what we’d learned about sharks a few days earlier, I felt like drinking beer on the boat was the better option.
The day was basically saved for me by the crew, they were a group of local Kauai guys, and we spent the day hanging out with them, and hearing all their crazy stories about their families and life on Kauai. One of their mothers had broken into their ex-girlfriend’s house and threatened her with a knife for trying to take his kid to live on the mainland.
Kauai is so small, and everybody knows everybody else, so there were definitely some interesting tales.We ended up having a blast with them, and they let us sneak into the beer/wine stash a little early since we weren’t getting in the water.
Overall the tour itself was great, we just had bad luck with weather and with people who hadn’t been out on a boat before and didn’t know to take precautions against seasickness.
If you are going to do this tour, book it as soon as you can on your trip. When we arrived in the morning they gave everyone the option of waiting and going on a different day when the weather was better, but it was our last day so we couldn’t.
If you book it on your second or third day, you can reschedule if it’s miserable, because you will enjoy it 10x more if the weather is nice.
On our way from Phoenix to San Francisco last weekend there were 3 things I wanted to do. One of them was to stop in at The Last Bookstore in L.A.
I read about it a couple of years ago, and had been wanting to go, but the last few times I was there I ran out of time. This time I was looking for any excuse to break up the interminable dross of 11 hours in the car, and it was just what I needed.
The Last Bookstore is in downtown L.A. As soon as I walked through the door, I was struck by what a cool place it was. It’s very big and open with rows of book shelves (obviously), and a big art installation made from paperbacks along one wall. The back right corner is dedicated to old records, and the entire upstairs section is more books, and art displays from local artists.
There is a little stage/nook area where people were cuddled up reading in big comfy chairs.They often do author readings at the store. There were so many books I wanted to get, I could have spent hours in there, but unfortunately I only had a few minutes. I ended up picking Before I Die, a closer look and compilation of all the Before I Die projects walls, all over the world.
I’d heard of the project a few years ago and had been wanting to check it out. It was between that, Letters of Note, a book based on a blog I’ve followed for ages, and an amazing looking veggie cookbook, but Before I Die won out in the end.
We ended up stopping at Griffith park for a picnic afterwards so I got to spend a couple of hours lounging in the sun reading, before we headed to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to watch Vertigo. It was a perfect few hours in L.A.
loveliness. 