So after a few days of San Francisco, Jake and I rented a car and hit the road! We cruised down the coastline on Highway 1, and stopped at a few key cities along the way, like Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Carmel-by-the-Sea. Ohhh what fun memories I have of these places as a kid!!
This is on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey...we walked down to the end and got some yummy clam chowder samples along the way! And we couldn't help but stop and visit Zoltar. Doesn't it make you think of Tom Hanks in "Big"?
This was just a beautiful sight along the way. If you look close, you can see the little heads of all the surfers out in the water tryin to catch a good wave. That water is freezing! It was amazing to see the difference in beaches when my family moved from the west to the east coast. In CA, the beaches are all down from a cliff, so you have to hike down a path or wooden steps to get there, and then there's driftwood and seaweed spotting the sand, and the water is always way cold with big waves. On the east, you have to park and then walk like a mile out to the flat beach, where the sand is spotless and the water is comparatively warm and the waves are great for body surfing. :) Fun times!
This is on the beach in Carmel, a cute, ritzy little town full of art galleries, shops and retaurants. Clint Eastwood was the mayor at one time, I believe. So we pulled in to town and noticed all these fancy, expensive cars like Bentley's and Royal Royce's (or however you spell that) and thought dang, this is a rich place. But then we realized that we were in the middle of a car show called "Tour de Elegance" that was going on for that one evening. Lucky us! The one below was ours, believe it or not. Jake went for a rental car and came back with an Eclipse, which was nice but not the best for sight seeing. :) It's fun to ride in style though.
Probably the least favorite part of the trip, but also quite memorable, was when we finished our day of driving and sight seeing in Carmel, and decided to head to our motel for the night. Jake told me it was in Seaside, which is near Monterey, so I thought we could check in and then go out on the town and have dinner. Turns out our motel was actually in Salinas, which is like an hour and a half the other direction in the middle of nowhere! So here it was, 6:00 pm in a pure Mexican agricultural town with absolutely nothing to do. haha. So we ate Chinese at the first decent place we could find, which was oddly full of Mexican Chinese food lovers! And then we spent the rest of the evening in our room watching the Olympics. :)
So after that interesting night, we headed out and journeyed to the one and only San Jose, my hometown!! I was so excited, but we didn't have a map of the city, so I got us lost right off the bat. hehe. But I wanted to show Jake some of the sights, so I took him to the one that the stupid brochure said, and that was the flea market! I remember going there as a kid and loving walking around and buying little things sometimes. but let's just say we paid the $6 for parking, walked around for 10 minutes, and were done. Hopefully Jake looked at it as a Californian cultural experience, if nothing else. Finally we got a map and I was able to find our way to my old neighborhood where I lived till I was 14. This is a pic of my cute little elementary school, Randol, where all the classrooms are accessed from the outside. Weird, huh? This is the little recess nook where we would eat our snacks and lunches and then go hit the playground!
And here is my wonderful house growing up. It's amazing how something can hold so many memories...our little one story 4 bedroom house with the treehouse in the backyard and the foothills right across the street. And this place below, Sweet Retreat, was our all time favorite ice cream place in the world. It was right down the street, across the big intersection, next to 7-11 and the chinese supermarket and Little Caesars. We'd go there as a family after every choir and band concert, and they have the best ice cream ever!
This was pretty much what I was most excited for in San Jose. haha. I got a sugar cone with cookies 'n creme and chocolate peanut butter ice cream. It's so super chunky, you'd love it!!
And here are those beautiful foothills across the street from our house. Not very nice to look at, but we sure spent lotsa time climbing them, hiking way up top, and sliding down the weeds on pieces of cardboard. How does that sound for white trash fun?? It WAS quite fun, actually, but you'd always end up with the little pricklies in your butt.
Yay for San Jose, I'm glad Jake humored me and pretended to be interested in everything I showed him, from my old schools to parks to the lake to our church building. We stayed that night with my old Bishop and his wife, the Williams, who were the nicest hosts and made the best food! We had one day left in San Francisco after that, so just wait, there are even more pictures!
This is on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey...we walked down to the end and got some yummy clam chowder samples along the way! And we couldn't help but stop and visit Zoltar. Doesn't it make you think of Tom Hanks in "Big"?
This was just a beautiful sight along the way. If you look close, you can see the little heads of all the surfers out in the water tryin to catch a good wave. That water is freezing! It was amazing to see the difference in beaches when my family moved from the west to the east coast. In CA, the beaches are all down from a cliff, so you have to hike down a path or wooden steps to get there, and then there's driftwood and seaweed spotting the sand, and the water is always way cold with big waves. On the east, you have to park and then walk like a mile out to the flat beach, where the sand is spotless and the water is comparatively warm and the waves are great for body surfing. :) Fun times!
This is on the beach in Carmel, a cute, ritzy little town full of art galleries, shops and retaurants. Clint Eastwood was the mayor at one time, I believe. So we pulled in to town and noticed all these fancy, expensive cars like Bentley's and Royal Royce's (or however you spell that) and thought dang, this is a rich place. But then we realized that we were in the middle of a car show called "Tour de Elegance" that was going on for that one evening. Lucky us! The one below was ours, believe it or not. Jake went for a rental car and came back with an Eclipse, which was nice but not the best for sight seeing. :) It's fun to ride in style though.
Probably the least favorite part of the trip, but also quite memorable, was when we finished our day of driving and sight seeing in Carmel, and decided to head to our motel for the night. Jake told me it was in Seaside, which is near Monterey, so I thought we could check in and then go out on the town and have dinner. Turns out our motel was actually in Salinas, which is like an hour and a half the other direction in the middle of nowhere! So here it was, 6:00 pm in a pure Mexican agricultural town with absolutely nothing to do. haha. So we ate Chinese at the first decent place we could find, which was oddly full of Mexican Chinese food lovers! And then we spent the rest of the evening in our room watching the Olympics. :)
So after that interesting night, we headed out and journeyed to the one and only San Jose, my hometown!! I was so excited, but we didn't have a map of the city, so I got us lost right off the bat. hehe. But I wanted to show Jake some of the sights, so I took him to the one that the stupid brochure said, and that was the flea market! I remember going there as a kid and loving walking around and buying little things sometimes. but let's just say we paid the $6 for parking, walked around for 10 minutes, and were done. Hopefully Jake looked at it as a Californian cultural experience, if nothing else. Finally we got a map and I was able to find our way to my old neighborhood where I lived till I was 14. This is a pic of my cute little elementary school, Randol, where all the classrooms are accessed from the outside. Weird, huh? This is the little recess nook where we would eat our snacks and lunches and then go hit the playground!
And here is my wonderful house growing up. It's amazing how something can hold so many memories...our little one story 4 bedroom house with the treehouse in the backyard and the foothills right across the street. And this place below, Sweet Retreat, was our all time favorite ice cream place in the world. It was right down the street, across the big intersection, next to 7-11 and the chinese supermarket and Little Caesars. We'd go there as a family after every choir and band concert, and they have the best ice cream ever!
This was pretty much what I was most excited for in San Jose. haha. I got a sugar cone with cookies 'n creme and chocolate peanut butter ice cream. It's so super chunky, you'd love it!!
And here are those beautiful foothills across the street from our house. Not very nice to look at, but we sure spent lotsa time climbing them, hiking way up top, and sliding down the weeds on pieces of cardboard. How does that sound for white trash fun?? It WAS quite fun, actually, but you'd always end up with the little pricklies in your butt.
Yay for San Jose, I'm glad Jake humored me and pretended to be interested in everything I showed him, from my old schools to parks to the lake to our church building. We stayed that night with my old Bishop and his wife, the Williams, who were the nicest hosts and made the best food! We had one day left in San Francisco after that, so just wait, there are even more pictures!
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