Monday, June 1, 2009

our travels so far...

Third post in a row...I'm on a roll!!!  Quick one though.  Hubby and I have gone to san diego, palm springs, san francisco, and yosemite these last few months.  Yosemite is awesome by the way and one of our goals is to train ourselves to hike up half dome...look it up...it is pretty scary!  

Places we still need to go are:  santa barbara, catalina, portland, seattle, vancouver, mammoth, lake tahoe, napa, big sur, coast drive from LA to san fran...i'm pretty sure i have a longer list than this.  We almost planned a trip to alaska, but that will have to wait for now.

Just getting back from Yosemite memorial day weekend, we are taking a break from traveling (we'll see how long that will last), as we have found a hobby.  Yes a hobby finally!!  Hubby and I are taking sailing lessons.  We love it, but we hate it.  Can't really explain it, but we both agreed that it's a really cool hobby and we are enjoying ourselves and at the same time we can't wait until the lessons are over and done with!  It is some hardwork, no you just don't sit there shooting the breeze, basking in the sun, you actually have to sail and do some manual labor...what is that?!?  lol  At least I know the 100 vocabulary words that comes with sailing!

my favorite topic...eating...

It's been almost 10 months since I've moved out here to california.  Hubby and I have found our favorite breakfast joint called Eat at Joe's, it's a family style sitting that looks like a hole in the wall from the outside, but is always packed with lines on the weekends.  We strongly recommend their onion rings, I get them as a side for breakfast every time, it's heaven!!!  And people next to you will literally be jealous watching the plate of heavenly onion rings placed in front of you and them.  Trust me, we've offered them to people and they've actually taken some off our plate AND dipped them in our ketchup so they can try them...it's that good!  Ok enough about onion rings...  We haven't found our local fave sushi joint yet, which is quite disappointing, so the search continues and meanwhile we still go to RA on a regular basis.  We did find a great chinese place called W's china bistro down the street and it is very yummy (their tuna poke and duck is what we get every time we go).

We finally made it to the Stinkin' Rose where all is garlic...enough said!  I had the 40 clove garlic chicken and kept pouring the garlic on my dish if 40 cloves weren't enough.  I tried the garlic ice-cream, couldn't tell whether it was garlic flavored at this point since everything I stuck in my mouth tasted like garlic.  We all had a rough couple of days afterwards....will not elaborate, but all in all it was quite a garlicky experience...yum!

Lastly let me tell you about the mexican food and how addicted I have become to tacos.  It is all things mexican here!  We even had awesome tacos from a man that calls himself the TacoMan, apparently he does weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, special events, etc.  I would know, I asked for his business card.  He came to Target and stood right outside of the employee entrance with his own grill, cooking away, taco after taco for 300 employees and boy were they good!  There are random taco stands that have tons of people waiting in line when you drive by, it is awesome!  Tacos and beer...perfect combo!

One more thing that trumps the east coast, not that i'm all of a sudden a west coast gal, is the fast food joint In-N-Out.  They have some seriously good burgers and fries and that's all they have on their menu.  This is their menu:  hamburger, cheesburger, double cheeseburger, fries, done!  But for us californians or wanna be californians, there is a hidden secret hush hush menu, that's what I like to call it.  Just order your fries animal style next time and see what you get :)


My first earthquake...yikes!!

Since my last blog, which was months ago, my famous last words were "no earthquakes yet".  I have since experienced my first earthquake a few weeks ago on May 17th...yikes!  I had no idea what was going on until it was over.  I'm sitting on the couch going through my facebook as usual, and the whole apartment building just shook really hard for about 2 seconds.  Penny lets out one bark (she never barks by the way), Pepe flies out of his cage (his cage door was opened) and flies across the room, so that got me all panicked even more.  I run to get Penny who is trying to hide under the couch and opened my door.  I see one guy that ran outside down the hall and some murmurs from another apartment.  So I am wondering what just happened, so I call the hubby who is at work and he immediately asks me if I was okay.  So he did feel it and it was a 4.7 earthquake.  He rushes home and that was that.  About 2-3 days later, another small earthquake (4.1) happened in almost the same spot.  This time it felt like a small tremor.  So there was my experience...