California Dreamin'

Our greatest apologies for keeping you all on the edge of your seat for the last few days. Fear not, we are clearly still alive. If we remember correctly, we stupidly thought we would be sober enough to write a post the night of the wine tour. As you may have noticed, we were sorely mistaken as we were up partying with our new best friends from Kansas and Canada (mind you, they could have been our parents, making it even more awesome). Let me tell you, they had some pretty awesome stories and were able to out party us. In our defense, they had not just done a wine tour all day long. Speaking of which, simply put, it was awesome! The day began with a popped bottle of champagne in a limo with four other people, and an extremely knowledgeable and entertaining driver. 

Throughout the course of the day he took us to four different boutique wineries, all in different areas of Napa. We also got served a gourmet lunch of pickled frog legs, fried alligator, and chocolate covered ants. Apparently these are delicacies of the area. Besides becoming best friends with these four other winos, we got some helpful hints for our stay in California that included strip clubs in San Francisco, crack dealers in LA, and nude beaches in San Diego. We’ll be certain to put all this advice to great use. Once we got back to our hotel, we thought the best option would be to go do another wine tasting in downtown Napa, followed by the bar. Smart idea, right? So naturally, when we finally returned to our hotel, we thought it’d be an even better idea to party it up with our neighbors. And good thing we did because they were honestly the most fun and entertaining people we’ve met so far. Eventually, we decided to throw in the towel and call it a night. Finally a smart idea!

The next morning, we took our time getting ready since, as I’m sure you could imagine, we weren’t exactly feeling 100%. If we had to guess, we were probably feeling close to 43%. Good enough to get ourselves to San Francisco. Despite not feeling up to par, we still managed to see a good amount of sites including Market Street, Ghirardelli Square, Chinatown, and Jackson Square. Impressive, we know.

  

Just in case you were wondering, not all of California is warm. In fact, even with pants and a long sleeve shirt on, we were still quite chilly. Little did we know, the next day was going to be even colder. While we did prepare for cool weather, we did not prepare for weather in the 50’s and extreme gusts of wind that literally almost blew us off the Golden Gate Bridge. Friday morning we met up with another one of Britt’s friends from Australia. Together we literally biked every block of San Francisco. Okay, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it sure felt like it. If we had to guess, we probably biked between 25 and 30 miles. Keep in mind, San Francisco is nothing like New York City. These roads are curvy and mountainous, making it extremely difficult for those other than Lance Armstrong. At points we even had to put all of our weight forward on the bike to keep the front tire on the ground. Now we knew that Lombard Street is known for its crooked downhill path, however, we did not put two and two together that in order to go down Lombard Street, we first had to go up it. And by “go up” we mean climb Mt. Kilimanjaro while pushing our bikes. Not an easy task. Although we were completely terrified, we thought it’d be a brilliant idea to get the full experience and bike down the crooked path. Insert petrified/nervous/excited face here.

After biking down Lombard Street, we all needed a new pair of underwear, so we decided it was time to bring the bikes back. This is starting to become an issue for us as our underwear supply is limited and we can only do laundry so frequently. At this point we were famished and decided to try and get mercury poisoning by stuffing our faces with sushi ASAP. Nobody succeeded, but we did manage to overload ourselves on wasabi. Following our sushi expedition, we headed into the downtown Marina area where we all met our future husbands dressed in Polos, plaid pants, and boat shoes, all of who own their own yachts. Score!

Saturday began our adventure down the Pacific Coast Highway. Our first stop was in Carmel, a west coast version of Nantucket. Fortunately, we had our new husbands with us who gave us free rein of their credit cards. Obviously we did what any normal person in this position would do, we spent it on food.

As we continued down Highway 1, we drove through Big Sur, a sparsely populated area of the California coast where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. Please refer to Wikipedia for further descriptions of Big Sur. In case you couldn’t guess, the views along this road are some of the most spectacular views in the U.S. We even got to see some elephant seals! And let us tell you, “elephant” is the perfect word to describe these massive animals. Despite their size and lazy demeanor, these animals are also quite playful, and somehow manage to move around much quicker than you’d ever anticipate.

As always, the pictures do not do the area justice. So far our adventure down the coast has been nothing shy of spectacular, and we hope it will continue that way.

Until next time,

Peace Out Cub Scouts