Apparently, we do know the way to San Jose

Sorry for the delay, but as you will see in the next few blog entries, we have been quite busy. As Memorial Day weekend approached we decided to make the most of a three day weekend and make the drive up the coast to visit our Northern Californian friends, Chris and Shellie. You might remember them from such blog posts as "Setting up Shop"- they drove all the way down here to help us unload the moving truck. Such troopers. Anyway, we hadn't been up their way for a while and decided to make a weekend out of it. It also meant driving through one of Pie Girls favorite spots on the PCH.

The rolling hills of the country side were a welcome site to these two city slickers

Luckily, for Pie Girl, she did not need to be slapped this time around.

Several hours of winding roads later, we finally arrived in San Jose. It was wicked late (for us, not for Chris and Shellie, of course) and some of us turned in early. We had a action packed day ahead of us beginning with a 10 o'clock appointment at "The Mystery Spot" and we wanted to be ready. Thanks to some terrible Memorial Day traffic, we took a detour through the Santa Cruz mountains (more winding roads) for quite a while as we tried to make our way to Santa Cruz- home of the Banana Slugs!!! Just as Pie Girl started to think to herself, "Gosh this looks familiar. I wonder if we are anywhere near...." and almost as if to finish her sentence she saw a sign..."Now Entering- Brookdale". And as quickly as it had popped into her head, The Brookdale Lodge popped into sight. Pie Girl and Dirt Doc tried to put words together. Somehow Chris translated their gibberish and pulled over. Since the Brookdale Lodge is frozen in some sort of bizarro time warp, it looked exactly the same as it did when we saw it years ago with Alys. (And now after reading about it -click on the link above- I am even more freaked out.)

We tried to convince Chris and Shellie to have their wedding here, but the creepiness of the Brookdale Lodge was too much for Shellie to even think of eating lunch here!


Exhibit A

Well, we finally pulled ourselves away from the ol' Brookdale, and eventually made it to Santa Cruz. Since Shellie and Chris used to live here they were able to give us a personalized tour of all the local hangouts. Since our detour had made us unfashionably late for our appointment at the Mystery Spot (even by California standards) we decided to go all-in: we stopped by a creperie to have a bite to eat. Then it was off to the Mystery Spot. The Mystery Spot still remains a mystery to us. The parking situation and pseudo-park rangers maintaining an iron-fisted control on that situation were very mysterious. We weren't sure why, but their system consisted of us waiting in our car for about an hour wondering what the heck was going on. We finally decided to let the Mystery Spot remain a mystery and high tailed it out of there.

Once we left there we basically had the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted. We decided to head down to the beach. Santa Cruz is really beautiful and full of lots of people. We walked out on the pier and spotted lots of Sea Lions! They were adorable. They reminded me of puppies! They make a very loud "bark" that echoes under the pier.

adorable!

Not so adorable, but cool anyway!

Trying to look adorable.

We are Chris and Shellie and we approve this picture.

The next day we decided to pack up a picnic lunch and head back up to the mountains for a hike. We set off on a trail called Castle Rock (Tee hee... Picnic at Castle Rock). After working up an appetite we found a place near the waterfall to sit and enjoy our munchies. We didn't actually see it, but some other hikers warned us of a rattlesnake up ahead.

Later that night we thought it would be nice to see the downtown area of San Jose. Also, we discovered there was a giant Monopoly Board in a park downtown that we just had to see. Apparently they have giant dice to roll and giant pieces so you can actually play- this needs to be reserved in advance, however, so we were only able to see the board itself. Having all forgotten to bring our cameras we tried to take a few shots with a camera phone, but they didn't come out too well. Pie Girl had to pose on her favourite properties of Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues! We grabbed a bite to eat and headed home after a long day.

The next day basically consisted of saying goodbye and driving home. We did have one stop to make in Pasadena for dinner with V and Nic. More on that in the next post!!!

A Special Thanks to Shellie for sharing pictures of the trip!