Surfing in the USA

This past weekend there was some awesome surf in San Diego so I made Jason go check it out with me.  Surfing is something I will never do, so it fascinates me.  If I'm being honest, I hate the ocean.  Salt water makes me want to vomit (Literally, if it gets in my mouth, I will gag & dry heave.  I hate it.  If I get in at all, I chew the strongest mint gum I can get my hands on, just in case!).  Anyways, I wanted to see the surfers take advantage of the huge swells so we biked the 4.8 miles from our house to Pacific Beach, where we had lunch at the PB Ale House, but sadly, didn't see any surfers.  So after lunch, we biked 4.3 miles to Ocean Beach, our home beach, where we knew we'd find surfers.  And we did.

Riding along the bike path in PB.

I love the way these footprints looked in the sand.

 It was fun to take some "aerial" shots from up on the Ocean Beach Fishing Pier.

This is a zoomed in version of the shot above.  Do you see the water shadow on his face that looks like a man.  It freaked me out at first but then we had fun trying to figure out who it looks like.  Go ahead and click on it to make it larger and let me know who you think it looks like. 

This gives you an idea of how huge the waves were (not Hawaii huge, but definitely huge by SD standards)

We had a fun day watching the surfers.  It reminded me of why we moved to California.  While all our friends and family are buried under massive amounts of snow and fighting through power outages, we're riding bikes, catching some rays, and watching surfers.

California Love

So instead of doing another general life goal list for this year, I decided to make a list of things that we (I) want to do while we're living in California.  Some of them are local to San Diego and some of them extend to the south western portion of America, some are touristy and some are unique, but they're all things I want to do in the next 3-4 years.

In no particular order, here is my list.

1. Hike to the Hollywood sign (or as close as we can get without being arrested)
2. Camp at Big Bear Lake
3. Visit Mexico
4. San Diego Zoo
5. Redwood Forest
6. Overnight hike part of the PCT
7. Learn to Stand Up Paddleboard (SUP)
8. Napa Valley
9. Yosemite
10. Hike to Cedar Creek Falls
11. La Jolla seacaves
12. Carlsbad Flower Festival
13. Children's Pool/Seal beach
14. Point Loma tide pools
15. La Jolla cliff/coast walk
16. Salvation Mountain
17. Watts Towers
18. Salton Sea
19. Nazi Camp
20. Hike at Torrey Pines
21. Hollywood walk of fame
22. Ride the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner
23. Ride the Marvin Braude Bike Trail (Santa Monica Pier & Venice beach)
24. Grand Canyon
25. Slots Canyons of Anza Borrego Desert State Park
26. Sand sculpture competition
27. Sunbathe on the beaches of the Hotel del Coronado
28. Take a surfing lesson
29. ?
30. ?

Have you done any of these?  What would you scratch off this list, or what would you add?

Settling in

We've been here just over a week now and we're finally starting to feel settled.  Neither one of us are working/going to school/doing much of anything responsible at the moment so we don't have any sort of routine established so we're simply enjoying our time together.

We received our express shipment (unaccompanied baggage) which means we have a lot of clothes, a lot of kitchen stuff and not much else.  Our kitchen here is very different from the one we had in Japan.  It is missing my beloved pantry and has really odd shaped cabinets.  I still haven't figure out how to make the best use of them yet, as you can see (I've never had lazy susan's and as of right now I hate them!  I'm hoping they'll grow on me.).  I'm not trying to complain, I just need to figure out how to make it work for me.

Since we have all these kitchen supplies, we've been making trips all the grocery options in town. We have about 5-6 to choose from with in 10 minutes of our house.  The first time I went to buy chicken and had more than one option I was so overwhelmed it took me 10 minutes to pick something.  There is so much more variety and selection here than we've had in the past 3 4 5 years!  They also have produce here like I've never seen anywhere else.

We thought to pack chairs in our UB but not a table so we've been eating dinner on trash cans (that are brand new and I still cleaned extra thoroughly).

We're slowly finding the perfect place for all of our belongings.  This place is smaller than any we've ever lived for an extended period of time so it's going to be interesting once our HHG arrive.

We did send our bikes with our UB so we've been putting them to good use exploring our neighborhood.

We live close enough to the beach that we can ride our bikes there.  We haven't yet but it'll be happening this week, I'm sure.  We did stop by Ocean Beach one day for a few minutes while we were out running errands.

We checked out a new church.  It was my first time at a "mega church" and it was interesting but it felt kind of like corralling cattle to me and that's not really what we're looking for in a church.  I loved all the outreach opportunities they have though so we'll see.

Everyday here I think "man, what a perfect day today is" then I realize that this is going to be EVERYDAY for the next 3-4 years. I really think we're going to like it here, more than we had hoped.  We live in the perfect neighborhood for us.  Almost everything we could possibly need is a bike ride away, the weather is my idea of perfection, and so far the people have been great to us.  We're looking forward to the next 3-4 years here!

New House Sneak Peak

I've been asked multiple times for photos of the new house and eventually I'll have a full post up about our new house but for now here are a few sneak peaks!

There's been a whole lot of painting going on!