14 Weeks and a Santa Barbara Getaway

This past weekend, the hubby and I took a little weekend getaway down to Santa Barbara.  It was so nice to literally get away from our normal lives of yard work and house work and whateverelse work, and just have some time to ourselves!  The first day we went to breakfast at a place called Renaud's.  It's a cute little cafe and came highly recommended to us from Jenn over at July Moon.

Then we took a little drive down State street and found some parking a little closer to the beach.  We walked down to the beach, and took a stroll down the pier at Stearn's Wharf.

The entrance to the pier

The view of the marina.  

Stearn's Wharf

It was so clear!

These guys were so tame!

Baby Bean at 14 weeks.  First trip to the ocean!

After the pier, we walked back down State Street to find some lunch.  After passing so many little restaurants, we decided on one called Killer B's.  It was a grill, and after looking it up on yelp, Hubby decided it was rated high enough for his taste ;-)

After lunch where we got to sit outside and enjoy the 80 degree weather, and people watch (my favorite!!), we decided to head over to UC Santa Barbara and check out the campus.  Sorry, I didn't take any pictures there, we were trying to see how well we fit in as college students!  Finally we came back to the hotel to rest for a little while before dinner.  We went to dinner at another highly recommended location called Jane's.  This place reminded me of eating in a quaint little restaurant in Paris.  The decorations inside were so fun and cute, with twinkle lights everywhere.  And our table was upstairs right next to a window that overlooked the balcony.  It was fantastic!  And, the filet was absolutely delicious!

Sorry for the quality, it was low lighting and taken on my phone.

After dinner we did some more walking around and came across a fun little Italian restaurant where we decided to have dessert (the theme this weekend was eating apparently...)

Also while walking around and exploring all of the little alcoves were fun shops were hiding down on State Street, I saw this awesome piece of work!

Excuse my nerdiness here...but this looked like it was straight out of Harry Potter!  I was so tempted to get in and see if I would be transported to the Ministry of Magic :-)

The second day we went to breakfast at a little place called D'Angelo's Bread.  It's a great bakery and they had super delicious croissants and danishes.  From there we headed to Hendry's Beach.  It's a very cool area and they even have a whole stretch of beach just for dogs to run loose off their leashes!  It was so fun to see them all running and playing and swimming in the ocean.

After some relaxing, reading, sunbathing, and frisbee throwing on the beach, we headed back to hotel to rest up and change for our dinner cruise!

Our dinner cruise was courtesy of Santa Barbara Sailing Center.  It was a sunset cruise so we headed out on the water around 5:30.  On our way out of the harbor, we saw some rather large and rather unique boats that happened to be docked there.

Just some cool yachts and sail boats

More coolness

First up, was this beauty of a yacht.  There were some fancy shmancy people boarding this guy before we left the dock.  Apparently you can rent it out for private parties, but we learned from a couple on our cruise, that it's about $1500 an hour!!!

Then there was this piece of history.  The Spirit of Dana Point, which according to our captain, used to be called the Pilgrim.  A little tidbit of info here: This ship is an accurate replica of a 1770's privateer used during the American Revolution.  Known for their speed, it measures 118 feel long, with a rig height of 100 feet, and 5000 square feet of sail! 

More info can be found here

Then we saw this one.  The pictures definitely do not do it justice.  This massive sailboat/yacht is owned by the Firestone family.  This sucker is a whopping 171 feet long.  This was the epitome of luxury on water.

You can see better pictures and more details about this floating wonder here

 And last but not least, was this guy, the Taxi Dancer.  This boat competes in lots of long distant races all over the west coast.

And since sunset pictures don't really need an explanation...I'll just let you view :)

Tons of pelicans!

Love this silhouette.  I need to adjust the angle of the horizon though :)

Final moments of the sun

First moments of the rising full moon

On our drive back home, we were able to stop in San Luis Obispo (my old stomping grounds) and had lunch at Firestone Grill.  So yummy!

Thanks for reading my marathon post!  More craft posts to come soon, I promise!!

Holiday Catch Up

Happy New Year everyone!  I’m sorry I have been such a bad blogger these past couple of weeks!  The hubs and I spent Christmas and New Years out in the Midwest.  We visited his family in Indiana, and also visited one of my friends in Chicago.  We didn’t bring a laptop with us, so I didn’t really have many/any opportunities to post.  I know you all have been dying to know what’s going on in my life ;-)  Well, worry no more!  I’m back with updates.  Prepare for a long post!

We left for the airport early Thursday morning the 22^nd.  HUGE thanks to Jamie over at thislittlehomeofmine for being so kind and taking us to the airport!  The flights on our way out were pretty bumpy and I nearly got sick on the second flight.  But we got into Chicago safely.  John’s parents picked us up from the airport and we headed to John’s sister’s house.  So we got there and settled in and got to visit with his parents, sister, her husband and their two kiddos.   We had a great time visiting with them and doing things with the kids.  We went to one of those indoor bounce house places, went and saw Santa, and went out to lunch. 

The Whybrew family with Santa

Christmas Eve we went to 2 different church services where Nathan (SIL’s husband) is a pastor.  The first service was the “family” service so we went for the kids.  The next service we went to because SIL, her hubby Nathan, and FIL were all playing their instruments for the choir.  Then we went back to the house and waited for Nathan to get back from the 11pm service.  Mean while I made my family’s tradition of Grasshoppers (1 part crème de mint, 1 part crème de cacao, and 1 part milk), as well as prepared my other family tradition of bubble coffee cake for Christmas morning.

Christmas morning we got up and went to church (since Christmas was on a Sunday) and then came back, ate, put the kids down for a nap while the adults opened presents, and then let the kids open presents after they woke up.  It actually worked out really nicely.  The little ones got to be the center of attention while opening their presents which was perfect J  There were some great presents to go around.  My most exciting present was the sewing machine I got from my hubby!  I haven’t gotten to see it yet, since he only brought the foot pedal and the user manual with him (obviously you can’t really travel with a sewing machine!)  But the pictures look awesome!!  You can see it here.

The day after Christmas we travelled back to John’s parents house (about an hour and a half drive).  And 7 family members from FIL’s side of the family came in from Virginia to join us.  We spent a fun few days with that crew (even though hubby was sick most of the time L  still is actually). They left on Thursday to go visit more family, and on Friday was the big family Christmas for MIL’s side of the family.  So there was about 30 people over on Friday afternoon.  Full house!  But a good time was had by all and it was nice to see everyone.

Saturday morning John and I trucked back up to Chicago to spend NYE with a couple of my friends.  New Years day my friend and I got to go into downtown Chicago and shop a bit on Michigan Ave.  It was a pretty magical site.  The street was lined with lights, there was a bit of a snow flurry falling, and people were bustling around all wrapped up in coats and hats and scarves and gloves. 

And now we are finally back home, and back to work.  John is still getting over his cold and we are trying to get back into a normal routine.  Phew!  If you read this whole thing and got this far…kudos to you!  If you skipped to the bottom…I don’t blame you J  Happy New Year!  

Here are some pics from our trip:

It snowed on the 27th :)

I started knitting a scarf for Tessa (niece)

Walking around Wrigleyville

Cubs themed Christmas Tree

Tree inside the mall on Michigan Ave - The Magnificent Mile!

Holiday Weekend Fun

This weekend while the weather was amazingly perfect, John, Alex and I took advantage.  John and I decided to take Alex up to Apple Hill.  It's this wonderful little area up towards the mountains that just has spot after spot of apple farms, and family run stores, and vendors, pumpkin patches and all sorts of fun fall treasures!  We stopped at a few of the locations and sampled some yummy treats like fresh apples sliced and covered in caramel, fresh kettle corn, fresh squeezed apple cider and the boys even tried some Apple beer - which unfortunately turned out to be pretty much unfiltered apple juice mixed with a beer of your choice.  Here are some of the pictures from our day:

Save Me San Francisco!

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted!  This past weekend hubby and I went to San Francisco to see the SF Symphony.  I love the city.  Visiting the big cities always just puts a huge smile on my face.  I'm not sure what it is, I'm just always in amazement.  Unfortunately I didn't take my camera (stupid move I know!).  But it really was a fantastic weekend.  We left Saturday early afternoon and drove to Walnut Creek.  We stayed in a hotel there (wayyyy cheaper than in the city).  We checked in, and got ready.  We then took B.A.R.T. into the city.  We had received a restaurant gift card as a wedding present and finally got around to using it.  We ended up going to Roy's.  The food was great, ....the dessert was fantastic!!  Chocolate souffle....'nuff said.  From there we took the B.A.R.T again over to a stop closer to the symphony hall.

We got there just in time for the performance to start.  Our seats were way up high, but it was nice because it kind of gave us a bird's eye view of the whole orchestra.  The first piece/half (yes the first half was all one piece) was quite.......interesting?  I guess that's a good word for it.  It wasn't at all quite what we expected.  It consisted of a few string instruments, and two singers.  The singers sang in Opera-esq voices....and it was all in Russian (queue crickets...).  So obviously we had no idea what they were saying, and on top of that, Opera is not our favorite style of singing.  But, we made it through the first half - with some giggling done on our part (heehee).

The second half was wonderful.  The rest of the strings came out, the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion.  Such amazing musicians with so much talent.  The piece was Pictures at an Exhibition.  It was fantastic.  If you have any sort of appreciation for symphonies or orchestras...I highly recommend the SF Symphony.

Afterwards we rode B.A.R.T. back to our hotel.  The next morning we checked out, went to breakfast and made our way home to pick up our fur babies from my parents house :)

I hope everyone else had a lovely weekend as well!  More updates to come soon I promise!  Ohh, and PS...I kinda chopped my hair off on Saturday!  Pictures to come ;-)