The last days of the honeymoon

The next day (after having gone on a nostalgia tour the night before of Paul's hometown and getting burritos... and all important stop) after spending the night at our hotel right on the beach :) we went to the Monterey Aquarium (for free - Paul's friend used to work there so he had his friend Pedro come let us in the back door... I'll vote for you Pedro!). I got to touch an manta ray thing (not really a manta ray but you get the idea). We watched them feed the sea otters... that was adorable. One of them came right up to the window and pounded his toy on it... very very cute!

Then we went on 17 Mile Drive; a 17 mile drive through fancy houses, swanky golf courses and along the ocean. It was sooooooo cold and windy... but we got out at all the important spots, including Pebble Beach. That's a fancy golf course for those of you who are as clueless as I am.... and I felt SO underdressed. Oh well.

The next day we had planned to go skydiving... would have been so cool! But it was raining and apparently you need to be able to see the ground when you jump out of the plane, so our appointment was cancelled. I had said a prayer the night before that if it was a dumb idea for us to go that Heavenly Father needed to let us know in no uncertain terms. But the rain wasn't enough for us. Paul proceeded to call every single town up the coast between Monterey and San Francisco to find out it any of them were planning on doing jumps, we finally found one in Holister CA (not really as cool of a surfer town as you would think by thy way... really just a lame farm town no where close to the ocean!) we got there and it started raining as we pulled into the airport. I told Paul that this was our final sign... if we ignored this one we weren't getting anymore warnings. So we cancelled our appointment and we're alive! Happy day! Still planning on doing it someday... so stay tuned.

I got a calling!

And my mom's response to it was "well somebody has to do it..."

Any guesses?

Did I mention that my mom is scared of teenagers?

That's right... 14 and 15 year old Sunday School teacher. Hmmmm... could be really fun right? Just calls for lots of treats, bribery and games!

Owl in Our Neighborhood

The other morning Paul mentioned that he thought that we had an owl in our neighborhood, he thought he had heard one while we were sleeping the night before. I thought that was pretty cool... till I heard the same owl later that DAY... odd. And I kept hearing it ALL DAY LONG at very predictable intervals... Turns out my neighbor has a fake owl sitting on her porch that turns its head and hoots all day long.

Hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 2 second pause... hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 6 second pause.... hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo... 10 second pause. Repeat 1000 times = a recipe for driving me CRAZY!

Day 4

Day 4 started in Paso Robles where we had a Mexican breakfast with Paul's uncle (also not a Mexican). Burritos for breakfast... who woulda thought! Actually Paul does it frequently at home... not Mexican my eye! ;)

Then we started the long drive up the coast to Monterey. It was BEAUTIFUL!!! The first part of the drive was through part of the California wine country and I have this HUGE thing for vineyards... were I not LDS I totally would have gotten married in a vineyard. I LOVE them, think they are so pretty! And where there weren't vineyards it was just beautiful lush and green... like Ireland.

On our way we saw a sign for Hearst Castle... being all about touring homes (especially ones called castles) I insisted we go. So we did! (good husband). It was amazing!

The story about Hearst Castle for those of you who don't know is that it was built by William Randolph Hearst, the Hearst family being incredibly wealthy due to media (magazine etc publishing) and he was bored and build a ginormous house on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. In it he stored is millions (now billions) of dollars art collection ranging from Italian monastary church benches to statues from King Tuts tomb. All displayed next to each other with nothing in common but Mr. Hearst liking them all. He designed the house(s) to look like an Italian village... part of it was never finished but all in all it was amazing. And all the famous people of the time spent time there... Charlie Chaplin, umm.... can't think of anyone else. But all the rich and famous of the 30's and 40s hung out there. One really cool thing is that he also had a zoo with all sorts of animals, most all are gone now but supposedly you can sometimes see zebra grazing along side the road. We didn't see any. These are some of the pictures... our camera was running out of batteries (and guess who forgot the charger... that would be me) so we didn't take as many as we wanted to.

From there we drove up Highway 1... long, windy and beautiful. Loved being able to always see the ocean. We stopped and ate at this little restaurant and I loved that the sign told us which way the llamas were... we didn't see any of those either :(