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San Juan Vacation – Part II

The next day, we stopped at the hotel for breakfast and a coffee place around the corner before heading to Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Again, this was something we could do because the kids weren’t with us, not because they wouldn’t have gone, but because we could take our time and not rush through the experience.

First, we had to have the experience, though, and apparently we got there too early! Google was “off’ by about 30 minutes for whatever reason, so we ended up finding a shady spot to kill time while watching folks walk around to the surrounding government buildings in what felt like the modern downtown San Juan.

Just before it opened, we checked out the gardens behind the museum, which were mostly empty, but is usually open for exercises, browsing, and yoga sessions. We strolled through it (it’s set up as a loop) near statues, trees, and plants, and eventually came to a bridge that was out, so we couldn’t complete the loop. Of course, this isn’t that big a deal, but it was still indicative of repairs still being made all over the island. In point of fact, right next to the museum, construction was still ongoing, likely putting up some relatively large government building. Near our hotel, multiple other hotels were being refit and renovated, so it was great to see progress on the island beyond simply picking up the pieces of Hurricane Maria like last time. We only hope they’re spared long enough to avoid more damage.

The museum was nice! We were there for maybe an hour an a half. Personally, art museums aren’t really my thing, but it was still nice to take in a different aspect of Puerto Rico. Some of the exhibits were specific to artists from the island, while others were from abroad, including from western Europe. We had a good time, and it was also good to see some school groups touring and learning about the artists and different artistic styles. Of course, they were learning in Spanish, so we couldn’t get much from it. Apparently I need to brush up a bit…

It rained a bit on us as we left the museum on our way to a grocery store, which we needed prior to visiting Playa Vacia Talega. We had to drive a bit to get there, mostly along the coast (obviously) until we found a relatively populated beach with cars just pulled off onto the sand. There were more people than we probably anticipated, but it still wasn’t that crowded. The picture above doesn’t really show anyone, but there were people pretty spread out throughout the area, mostly up and to the left in the picture, closer to the trees where there was some shade.

That night, we went to Rakuten Bar and Grill for sushi, as we figured some seafood would be a good idea while we were in an area with actual seafood. It was great, though there weren’t really any other people at the restaurant. We were, however, seated on the patio outside overlooking the four-way “not-stop” that really should have had stop signs. Seriously, there were no stop signs at any corner. So we’d see car(s) after car(s) come to that intersection and nearly hit each other. It provided plenty of entertainment, and to our knowledge, no one got hurt. 🙂

The next day was to be a beach day, as it was our last day on the island before heading out. Brooke found La Monseratte Beach, which wasn’t a free beach like the one the day before, but was still pretty cheap. It must have been attached to a resort or something years before, because it still had the infrastructure for bathrooms, food, a playground, and also had security dudes driving around patrolling. It was pretty nice! Very family friendly, and plenty of space to spread out.

It was a great last day. The weather was beautiful, the skies were blue, the water was warm, and we got to have fun in some pretty big waves! Brooke lost her sunglasses in the ocean when she got knocked over, which was rather hilarious. Her hip is still a little sore from it…but I think she’ll remember it fondly!

For the record, by some minor miracle, somehow we largely avoided sunburns.

For our last night there, we made reservations for a fancy restaurant, Ropa Vieja Grill, which isn’t really “fancy” as most people would say, but reservations were absolutely necessary and people were dressed pretty well, so it was “fancy” by Marshall standards. We hit up Tryst one last time for some drinks prior to the 8:00 pm reservation, but there must have been a conference in town because it was reserved for a group of mechanical engineers, so we got a small table off to the side and then went to the restaurant to wait for our table. Dinner was great, of course, and it was a lovely night to walk the streets of Condado before we left the next morning.

That Saturday when we returned was veeeeeeery looooooong. We figure it was about 18 hours of travel time. The flight to Dallas was around 6:45 am, plus we lost a few hours on the return trip due to the time zone change, then we had a 7 hour layover until flying back to Kansas City, so it took a bit of time in the airport. Thankfully, I had the foresight to figure out how to drop the rental car off the day before in Condado (we happened to notice they had a location a few blocks from our hotel, so I checked and, surprisingly, we could just take it there and Uber to the airport the next morning, saving us something like $150 in car rental fees…who knew??), so it made the exit from PR a bit more smooth. We also left Brooke’s car at the hotel we stayed at in Kansas City a few nights before, so after our plane landed at 9:00 pm, we called the shuttle, they came and picked us up, and we drove home to Marshall.

Thanks again to Mom for watching the kids while we were gone! It was a very nice getaway and we hope to go back again someday! I really enjoyed that part of the island, and spending more time getting to know San Juan (we were only there for one day last time), so next time, we probably need to hit up Ponce, or Vieques. Maybe for our 20th anniversary in 2025……. 🙂

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San Juan Vacation – Part I

So our 15th wedding anniversary trip was thwarted because, well, 2020, so we’ve still been talking about doing something for the past few years. We’ve also wanted to get back to Puerto Rico because the last time we went, we had two relatively small children, neither of which wanted to do the touristy things we wanted to do, so we didn’t fight them at the time and figured we’d go back later.

We almost went last year, even! We looked into flights and had my Mom on stand-by to come watch the kids, but ultimately we decided against it. It wasn’t the cost, but more the still-present COVID restrictions in San Juan, and the logistics of getting to a plane flight while not having the kids miss school or anything.

Enter 2023, where now I’m running for School Board (more on that later), I may be needed to go to Utah for our Field Biology class again, and our own family vacation plans were up in the air because Meg’s Summer program at Truman State was either going to be in June or July, and we wouldn’t know until mid-March. After poking around a bit, Brooke bit the proverbial bullet and booked us a trip to San Juan! This trip would be something of a combination between our 15th anniversary celebration, my 40th birthday (last year) and Brooke’s 40th birthday (this May).

My Mom came in (thanks, Mom!) on a Monday night in time for me to go to a meeting on campus, then after the meeting was over, Brooke and I went to Kansas City to stay in a hotel, as our flight was at 6:00 am the next morning. This wasn’t my first choice, but it would allow us to land in San Juan around 4:00 pm that day, giving us some time that evening to still explore a bit.

The flights themselves were fine! We stopped in Miami on the way down and had a bit over an hour of layover time, and we made it to San Juan a few minutes ahead of schedule. Brooke scheduled a rental car, so after we grabbed our bags (only had to take two, so a bit easier than the last time when we had two little people with us) and called the shuttle. They picked us up and we piled into a full van with a bunch of other folks.

This was the first red flag. The line waiting outside of the rental company was the second. The hour and a half(ish) we waited to actually get Brooke to the check-out counter was the rest. There were two or three folks behind the counter trying to get people into cars, but each time a customer got to the front, they ended up arguing with the employees about fees, insurance, and other policies that were all advertised all over the place. Like, we understood the frustration, but everyone in there was hearing the same thing, and yet each time someone finally reached the front of the line, they re-litigated it as if they would get a different answer. When Brooke got to the front, we paid whatever we had to and high-tailed it out of there.

The hotel Brooke found was in a neighborhood called Condado, which had a lot of resort hotels and restaurants present. It took us a bit to figure out how, exactly, to get to the hotel, but once we did, we got the hang of navigating the area. The hotel was really nice, overall, though our room didn’t actually have a window overlooking anything. There was a window, but it faced a hallway, so it was something of an internal room. Still, the room itself was nice, the breakfast each morning was good, albeit crowded, and the location was within walking distance of a ton of restaurants, coffee shops, a convenience store, and was surrounded by water. Not bad!

That night, we stopped at a restaurant a block from the hotel called Semilla Kitchen & Bar. It was a Tuesday night, so it wasn’t crowded in the least, but we got a few drinks and some appetizers. The fish we had was spectacular, of course, so it was a good introduction to the trip!

The plan for the next morning was to check out Bacardi’s distillery on the other side of San Juan. The last time we went, in 2019, the kids were quite young to be visiting a distillery, and indeed, you still need to be at least 18 to even go on the tour. This time, we could go and check it out!

The tour Brooke signed up for involved a cocktail when we arrived, a tour of the Bacardi family museum (that was really a single room with some art on the walls depicting the history of the family), and a tasting of some rums.

The dude who ran the tour was spectacular. I’ve been on my share of brewery and distillery tours before, but this guy believed what he was saying, and really sold it. He had bought in to the Bacardi family rhetoric, how the distillery takes care of the workers, and how much the company means to the people of Puerto Rico. He also did a marvelous job with the rum tasting, which included their cheaper varieties that we can get here on the mainland, but also 4 year, 8 year, and 10 year varieties that are a bit harder to find. All of them were quite good, of course.

After Bacardi, we went back to Old San Juan to walk around, which took a bit to find a parking spot in. We visited the same places we went to in 2019 and it all felt very familiar, though this time it actually felt more busy, strangely? June 2019 was obviously pre-pandemic, yet we think there were a lot more tourists this time around, post-pandemic. Perhaps it was the shadow of Hurricane Maria in late 2017 that still kept people away at the time, but now, there were people everywhere, and parking was pretty limited. Brooke found a (literal) hole-in-the-wall parking place for less than $20, so that worked out for our purposes.

For lunch, we went to Cafe Manolin, where there was (you guessed it) a relatively long wait. A ton of people in there, so we sat at the diner counter, while others waited for tables for 20-30 minutes. It was pretty densely packed in there, but Brooke wanted her mofongo, so we did must what be done!

After that, we checked out Scryer Rum Barrelhouse & Rooftop, mostly because the last time we were there, the rum distillery market was very, very limited. Don Q was a big brand, as well as Bacardi, but other brands were hard to find or non-existent. Scryer was relatively new (started in 2018 in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria), to the point that in 2019, we hadn’t seen it in stores or anything. At Semilla the night before, I’d asked for local rums and that was the one they pulled out for me, so we figured we’d seek it out. The location was an open-air place where you could see the barrels behind glass, and just across from them was a bar with their wares.

We didn’t stay long. We’d already had some rum at Bacardi, so after we each had one at Scryer, we moved on to try and find mallorcas again like in 2019, but sadly, Cafe Mallorca (which was around the corner from where we were!) was closed. As in, they weren’t supposed to be closed (according to Google), but when we got there, the dude on the other side of the class flipped the “open” sign to “closed,” so that was disappointing.

After that, we walked a bit further toward the old fort that we spent a lot of time at in 2019. This time, we didn’t think we needed to see the same thing again, though it was nice to say “hi.”

We drove back to our hotel in Condado and decided what dinner plans were going to be, and honestly, we weren’t all that hungry, so we stopped by a beachfront hotel bar called Tryst that had some appetizers and waves hitting the beach. We walked around for a little bit afterward and stopped by a convenience store for some rum and snacks (and a sandwich). Was it spectacular Puerto Rican food? I suppose not, but it “hit the spot,” so hey, not complaining.

The next day, we had an art museum and a beach in the cards! But that’s another post. 🙂

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Maple Syrup 2023

First of all, apologies for taking awhile between posts! Christmas Break went generally well and we haven’t really had any snow days, so didn’t have much to say, to be honest (kids are fine, school is moving along, etc., etc.). However, now that we’re on the other side of maple syrup season, it was time to try out the new fire pit Brooke constructed last Fall.

Over the past few years, we’ve been relying primarily on propane to boil down the sap collected from the maple trees in our yard, but we wanted to try not burning fossil fuels in the process of making our own syrup (seemed somewhat antithetical). The weather has been remarkably good these past few weekends, so we had a few chances to burn some of the firewood we’ve collected from trimming trees in the yard.

Brooke picked up a few serving platters last Summer, partially for Oktoberfest and other hosting duties, but also to help add some surface area to the boiling vessels, hopefully boiling off sap more efficiently. It largely worked, and we were able to burn down sap relatively quickly! …..once the fire got started… Both days, it took a lot longer to get a fire going than we expected, meaning we didn’t really get started with the process until the afternoon.

Again, the weather was so pleasant, it was a nice reprieve from a normal February (though the implications of warmer and warmer Winters is terrifying for a host of other reasons). Still, sitting outside with a beer and a fire isn’t a bad way to spend a weekend.

Brooke also took a hacksaw to the gourds she grew this Summer. Most of them have been inside in our basement drying out, though she left a few outside…because frankly we didn’t notice them, so they’ve just been hanging out? She cut the tops off and ended up with some hollow gourds! The plan is to cut up some of the others and make bowls eventually, but she kind of tested the process this weekend. More on that in the future!

Brooke spent a few hours today refining the sap, heating it to the correct temperature (she plugged info into an online calculator this time, taking atmospheric pressure into account to target the correct boiling point, while not crystallizing the syrup). She ended up with just under 2 gallons, which is better than the 1.13 gallons we got last year. We still ended up going through almost two propane tanks, and more firewood, so again, was it worth it? Dunno.

But I got to have a few beers next to a fire in February. Not too shabby.

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A Beautiful Fall Day

Brooke has been wanting to get another round of apple cider made this year before it gets too cold, and this weekend was really the last chance to get that done. Next weekend, the lows are dropping down to the teens once again (it did that a few weeks ago) and we’ve now got a snow chance in the long-term forecast, so really, today was the last opportunity!

Brooke and Calvin did a bit of cider processing earlier in October (mostly our own apples from our tree, as well as a few pears we were able to salvage), but didn’t make as much then as we did last year. This time, we went with two 5-gallon buckets of apples collected from a local seller, as well as some that Brooke’s Dad picked up from one of their properties.

This time, Brooke used a meat grinder to crush the apples before we put them in the press. She quartered them and Meg put them through the grinder, with Calvin scraping them across the cookie sheet toward a bowl for transfer to the press.

The press is always the challenging part, and the kids are amused in trying to crank it just a quarter turn further. The cider presses out, the apple pulp settles a bit, and usually you can crank it just a little bit more. After awhile, we sort of give up, but still keep the rest of the pulp to convert into apple cider vinegar (Brooke was pleased with how it turned out last year!).

While we were outside, we started up the new fire pit and roasted some hot dogs! We got 1.5″ of rain on Friday, so a lot of the sticks were still pretty moist, making it a bit difficult to get a good fire going. We got something out of it, but it wasn’t quite the roaring fire we were hoping for. Still, it was enough to roast some hot dogs!

Ultimately, we ended up with a pretty good haul! The smaller bottles will go in the freezer for smaller volumes. Calvin likes heating up cider and putting a cinnamon stick in it, so this should make it easier for us to make it on a whim without thawing out a ton that’ll go to waste.

Separately from the cider work, Brooke also harvested her gourds. It still may take another 6 months before we can actually make bowls out of them. We’ve got to find a “cool, dry place” for them, which will have to be our basement, despite the fact that it’s only really “cool” and rarely ever “dry.” Still, we don’t have much of a choice of where to put them!

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Sorghum Extract

In keeping with hair-brained ideas of what to grow in our garden, and maintaining our theme of producing “sweet things” (i.e. honey and maple syrup), Brooke decided to try growing sorghum. She’d read that the stalks of the sorghum could be ground up using a relatively cheap, electric wood chipper, and then she thought we could use the apple cider press we already had to squeeze the sorghum to juice it.

First of all, Brooke set aside Sunday to harvest the two rows of sorghum she grew. It did a good job “training” the soup beans to climb the stalks, so that kept the vines out of the yard this year. Brooke had to untangle some of that a bit in order to cut the stalks down, then we removed the tassels from the top and the leaves, as those aren’t necessary to get the sorghum goo out (it probably has a technical name, but I’m too lazy to look it up. “Goo,” it is.).

I tossed the leaves back onto the garden plot to let them decompose there, hopefully returning some nutrients back to the soil. We ended up with a decent number of stalks! It’s a bit tough to gather how many more we need in order to make more of the end product but, well….we’ll get there…

The wood chipper we picked up from Harbor Freight did a good job! I haven’t been happy with it for chipping sticks and leaves, as the opening at the top is very narrow (for safety reasons), making it annoying to get wide sticks that have fallen with leaves on them into the thing. For this purpose though, it’s perfect: the stalks are straight, you just shove ’em in there, and they’re chopped up efficiently.

The cider press, however, didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. It worked just fine for apples, especially after we chopped them up a bit, but there just isn’t enough water in the stalks of the sorghum plants to have much “juice” come out! Brooke was able to get a little out, but it wasn’t an efficient method of extraction. So, she had to resort to “plan B.”

She grabbed a big pot she had downstairs and effectively made a “sorghum tea” out of it. This ended up involving soaking the sliced-and-diced stalks in water, then trying to game out when the tea was “done” (i.e. as close to “fully extracted” as we’d get). I’m sure this process could be refined with something like a refractometer, but Brooke was just looking to “pilot” this process and refine it next time. The question was: how much will we get from two rows of sorghum?

Answer? A quart jar. She heated the liquid to 210 F for awhile, which is what she read the right temp was to do the job without causing undue crystallization. The color looked good! The taste isn’t quite as “molasses-y” as I think we expected, but to be fair, molasses doesn’t come from sorghum, so of course it doesn’t taste identical. It’s definitely sweet, though, and sticky. I don’t really pick up as much flavor as I do from molasses, though? There’s a “burnt” quality to molasses that this doesn’t really have. I think Brooke picked up more flavors than I did.

In the end, we didn’t get a ton, so likely isn’t going to be a process we can take advantage of to make enough to sell it or anything. We’ll just have to see how good it tastes in cookies: then we can decide if it’s worth it!

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Garden Update: 09.06.22

Normally, this time of year, the garden would be running a bit low on productivity, but this year, it sure seems like we’ve got a long(ish) way to go! It sure looks good, too, despite the notable lack of rain this Summer. I haven’t had to water for a few weeks, and the temperatures have been a bit milder recently.

The sweet potatoes are growing well (not really pictured, but just off to the right of this image), but the main story is the bottle gourds…which are apparently a thing?? Brooke picked up these seeds mostly on a whim and they’ve taken over the garden, and there are quite a few gourds growing (three in the image above – we’ve got almost 10, maybe?). I’m still not sure what, exactly, we’re going to do with them. I suppose we could carve one up like a pumpkin for Halloween?

In this shot, we’re still seeing a lot of bottle gourd plant matter (all those big leaves), but we’ve also got some zinnias! It sure took them a long time to get going this year, but Brooke’s had enough to pick here and there to bring into the house. I think she’s still planning on starting a new flower plot next year, so maybe the zinnias will move out there, but for now, randomly interspersed among the gourd plants, we’re still getting something out of them.

The sorghum are still doing their thing, of course. The tassels are mostly brown at the top, but it looks like they have grown secondary stalks, which is something we didn’t expect. The secondary ones are still green, so it may take a bit before we can do anything about them. When Brooke’s ready, we’ll use her new electric wood chipper to process them and see if we can get more than a teaspoon of molasses.

The beans are still coming along, too (pictured a few shots below). Brooke’s working on soup beans, and that will probably continue for the rest of the month. She ended up picking some green beans yesterday, despite the fact that we’d normally be done with them a month ago. She’s canned 9 pints of green beans so far, and she likely got enough for another 3 or 4 more. It wasn’t looking good earlier in the Summer, and we definitely don’t have as many beans as we normally would, but at least we’re recovering a bit compared to previous years!

The tomatoes needed some TLC, so last week, we removed as much of the greenery as we could while still leaving the green tomatoes on. We finally got a few “slicers” to ripen, but we still don’t have as good a haul of those as we have in the past few years. On the other hand, we’ve got a ton of romas this year, so we should be in good shape in the tomato sauce department.

The bell peppers, though…they’re a whole other thing. We haven’t had this good a pepper year since we lived in Iowa, and these last few Summers, I’ve questioned whether it’s even worth planting them because we get only a few peppers, sometimes one or two per plant. Well this year, we’ve got buckets full of them, to the point where the plants are so overloaded that they’re falling over (as seen above).

Those are some nice looking peppers, right?? And we’ve got multiple fridge crispers with more in them. And we’ve been giving peppers away because we’ve got so many. It’s. Nuts.

We’ve still got quite a few romas on the vine, as well as cherry tomatoes, but we’re about out of “big beef”-style ‘maters, sadly. Those are the ones I’d rather have, of course, but so long as we’re getting a lot of the others (and we are), it isn’t a total loss.

The peach haul this year was very disappointing, but the apple trees are actually doing pretty well! We won’t have enough to get a ton of cider out of them from our cider press, but they’ll definitely supplement whatever other apples we get from Peter’s. We’ve also picked some pears, but we aren’t sure they’re quite ready yet. Some are rotting on the tree, while the ones we preemptively pick don’t seem to be ripe. We’ll just keep trying, I suppose!

Last, but not least, the tobacco plant! It’s gigantic, and the flowers at the top are kinda pretty! The leaves started to turn yellow toward the bottom, suggesting that they were ready to be picked.

The leaves have been at a good size for weeks now, but only recently did we think it was time to try and dry a few. Not that we know what we’re doing, but you can see how the edges of the leaves are lightening up relative to the rest of the green centers.

And so, we’ve got some hanging up in the garage attic! It will be plenty warm up there, and hopefully humid enough to dry the leaves without overdrying (which is a concern). The whole point of the leaves are for them to produce smoke when lit, which means they need to be at least somewhat moist. Whether this particular setup actually ends up being the right one or not remains to be seen.

There’s probably a month left before we shut it all down for 2022! We’ve gotten plenty of produce this year, despite the fact that the proportions of fruits and veggies were different than we usually get. It keeps things interesting from year to year, I suppose!

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Garden Update: 07.20.22

So, we were gone for two weeks in June, and then it took a bit of catch-up time to make the garden not look like a trainwreck of weeds. We’ve been battling Japanese beetles and weeds for a few weeks now, between various trips to Hannibal, Springfield, etc. for a variety of reasons. Brooke was able to get a lot of weeding done a few weekends ago, and I’m trying to clean up other bits where I can during the week.

Firstly, the kale (seen above) remarkably survived this far into the Summer. It actually looks pretty good! But it’s starting to taste extra “kale-y,” so while Brooke harvested some and dehydrated it into powder, she’s not doing too much else with it. The bees tend to like the flowers from the kale plants, so she’s waiting for those to show up before we pull them out.

The zinnias kinda came up, but not nearly as well as last year. Old seed? Supplanted by other things? Who knows. Still, we got a few plants to getmoving.

The zucchini did about as well as they normally do. We got maybe 4 or 5 pretty large zucchini before the plants shriveled up and died, seemingly similar to what happened last year. We’ve still got a few on the plants, though, so we’re hopeful we get to use them.

We also have a few volunteer…somethings out there. Watermelon? Pumpkins? Who knows. We’ll know by August!

Brooke tried planting tobacco, and it appears to be growing remarkably well! Dunno what we’re going to do with it (I have a few friends who like cigars, so figured it’d be interesting to see if we can dry them out and actually do something? Hopes are not high for this to be a useful thing…)

In the above picture, you can also see sweet potatoes in the bottom-left corner. Brooke planted them way later than usual (we still have some potatoes from last year), so I’m having to water them relatively frequently to try and keep them alive. They’ve lasted through a ridiculous heat wave for a few weeks, so we’ll see! They always seem to surprise us.

The tomatoes are doing pretty well! We’re stringing them up like we did last year, and there are a lot of romas and, of course, cherry tomatoes coming on. We’ve seen a few slicer tomatoes on there, but as usual, we don’t do a good job of pruning early on in the growth of the plant, so we should probably have more on there…and they should be riper than they are (too much foliage blocking them).

The peppers are doing pretty well, too! We normally don’t have 6+ plants survive, so it’s kind of remarkable they look as good as they do. They’re pretty good about telling me when they need water (which is near constant…). They were watered before this picture above was taken, though, so I don’t know why they’re complaining. Jerks.

See! Big pepper! We’ve got 5 or 6 big ones like that on different plants right now. So while we don’t have the number of peppers I’d prefer, we sure have a bunch of big ones!

The beans, though, have been a disappointment this year. The season isn’t over yet, but we’ve only ended up with a few handfuls so far, unlike last year or the year before (or any other year, for that matter). The soup beans look alright, but they usually don’t develop much until later in the season.

You can also see Brooke’s sorghum growing in the above picture! They look good! No idea how much molasses she’ll be able to make from that crop, but we’ll see. She’s hoping she can convince her Dad to plant a lot of sorghum at his house, but we need to run a “pilot program” here first to see what we’re looking at. Honey and molasses seem like good things to make, eh?

Last, but not least, the bees live! We’ve got 5 supers on the three hive boxes now, and any time Brooke has gotten into them, they’ve had plenty of brood and capped honey, especially on that big hive. The last time she looked in the middle one, she didn’t see much in the way of brood, but considering that bees are still coming and going, and doing so in an organized fashion, sure seems like the hive is doing better than she originally anticipated. We’re going to extract on July 30th, so we’ll find out soon enough!

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US-101 Vacation – Part V

The drive to San Diego took about 2 hours, putting us at our hotel right around 5:00. The kids and Brooke went and checked out the pool while I went and picked up dinner (we went with “TV Dinner” night again, which is a popular choice for the kids. I had chips and salsa. It was good.

The next day was going to be our last beach day, and being “Sunny Southern California,” we assumed it’ll be nice and warm! Joke’s on us, though, because the high was still 75 F (while it was still in the mid-90s in Missouri! HAH!), so while the Sun was indeed out, making us feel warmer, we still didn’t really want to get in the water!

We observed some surfers, though, which was cool! It definitely explained why they’re always wearing wet suits when surfing, though, as the water, while warmer than northern California, still wasn’t anywhere near “warm.”

The kids took turn burying themselves in the sand, I took a 2 mile jog along the beach, and Brooke read her book. This was just a public beach we found outside of San Diego (the relatively non-descript “Pacific Beach”), parked in a garage, and then headed back to the hotel to wash up before dinner.

For our last “real meal” of the vacation, before returning to fast food and gas station options, we went to Baja Beach Cafe, which turned out to be quite good. Meg had a cheese quesadilla and Calvin had a grilled cheese sandwich. Everyone was happy.

The next day, though, was a daunting one. The whole reason we went down to San Diego was so that we would “book end” the trip, where the kids saw Canada from across a bay, San Diego would hopefully allow them to see Mexico on the southern border (that’s them waving to Mexico from the car). As mentioned previously, US-101 actually ended in Los Angeles, so we really only went down to San Diego for some beach time, and to complete the journey of the west coast of the US.

The goal was to get to Albuquerque that day, but we ended up making it as far as Santa Rosa, NM. That was 933 miles and 13.5 hrs of driving. It rained, surprisingly, outside of Albuquerque for part of the trip, and it obviously got dark. The kids fell asleep, and hotel options were somewhat limited, so we pushed it, rolling into Santa Rosa at 11:30 pm that night. I’m not going to say it was a “seedy motel,” but as you can see in the picture below, seeds were definitely planted in the swimming pool.

The hotel was fine, ultimately. It’s not like we spent a ton of time there. The next morning, we got up bright and early, leaving before 7:00 am. Calvin got his Taco John’s lunch finally (we got way too much food there), then Sonic for dinner outside of Kansas City, before heading into Marshall around 8:00 pm that night, a total of 760 miles and 11.5 hrs of driving.

When it was all said and done, we’d traveled 5571 miles, hit 14 states, and did it all in 17 days. Would we do it again? Maybe?? It really wasn’t all that bad, and we spaced it all out over the right length of time, with a good break in the middle where we didn’t have to drive as much. I did need an oil change in the Outback pretty much immediately upon returning, and ended up buying four new tires, so I guess we should add that into the total costs on this vacation.

It was definitely the trip of a lifetime, though! We saw just about everything we’d want to see on a trip like that, had a lot of different kinds of experiences, and the kids can say they’ve been to a Disney theme park now, so that’s a win for them.

Time to start planning for 2023!

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US-101 Vacation – Part IV

Alright, the moment you all have been waiting for: Disney.

Brooke picked up a book and used it to come up with a bunch of good ideas, the first of which was that we should stay at a hotel directly across the street from Disneyland. Unlike Disney World, where the only hotels nearby are part of the resort (and are, therefore, crazy expensive), Disneyland is in the middle of Anaheim, so while you could stay at one of their hotels on the Disney campus, you certainly don’t have to. And indeed, the hotel we stayed at was such that we could literally walk across the street and we’d be there, allowing us to come and go as we wanted, and leave our car parked at the hotel, only moving it to go wash the laundry before we left. We also ate dinner at a Denny’s the night we got there, for a reasonable price. We grabbed coffee from Panera or McDonald’s, both of which were only a few doors down. There were a lot of good options if you didn’t want to eat at the park.

The other thing we did was pay extra for “Lightning Lane” access, which was something like $20 extra per ticket, but it provided multiple benefits. Brooke and I both downloaded an app that stored our tickets on it (that way, we didn’t both have to be there at any given point). That app also came with a map of the park that could be zoomed into where you could see what the approximate wait time was at a given ride. Sometimes, the wait was only 10 minutes, but for some rides, it was as long as 70 to 90 minutes.

Some rides, though, have Lightning Lane as an option, which allows you to bypass that main line and get in a shorter one. Newer rides were designed with this in mind, whereas older ones like Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room weren’t. Also, importantly, you could only do this once per day per ride, so if you wanted to right Hyperspace Mountain (which, duh), then you can only “Lightning Lane it” once, and you have to wait through the regular line for the next time. So yeah, we did our best to “game the system a bit,” getting there right when the park opened, and trying to target the big rides early.

I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, though. We got there on Monday, June 13th and had tickets to the park for 3 days. The plan was to arrive at the hotel late that morning, grab a quick bite to eat, then go to the park and see what we could see, that way we’d have a full day there on the 14th (Flag Day!) where we could target the rides we really wanted to hit. Then, June 15th would be spent at California Adventure, before leaving that afternoon and heading toward San Diego to finish out the trip.

The first thing we did was hit up Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island (because, duh), and then we “Lightning Laned” Haunted Mansion (which freaked Calvin out tremendously). During the time we had the “LL” on, we couldn’t “LL” anything else: once we redeemed it, then we could apply it to another ride. (Also, side-note, you can split the tickets up, so if Brooke and Meg wanted to ride one thing, and Calvin and I wanted to ride another, we could do that).

Generally, we stuck together to hit most of the rides, sometimes twice. The morning of the 14th, for example, we saw Hyperspace Mountain had practically zero line, so we tried heading there first, but then we noticed that Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters had literally “zero line,” and it was right next door, so we hit up Buzz Lightyear first. By the time we were done, Hyperspace Mountain only had a 20 minute wait, so we canceled the LL we’d applied to it and instead applied it to Matterhorn Bobsleds, that way we could still LL Hyperspace Mountain again later in the day if we wanted to (read: we totally did).

A brief side-bar on Hyperspace Mountain. The day before, when we did Haunted Mansion, Calvin got scared. Dark spaces like that caused him to, oh, freak out a bit. So when we were waiting for Hyperspace Mountain, he worked himself up into a frenzy because a). it’s dark in there, and b). it’s a rollercoaster, and every Disney ride would say “dark spaces with sudden drops,” or something to that effect. We did everything we could to calm him down, but ultimately he started to refuse to get onto the coaster, so the attendant (who’d surely seen this 1000 times…) offered he could cross over to the other side and not actually ride it, waiting for us. He jumped at that chance immediately, so the three of us went on it (and it was awesome), and Calvin waited for us. Later in the day, though, after having ridden other, similar rides, he’d gotten more comfortable with the idea, so he did ultimately ride Hyperspace Mountain, and I think he wished he’d ridden it earlier so he got to ride it twice.

So yeah, the Lightning Lane thing was totally worth it. We got to ride everything we wanted to, and it was relatively seamless. They even canceled our LL for Splash Mountain because they had to shut the ride down, so it gave us a free LL that we could reapply, giving us an extra that we could apply without having it affect the total tally. Score!

By the time we were done with June 14th, we’d done just about everything at Disneyland that we’d wanted to. Honestly, for June 15th, we weren’t expecting much out of California Adventure, but there were a few things we were curious about. All of the Star Wars stuff is over in Disneyland, as well as the more traditional “Disney things” like Peter Pan, Pinocchio, etc. Pixar stuff (aside from Buzz Lightyear) and Marvel stuff are over in California Adventure.

Similarly to over in Disneyland, we tried to “game” the Lightning Lane system, zipping directly to the Incredicoaster as the first ride, while applying the LL to something else we’d want to see afterward, allowing us to LL Incredicoaster again later (narrator: they did). I think most of us decided that Incredicoaster was the best ride we went on between the two parks. There were other good ones, for sure (for example, Hyperspace Mountain was great…the first time….but the second time, some of the “magic” was lost. Incredicoaster was awesome both times). Incredicoaster is a relatively long roller coaster, so it lasts for a bit, but importantly, there’s a loop-de-loop.

Meg noticed this when we were in line for it. We had to “shush” her so she wasn’t too loud, as we didn’t want Calvin to notice…. 😉

Still, both the kids loved it. Calvin was definitely apprehensive, but this roller coaster wasn’t in a dark building, so he could see it from the outside, which helped quite a bit.

Other rides there were cool, like the Guardians of the Galaxy (which is a re-skinned Tower of Terror), and the Pixar Pal-A-Round (which is “just a ferris wheel,” but the gondolas you sit in slide around more, so there’s a lot more movement), but by the time we were through California Adventure, I think we’d seen and done just about everything we’d wanted to. It had gotten hotter as the three day stint went on, so we were pretty tired and drained.

We headed back to the hotel (late….Brooke mis-read the check out time….), packed up the car, and headed back to California Adventure for lunch and a few more rides before leaving for San Diego! Below, I’ve typed in the names of all the rides we went on, mostly for posterity’s sake in case I need to look it up some day to tell somewhat what we did. It’s a pretty solid list – we hit just about everything at least once!!

Disneyland:

Autopia

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (2x)

Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters

Disneyland Monorail

Haunted Mansion

Hyperspace Mountain (2x)

Indiana Jones Adventure

“it’s a small world”

Jungle Cruise

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

Matterhorn Bobsleds

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run (2x)

Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride

Peter Pan’s Flight

Pinocchio’s Daring Journey

Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island

Splash Mountain

Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room

California Adventure:

Golden Zephyr

Goofy’s Sky School

Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!

Incredicoaster (2x)

Inside Out Emotional Whirlwind

Jessie’s Critter Carousel

The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure

Pixar Pal-A-Round – Swinging

Soarin’ Around the World

Toy Story Midway Mania!

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US-101 Vacation – Part III

We used Smith River as our “base of operations,” where we could head out and see other things in northern California. We had a few options for how to schedule things, but we wanted to give the kids a “beach day,” more or less, however we figured that Friday would be the better option, so we should see some stuff on Thursday, June 9th. Our first destination was Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, which is not a part of the national park, but still has a ton of redwood trees. These are things Brooke and I got to see on our Oregon Trail trip back in 2015, and we thought it was cool enough that the kids should probably seem them at some point.

We didn’t want to do anything too strenuous, lest we end up with a minor revolt, but we stopped in at a visitor center (there are multiple) and asked what would be a good option. We found a 2-ish mile section that would take us out near the trees, close enough to hug them.

The only “wildlife” we saw were tons of banana slugs. We had to be careful we didn’t step on any. The biggest ones we saw got maybe 6 inches long, so Brooke was absolutely thrilled about that!

Similar to Devil’s Tower, I’m not sure the kids were totally impressed by the size of the trees, but they humored us and posed for some pictures. I think we only passed maybe one other family while we were out there, so it was a pretty secluded hike, which is always nice.

If anything, some of the dead trees we saw were more impressive to the kids, such as this root system from a tree that had fallen over years ago. We’ve got another picture of the kids standing on a stump that’s absolutely gigantic, but I’ve got enough pictures here already, so this is the one you’re getting.

We only spent an hour or so out hiking, and the weather was absolutely gorgeous, so it was a good activity to kill some time while we were in the Pacific northwest!

After the State Park, we found a picnic table overlooking the ocean to have lunch at while we made our way to our next destination, Battery Point Lighthouse.

We’ve wanted to go up in a lighthouse for years. We’ve been near them and seen them, and visited one when we were in Puerto Rico, but we’ve never been able to actually go up in one and get that perspective. Brooke found this one and saw they had tours, and it was less than an hour from Smith River, so score! The other interesting thing about it was that you could only get to the lighthouse at low tide, as there’s a rocky path you have to cross to even get there, so it definitely depends on the time of day for when to go.

We ended up having to wait for a school group to go through their tours first, as they can only allow a limited number of people up at a given time. It’s a relatively efficient operation, though the four people conducting the tours were clearly overwhelmed by the high school students they weren’t expecting. After waiting about 30 minutes, we got to go in, paid for the tours, and then were shuffled through different rooms to learn about the history of the lighthouse. The cool thing is that this lighthouse still has people living in it, and it’s one of the oldest that has been in continuous operation and had a continuous tenant. The tour guides told us that it’s usually staffed by retirees who live there for a month at a time. The lighthouse was originally set to be fully decommissioned, but the Crescent City historical society took it over and is maintaining it now.

The tour itself didn’t take all that long, but it was cool to go up and see things from their perspective! The kids ended up liking this one a bit more, as I think the tour guides gave them a bit more attention than we were giving them…..

We got back home around 4:00 pm, so we went down to the beach for a bit, and then the kids came up and hopped in the hot tub. Again, the water is relatively cold and it was cloudier that day, so not particularly pleasant for swimming…

The next day wasn’t much better, but the kids were promised a “beach day,” so a “beach day” they would have! Really, the kids just worked on digging a hole, and spent nearly all day doing it. Brooke went up to find a laundromat in Brookings, OR, which was just across the state border, so I was down with the kids for part of the morning, and then Brooke took over for some of the afternoon when I took the car for a vacuum and car wash, and also check out a nearby liquor store to stock up on Northeastern US beers (nearly all IPAs, of course).

That evening, we mostly hung out in the hot tub, but we kept an eye on the hole Meg and Calvin had worked on all day, so when high tide came in around 9:00 pm, Brooke took the kids down to see if it would fill. That hole was still there the next morning! They did a good job!

By the time June 11th rolled around, it was time to leave Smith River and start making the trip down to San Francisco. This was a longer driving day, as we needed to go over 350 miles, but we had a few stops in mind. One of them was Meg’s substitute for not getting to do the sea lion cave, but before that, we had to drive through a redwood tree. So we did. 🙂

Meg decided she wanted to stop by Confusion Hill, which was…an odd place… It reminds me of a tourist trap like you’d find outside of Branson, where they’ve got some stuff there to do, but they’re really just trying to sell you kitschy souvenirs (incidentally, the one place we saw a US-101 sticker for our cartop carrier was there, so it’s a good thing we stopped!).

The thing Meg was most excited about was the “gravity house,” which no, isn’t a house where there’s no gravity, but it’s built (?) in such a way that it’s all sideways, so when you walk through it, you kind of lose your sense of orientation. We paid actual, United States legal tender, money to do this. In this author’s view, it wasn’t worth it…..but I digress…

Another 4 hours in the car later, we made it to San Francisco! Brooke found a hotel that was down near Alcatraz, which was to be the next day’s main activity. This was good because the hotel was centrally located and it had on-site parking.

However, when we actually arrived, that on-site parking was full. This was not good. Brooke kinda had a meltdown trying to navigate San Francisco traffic while we figured out what to do. Ultimately, I hopped out and asked the hotel desk clerk where we should go, they directed me around the block, we went and parked the car and it wasn’t a big deal.

That night, we went to an Italian restaurant that wasn’t absolutely full (it was, after all, Saturday night in San Francisco). The food was solid, we only had to walk to get there, and it still allowed us to hit up Ghirardelli that night (which was something of a bribe to keep the kids in line…). We got some overly expensive ice cream (that took too long to get), as it was quite crowded, but still had time to grab some chocolates for the trip home. Score again!

The next day was Alcatraz, something we weren’t able to do the last time we were there for our Oregon Trail trip. This time, we got reservations ahead of time, went and waited for the ferry to take us over, and and got to get to the island.

On the way, we finally saw some seals. See, Meg? We didn’t need to stop at the sea lion cave! These were close enough. 😉

The way Alcatraz is set up was interesting. You can walk around most of the property, though some of is has fallen to disrepair, so you can’t go everywhere. Most of it is set up as a self-guided tour, where they give you a glorified phone that you can listen to through a speaker.

This part of the tour, though, got a bit annoying. One of our four tour devices wasn’t working, so Brooke and the kids started and I went back and grabbed one. Then, of course, I started listening, but now I was at a different part of the recording than they were, so they had to pause eventually for me to catch up. We’d also have to pause sometimes as large groups would have to listen to their recordings, as they were standing in a space that we were ready for, but couldn’t actually progress to until they moved on. It all worked, I suppose, and I’m not sure what else I would have done? It’s probably better than trying to pay tour guides to be out there and physically walk groups through every 20 minutes, as this method just lets the tours start in a rolling fashion.

The recording itself was pretty interesting, though. It was told from the perspective of some of the guards and some of the inmates, so you kind of got both sides of the story (certainly in a more “sanitized” fashion…). We were also impressed that the National Park Service had an exhibit up highlighting the issue of mass incarceration in the United States, so that allowed for a “teachable moment” we could have with the kids later on.

There were other written parts of the tour, and as Meg is our designated Tour Guide Reader, she had to read some of those bits for us.

I’m glad we did the tour, for sure, but I think Brooke was maybe a little disappointed. The tickets were relatively expensive for what we got (a self-guided tour and a whole bunch of people slowing us down), but we got a to-and-from ferry ride, so that was nice. It was a fine way to spend a morning, and we could check one more box off the West Coast Tourist Bucket List!

The last thing we did before leaving was hit up Pier 39, which was some kind of cross between shopping mall and amusement park? We grabbed lunch and then started the drive to our next destination, which ended up being an AirBNB in Oxnard, CA. Our options were kind of limited, and this stretch was really the only one we hit that had a decent amount of traffic. We wanted to stay in Santa Barbara, mostly because that’s where “Psych” is set (even though no aspect of the show was ever filmed there…), but hotel prices and AirBNB options were ridiculous, even for southern California. We found a place in Oxnard, though, that allowed us to spread out into a few bedrooms before we’d all be locked in a traditional hotel for the following three nights.

And where was that, you may ask? A hotel directly across from Disneyland! More on that, next time.