March Updates

I’m cooking some collard greens right now!! Using this recipe. It smells absolutely DIVINE. I’ve never had collard greens before – I guess they’re a southern American thing – but the way that these smell, I think I could love them!!

Another thing that we really love here are food trucks and Mexican Coke, which is made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. I guess this shouldn’t make any difference, but there definitely is some kind of different flavour about it! I don’t know if I would say it tastes more “natural”, but it’s a different taste from regular Coke- I would say less sweet, and with more “spiciness”, almost like it’s mixed with a little like root beer or dr pepper.

 

We also went for a long bike ride last weekend, up in Half Moon Bay. It was an amazing sunny day (of course) and a great ride, except I had to cut us short – I have trouble with long climbs, and this route had a pretty brutal one near the end. Next time we’ll do it backwards so we do the mean climb while I still have some energy.

You can’t really tell, but the middle picture below is of a rooster crossing the road. There were all these chickens hanging around outside this farm – I must have cracked myself up for 5 minutes (you know, why did the chicken cross the road??). Yes I am the lamest person you will ever meet.

 

We have a busy few months coming up. First, we’re heading to JAMAICA!!!!!! for the wedding of one of our closest friends. Nick and I are both getting REALLY excited.

Then, we’ve got some of Nick’s family coming to visit. It’s going to be awesome seeing some family and introducing them to our new stomping grounds! Touring wineries, and fish tacos are definitely both on the menu.

Then, a couple of days after they leave, I (Pam) am off to New Zealand to visit my grandmother for 3 weeks! My grandmother has lived in New Zealand since approximately 1977, and over the past 5 years I’ve been trying to visit her as often as I can. She’s an amazing woman and it’s wonderful to be able to spend time with her, listening to her stories and playing Scrabble (actually getting my ass kicked at Scrabble). And of course, the fact that it’s in NZ doesn’t hurt either 🙂 This time around, I’m going to try to see the Fox Glacier, and hit up a wine tour, and maybe even pop over to Australia for a few days.

And finally, after I get back from NZ, it’s just a couple of months until another close friends’ wedding back in Ottawa – we’re looking forward to being back home in the summertime, since last time we were home, the Snow Gods saw fit to completely dump on us!!

Seems like this year is just going to fly by – in fact, it already is flying by – can you believe it’s almost April??

 

Spring in SJ, and the Winchester Mystery House

Well, it’s officially shorts and tshirt weather!!

 

This also means it’s beer-on-the-back patio weather (Happy St Paddy’s Day!):

 

And primo bike ride and hiking weather (not that the weather has been stopping us or anything anyway, but I needed a third thing):

 

Oh yeah! And surfing weather! Surf’s up! Look at them all!

 

But what this post is mainly about, is our visit to the Winchester Mystery House. There are billboards advertising this place all over San Jose. The billboards make it seem like a haunted house, but it doesn’t seem haunted…it just has a weird past.

In 1884, Sarah Winchester, the widow of the treasurer of the Winchester Arms Company, bought a house in San Jose. For some reason, either because she thought that the spirits of people who had been killed by Winchester guns were out to get her, or because she had been told by a medium to do so, she began construction on this house, and never allowed it to cease. Construction continued night and day until her death in 1922. There were no blueprints and no building plan, so there are many strange features to the house like a staircase that leads to a wall, a door to nowhere on the second floor of the house, rooms without windows, or with beautiful stained-glass Tiffany windows looking out onto nothing but a brick wall, etc.

 

Also, the number 13, as well as the spiderweb shape, prominently feature in a number of places in the house. Oh, and all but one of the pillars (like the ones holding up the porch roof) are upside-down. Oh yes, and she had a room with a secret exit just for holding seances.

Sarah Winchester might have been a little bit of an odd duck.Still, she had some pretty nice digs.

 

Here’s another cool thing we saw during our tour:

Yep, that’s a gingerbread replica of the Winchester Mansion. Apparently it took 400 hours to build, 84 cups of gingerbread dough, 34 cups of icing, and was baked in 242 individual pieces. It was also baked in like 1960, but I bet it would still be DELICIOUS!!

The Winchester House tour was interesting, but at $40 per person, not sure it was totally worth it, or if it would be worth it for a big group of people. We would go back for a fright night experience though, which run in October for Hallowe’en. Also, so much depends on your tour guide. We did our tour in two parts and the tour guide for the first part was clearly reading from a script. The second tour guide was passionate and knowledgeable and funny.

Oh yeah, and here’s a little piece of home:

 

SF Zoo & The Flying Karamazov Brothers

It’s been busy and the weather has been super beautiful in San Jose!! It’s been distracting me from updating because I just want to be outside all the time, and then I’m too tired to update the blog!

We’ve been up to a bunch of cool new stuff, but I want to start where we left off — when we came back from our Seattle road trip. The Friday after we got back, a friend was in town for work, and joined us at a play we were seeing that night at the San Jose Repertory Theatre (yes, they actually spell THEATRE correctly!!) called The Flying Karamazov Brothers. The play was more of a live-action memoir, and told the story of the FKB from their inception in 1973 through to today. There was lots of juggling, jokes, and audience participation. We thoroughly enjoyed it. There are a ton of clips on YouTube (one is linked there) if any of you care to check them out.

The next day, we met some other friends up at the San Francisco Zoo for a day of walking around and checking out the animals. The weather was gorgeous and sunny and we had a blast at the zoo, and then driving home the long way along hwy 1 and up through the hills along Pescadero Creek Rd, with lots of switchbacks and crazy hills (Nick’s favourite).

Here are some pics of our zoo trip for your enjoyment:

  

 

These birds below were super sad, chained to their posts and just not even bothering to attempt to fly away.

Zoos are kind of weird places. It’s fun to see the animals but some of them look super sad or lonely. Like in the article I linked to, I’m not sure what to think, because to Professor Hyson’s point, we are very lucky to be able to witness animals up close that most of us would never, ever have the opportunity to see in the wild. But it is totally sad to see them in captivity, especially the ones who clearly don’t want to be there.

Road Trip to Seattle & Back

I think I mentioned a while ago that Nick and I were planning to drive up to Seattle over the President’s Day weekend (Family Day weekend for those back home). Well, we did it, and survived, and we even had an amazing amount of fun despite being in a car less than a foot away from eachother for at least 7 hours a day. Honestly, I was worried I would not enjoy a road trip (it was my first), but it was SO much fun and I’d definitely do a long drive like that again!

This was our planned round-trip route up the coast along highway 1 on the way there, stopping twice along the way, and then a loooong day of driving home along the I-5 with no stops except for gas & pee breaks (and one unplanned speeding ticket):

We left San Jose around 2pm on Wednesday Feb 13, and drove up across the Golden Gate bridge, through Sausalito, and then out to the coast. After a quick nip through the hills, we were treated to some absolutely stunning views of the Pacific Ocean – just a hint of the hours and hours of amazing scenery ahead of us.

I don’t know how I’ll ever live anywhere without the ocean ever again – I REALLY love the waves crashing against the rocks.

We stopped in tiny Westport (population: about 30) for the night at the Westport Hotel. A half-bottle of wine was waiting in our room along with some delicious little chocolates and the sound of the ocean, which was just across the street from the B&B. There was no cell phone service, no bars, no restaurants (scones & coffee were outside our door when we woke up, though!)…and the only gas station for 50 miles was an old-time pump with gas at $5 a gallon (yes, we filled up – the tank only had about 30 miles left in it!).

After finishing our scones and filling up the car, it was off on the second leg of our trip up to Newport, Oregon. We cut inland after Westport for a bit and drove through a magnificent forest, where we were delayed for about 45 minutes while a tree was being removed from the road. We chatted with the woman who was directing traffic (we were the only traffic), who told us a number of great stories and conspiracy theories about the area – like why there was no cell phone service and a lot of mysterious trucks going in and out of the hills.

Also north of Westport, we drove through a giant Redwood tree – barely – guess the tunnel was made for compact cars – and cut back out to the coast, where we were treated again to absolutely stunning views of the Pacific Ocean.

 

We arrived in Newport OR just in time for Valentine’s Day dinner at a local seafood restaurant (and I do mean local) – Local Ocean Seafoods. It was FANTASTIC. We ordered a bunch of different small plates and a bottle of Chardonnay, and very much enjoyed ourselves. And when we got back to our B&B, the Lightkeeper’s Inn, a delicious dessert, homemade by the owner, was awaiting us in our room!

The next morning, we woke up with the sun. Here’s the view of the Newport harbour at sunrise from our room at the B&B:

After a delicious breakfast of seafood benedict, fresh fruit, and coffee, we were off for the last leg of our journey from Newport to Seattle! We were mostly done with the coast at this point, but the scenery was still beautiful as we drove through Oregon and approached Seattle. We were so lucky with the weather on this trip – normally in mid-February it would be raining, or at the very least, cloudy and cold – but we were actually able to put the top down on the car a few times!  

Once in Seattle, it was time for a very special birthday party of a very special little man:

After a wonderful weekend spent with close friends, eating cake, and playing board & card games, we got back in the car and drove all the way home in just one day, with all kinds of different scenery on the way home. That was one of our favourite things about this trip, I think – we saw almost every type of scenery you can imagine. Ocean, forests, mountains, cities, small towns, and farmland…every time you looked there was something new to see.

Here are some shots from our trip home through three states on I-5S, including SNOW!!!!!! in the mountains (I have acclimated to California so well that the sight of snow had me taking multiple photos).

And that is the end to our road trip recap! Thanks for reading!