Hello

Okay, I know I haven't updated in a very long time. Sorry! Since leaving W. Beach, I've just been bumming around. Even though I've had all this time off, it's not a good time for Allen to take vacation since it's the end of the school year for him and lots of his students are graduating. Luckily, he was able to take a couple days off last weekend.

Friday 6/1
We woke up super early to make the drive up to Refugio State Beach, which is about 20 minutes north of Santa Barbara. We had packed up the car for a four-day weekend of camping and were really excited to finally be taking some time off to do something fun. We got to Refugio, but it turned out the campgrounds were full. The park services girl suggested we try "El Cap" (by looking at the map we figured out that she meant El Capitan State Beach), which was a few miles south. We drove down there and luckily there were four sites left out of over 200!

(We didn't take this photo. I was going to upload pics, but Allen took the camera today - sorry!)

We set up and took a nap - we were really tired from waking up so early! After we woke up, we took a quick walk on the beach. The campgrounds are right on the coast and the beach is only a few minutes walk. We only stayed for a bit to check it out, but after dinner (spaghetti and meat balls!) we went back to watch the sun set. It was so pretty! We even got to see some dolphins near the shore. We kept trying to take pictures of the dolphins but they were too far away and too quick for us.

After it got dark, we built up the fire and tried to enjoy the night. Unfortunately, there were a lot of kids in our area. And even more unfortunate, they were really annoying. Normally, I'm a big fan of kids. Everyone knows I dote on my niece and nephew, but man, the girls near our site were so bratty and one of them had a very shrill voice. Like banshee shrill. And she kept insisting that she was not afraid of the dark. So we gave up on sitting by the fire and went to our tent to watch an episode of The Shield on Allen's laptop instead. It was a good one! Then we went to bed.

Saturday
In the morning, park services told us we couldn't stay - the grounds were fully reserved for Saturday. It really sucked, but we packed up and tried to see if the other campgrounds had any open sites, but we didn't have any luck so we just had to drive home.

When we got home, we were totally bummed out that our trip was cut so short. Allen already requested Monday off so he decided to plan a mini-trip to Palm Springs! We'd never been there together and Allen had never been at all. We booked a cheap room for Sunday at the Palm Court Inn.

We were somewhat cheered up so we decided to go to dinner. We took BK to eat soon tofu at BCD Tofu - his first time. Yum! Then we got Korean dessert at Ice Kiss. It's this crazy dessert that has fruit, ice cream, jelly things, red beans, whipped cream and shaved ice. It comes in a doggy bowl! The only thing I don't really like is the red bean, so I won't get that next time.


Sunday
We headed out to Palm Springs and made a stop at the Cabazon Outlets since check-in wasn't until 3pm. It was pretty hot outside, but we tried to tour the entire mall. We bought some new salad plates at Crate And Barrel (love that store) and some other stuff.

(I didn't buy the whole set - I wish! But this is what our new salad plates look like)

After checking in, we went swimming. It was seriously hot in PS with temps in the 100s during the day and in the 80s at night. Swimming was fun and relaxing. I normally don't like swimming very much b/c I hate getting water in my ears, eyes and nose, which kind of defeats the point. But it was so hot that I just had to get in the water. There were these two foreign women who were also in the pool and all they did was work out. It was so strange. They were doing push-ups and swimming laps. Made me feel really lazy and fat, but whatevs.

We decided to go into town after it cooled down a bit. We saw a Cold Stone and thought it would be perfect because it was still pretty warm out. We had to wait for a LONG time before we were served because there were two groups in front of us. Both groups had only one member who could speak English (barely) so ordering took a really long time. I was getting pretty frustrated, but eventually we got our ice cream (Allen got a shake) and it was delicious.

Monday
We had to check out by noon so we ate breakfast and then went into town. We tried to walk around since most of the shops had been closed the night before, but it was so damn hot that we just decided to go home.

See? I haven't been doing much. The only thing I have been doing a lot of is reading and watching DVDs. I'll post reviews next.