Category — Travel

My posts for the next week to 10 days will be sporadic.

For good reason! Twenty-five+hours and 1757 miles of driving will be the reason.

Dave and I fly to San Francisco today to help Marissa and Jeff pack their lives into a U-Haul truck.  Then on Thursday, we’ll drive with them to their new life and jobs in Austin, Texas. We’ll be driving the southern route, shown on the map above.

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Marissa moved to San Francisco on June 19, 2011. I figure I’ve visited her and written about my trips at least nine times in these last 3+ years. Hence the SF 10.0 title.

The trip this past weekend was a wedding dress shopping trip. It was a success. We found the dress and had a glorious weekend, fog and all! (Do you see the Golden Gate peeking out in the background?)

Kaley, Marissa, Petra, and I went to the Renegade Craft Fair at Fort Mason, on Sunday afternoon.

There were so many wonderfully talented people selling unique, fun, and beautiful things. Marissa and I each pick up a set of these adorable berry napkins, perfectly packaged in berry boxes and tied with twine. It’s all about the packaging!

After the craft fair, the girls and I went to one of our favorite spots in the city, The Ferry Building.

It was there that we ran across this enormous pumpkin named “Roxanne.” She won 2nd place in the Elk Grove Giant Pumpkin Competition, weighing in at 1707 pounds. Makes you wonder about the 1st place pumpkin!

Later that evening, Petra flew home to San Diego while Marissa, Kaley, and I went to a new restaurant for dinner, Sons & Daughters. The Michelin one-star restaurant is not new, it has been open for four years, but it was new to us.

The menu is prix fixe and expensive. Very expensive. We enjoyed it, but there are so many terrific restaurants in San Francisco that don’t break the bank… I just can’t add it to my “highly recommended” list.

Here are photos of our nine courses!

The portions are tiny, but the meal is rich, satisfying, and surprisingly filling.

The beautiful and fun plates were almost as delicious as the food!

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Marissa and I, along with her maid-of-honor, Kaley, and two of her five bridesmaids, Petra and Jessica, went wedding dress shopping on Saturday.

We visited two bridal shops and although the girls and I thought Marissa looked beautiful in nearly every dress, we have yet to find The One.

Marissa’s attendants were so helpful in finding dresses to try on! I just sat back and watched as they helped her choose dozens of dresses. What I loved most was how open she was to their choices. I knew some were not her style, but she gave all the dresses a fair shot.

I am not permitted to show you, Marissa, in any of them, but these “bottom half” photos will give you a small glimpse into our Saturday.

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We own a week at a timeshare in California. In Carlsbad, which is north of San Diego, to be specific. We haven’t used our week there the last several years, having rented it out instead. The main reason we haven’t used it is that we’ve either been vacationing elsewhere that same week or have just returned home from a big trip, such as Hawaii last year and Alaska the summer before.

It was the same situation again this year, having returned from Ireland only a week before our Carlsbad week began.

Well, this time around, I decided to use it anyway. Dave and Connor both had to return to work but since I don’t have classes to teach, I asked Peggy to come with me and we are here and we’re having a ball.

The week is from Saturday to Saturday, but since we both had commitments on Saturday, we drove out early on Sunday morning. Here is my day-by-day account of our trip so far:

Sunday – Friends and Family Day

We were on the road a little after 7:00 and it was smooth sailing as we crossed the Arizona/California border. The California desert skies were cloudy, gray, and beautiful!

Then things got a little more serious as the clouds were so low and so thick that this is what we encountered.

A bit of rain and very low visibility! We made it through all that and arrived at “The Inn” just before 2:00.  Marissa was in town, visiting high school and college friends, Kaley and Petra. Elementary school friends, Lindsey and Alyse, also came to town for the girlfriend’s summer reunion.

Add to that, high school friend, Julie, who is pregnant with her second, is staying right here at “The Inn” with her entire family… and you have not only a girlfriend reunion but a brief mother and child reunion too!

When the girls arrived, they came up to our room for a “welcome” glass of wine before going down to the beach to meet up with Julie.

After beach time we all had dinner at Norte Mexican Food, which is adjacent to the property. Then the girls were off, insert sad face here.

We’ll end Sunday with a beautiful California ocean sunset, a photo courtesy of Peggy.

Monday – Foreign Adventure Day

Peggy’s had an itch to go to Mexico for a while now. She just bought a new house and it has a lot of Mexican/Southwest flair. We decided it made sense to drive from Carlsbad to Tijuana (56 miles, 1-hour drive) instead of from Scottsdale to Nogales (183 miles, nearly 3 hours) so off we went.

We had fun shopping and eating and drinking, especially eating and drinking! I always forget just how great Mexican food is in Mexico. Go Figure! The Mexican flag guacamole was outstanding and pretty darn cute and the shrimp ceviche – was delicious!

All was good until we decided it was time to leave Mexico. We sat in the line of cars at the border for FOUR (4) hours, I kid you not. It was horrible!

You move so slowly that there are vendors set up between the lanes of cars and they are selling everything you can imagine; ceramics, churros, dulces, tostilocos, burritos, elote, lawn ornaments, purses, toys, everything you can imagine! There are hundreds of them and even more of you, sitting trapped like prisoners in your own car. Let me say that four hours is a long time to sit after drinking beer all afternoon if you know what I mean. It was torture!

We were happy when we finally saw the border, but it still took nearly 35 minutes from this spot. My advice? NEVER drive into Tijuana. Park your car and walk across! Live and learn.

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I have one more recipe to share with you from the class I took at Ballymaloe Cookery School, but it will have to wait for the weekend.

Today, I’d like to post a few of my favorite miscellaneous photos from Ireland, in no particular order. (With one exception, all photos were taken by me with my iPhone 5s)

Ireland is truly a treat for the eyes. Beauty is around every corner.

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned just how gloriously beautiful Ireland is. Seriously, it is beyond words. Neither photos nor waxing poetic can do it an ounce of justice.

I do know that the words that will immediately pop into my mind every time I think back on our time in Ireland are:

GREEN.
Rock walls.
Endless fields of sheep and Jersey cows.
100’s of shades of green.
Rows of rock walls.
Immensely kind, hospitable, gracious Irish people.
Did I mention Green?
    and
More rock walls.

So very many Rock Walls!

One thing I know for sure, the Irish really know how to stack rocks and make sturdy and good-looking rock walls!

Not a drop of cement or mortar is needed!

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In a mere 48 hours, we went from feeling like royalty, living in the lap of luxury …. to common Irish peasants, ready to harvest potatoes.

This is where we thought we were staying. Isn’t it stunning?

We booked a two-room cottage next to Adare Manor. This was because two adjacent rooms in the actual Manor were out of our comfortable price range. Way out of our price range!

For some reason, I was under the impression that the cottages were near the Manor and that we would have full access to the Manor itself. Turns out they were more than a mile away. No matter, we didn’t end up in a cottage anyway.

When we checked in, the woman at the reception desk said, “We’ve upgraded you to a villa.”

How wonderful is that? We were upgraded in Dublin to the Princess Grace Suite and now we were being upgraded from a cottage to a villa!

Even “Ugly Dougly” – as I’ve dubbed him – appeared to be happy for us!

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We visited Kylemore Abby in Connemara, County Galway.

While the former castle turned Abby was wonderful and impressive, it was the walled Victorian gardens that really caught my fancy.

Kylemore Castle was built as a private home for the family of Mitchell Henry, a wealthy doctor from London whose family was involved in textile manufacturing in Manchester, England. Construction began in 1867, and took one hundred men four years to complete.

Other buildings include a Gothic cathedral and a family mausoleum.

The castle was sold to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester in 1909, who resided there for several years before being forced to sell the house and grounds because of gambling debts.

In 1920 the Irish Benedictine Nuns purchased the Abbey castle and lands after they were forced to flee Ypres, Belgium during World War I. The nuns, who had been based in Ypres for several hundred years, had been bombed out of their Abbey during World War I.

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We really didn’t want to leave the luxury of the Princess Grace Suite at The Shelbourne, but that’s what we had to do on Wednesday morning.

We loaded up the rental car and began our drive across the center of Ireland, from Dublin, on the east coast, to Ballynahinch Castle on the west coast. It’s about a 4-hour drive, though we took a little longer, stopping in the center of the country, in the town of Athlone.

There, we toured the medieval Athlone Castle along the Shannon River.

While the boys played “lawn” chess on the top level of the castle, I was more focused on what was in the background.

I visited the beautiful Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

Beautiful, inside and out.

It began to rain, so back in the car, we went.

We followed the road markers to our destination, turning down the dense tree-lined lanes until the castle rose out of nowhere in front of us.

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