Ocean Beach

For our first day in San Diego, we explored a little bit of Ocean Beach. We brought Drake with us and went to the dog beach portion, so our exploring of the neighborhood only consisted of us driving around for a bit before heading home. But we stayed at the beach for a while, and that's all that really matters.

This will be us soon!

Drake loved the beach. He really loves anything that is not inside our apartment in a city. Poor dog was just as miserable in Philadelphia as I was. He is seriously a different dog outside of the city.

 

Other than the little mishap on the way home, the dog beach was a success and we foresee many trips there in the future! (Drake maaay have drank a little too much salt water and then proceeded to throw-up all over our back seat on the way home. We definitely will need to watch him more while he's swimming next time. Lesson learned.)

Roadtrippin' to California: Last day!

Well, we've made it to San Diego! More on that to come later.

We woke up bright and early on Sunday (Ryan's birthday!) and watched the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful. And freeeezing. I was pretty sure while standing out there that I had lost all my toes and at least 4 fingers to frostbite.

Then we hit the road, we were off to Vegas! With a few stops along the way.

Flintstones' Bedrock City

Hoover Dam

Arizona/Neveda scenery

We got to Vegas and had a heck of a time getting into our hotel (it was literally a 20 minute walk just to get to the front desk.) And coming from Colorado and the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas was extremely overwhelming. All the lights and sounds and people. My goodness. BUT we enjoyed it and had a good time regardless.

LOVED the fountain at The Bellagio, that thing is AMAZING!

We got a $10 casino credit from our hotel, so we agreed to play $5 on the penny slots and $5 on video poker. Have you guys ever played the slots? Because it is incredibly confusing. We thought you just put some money in, pull the handle, and if the 3 things match you win! Nope. Not the case. We both felt so stupid trying to figure these things out. We finally humbled ourselves enough to hit the "help" button, and then NINE PAGES of instructions pop up. NINE PAGES!! What the heck? We tried reading through them but that just left us more confused. So we just hit buttons until our $5 had run out and then headed back to video poker. Where Ryan won $13.75!! Which we then proceeded to lose. Gambling is not our forte. But it was at least an hour or two of entertainment on the hotel's dime.

Probably not safe flashing that kind of money around

The next morning we woke up and plugged our new home address into the GPS!! It was a beautiful drive through California, and we stopped to see the world's largest thermometer on the way!






































And with that, our road-trip across America was complete!
10 days, 13 states, a trip of a lifetime!

Roadtrippin' to California: Day 8

Writing from Grand Canyon, AZ tonight!
We've spent the last few days in Colorado visiting a childhood friend/former co-worker of Ryan's turned best friend of mine. It was GREAT to see her and her husband. She is one of the funniest people I know, so the last few days were filled with a lot of laughter and joy.

Annnnnd photo update from here on out.

Boring Kansas drive.

Garden of the gods, Colorado Springs CO

Penny Arcade, Manitou Springs CO
(I LOVED THIS PLACE!)

Hiking in Colorado Springs CO

Views from our drive today (Colorado Springs to Grand Canyon)

Four Corners Monument, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet.
My favorite stop so far!

"Elephant's Feet" AZ

We're having so much fun and still can't believe how cool it is that we get to do this!

Roadtrippin' to California: Day 3

Writing from St. Louis tonight!

We drove from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati on Day 2. We stayed with some friends/old young-life leaders and crashed their son's first birthday party. We're awesome house guests like that.
It's always so nice to see them. Conversation is always great. And it was especially good this time because we finally got to meet their son (who is adorable.)
I didn't take any pictures.
Sorry. [that I'm not sorry.]

Today we went out for breakfast with said friends and then hit the road!
Our first stop: Jet's Pizza for lunch!! Now don't think we just happened upon a Jet's when we were hungry. Oh no, my friends. It was in the itinerary. I looked up all the Jet's pizzas and mapped out which ones were on our route AND THEN figured out which ones would be reasonable to stop at for a meal. And well, just south of Indianapolis won out.
Philly is severely lacking in good pizza. We could get good gourmet pizza, but not just a good ol' slice. Not too thin, not too thick, good cheese...you know the drill. Jet's pizza is like the best pizza of all time. Love it. And since there isn't one in San Diego, we had to make it a stop on our roadtrip.

After then we headed to the world's largest catsup bottle! CATSUP, not ketchup. Because the world's largest ketchup bottle is at the Heinz stadium in Pittsburgh. Details, details. Drake HATED the world's largest catsup bottle. Sorry bubs, you win some, you lose some.

Then we got to St. Louis and checked into our fancy-schmancy hotel and walked over to the Arch. You know, because it's right next to the hotel. When we got back, we enjoyed our FREE happy hour drinks and appetizers. (Read: our place here is a little swankier than we're used to.) And we had Imo's pizza for dinner. Yes, pizza for lunch and dinner. A St. Louis native friend of ours told us it's a staple, so we had to try some.
Tomorrow will be our most boring day. We're headed to Colorado Springs, so 9 hours of driving through flat, flat, flat Kansas. Woof. We've got the audiobook "Bossy Pants" by Tina Fey to keep us entertained. We listened to about 45 minutes of it today and laughed so much. "The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes." Oh, Tina!

Roadtrippin' to California: Day 1

I'm not even gonna start out being all, "whoa it's been a while" cause...well, duh. It's pretty obvious.
So just look at the date of my last blog, be in shock at how long it's been, and there ya go, we're all caught up.

Ryan and I left Philadelphia this afternoon to start making our way to our new home in California. It was surprisingly bitter-sweet. MANY tears were cried last night, but that was only because I nanny (well, nannied...so sad to say that) the most wonderful child on the planet and I had to say goodbye to that family yesterday. I literally walked in the door to our empty apartment, ran to the bathroom and sobbed. I am going to miss that boy so so much. Thankfully we had a wonderful last day together, and his parents planned a little goodbye party for all of us. It was a very, "don't be sad it's over, be happy it happened" type of deal, which is totally not my normal tune. But I was all for anything that would make the goodbyes easier. Especially when it involves a 2 year old proposing a toast with sparkling apple cider. "To all of us! Cheers!"

But after that goodbye, it was about 85% sweet and 15% not-quite-bitter-but-something-a-little-less-harsh. We were both sad to leave our apartment. We had a great place there and we'll miss it and look back at it fondly. But leaving the city? Leaving Filthadelphia? The City of Brotherly Shove? Where trashcans are optional and the sidewalk is an acceptable stand-in for a toilet? That was nice. That felt good. SEE YA PHILLY! It was a strange feeling, looking at all the skyscrapers and being like, "I lived there. This is all familiar to me." I guess change is always kind of strange. But in this case, is so so good.

So today our final destination was Pittsburgh.
Our first stop was to walk part of the abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike. I got wrong directions from practically the only website that gives you detailed directions on how to get there. So we ended up driving 10 miles east, when we should have been going west. Ugh. It's not really a big deal because Ryan and I get lost EVERYWHERE, so we're used it by now. But it was especially sucky, because it wasn't our fault this time. But we eventually made our way there.
[Don't you worry though, I already emailed the website creator and told him he needs to fix that typo. It's a rather important one.]

We got to walk in some snow!! Haven't done that since February 2011!

One of us especially loved the walk on the abandoned turnpike

Next was the World's Largest Coffee Pot. Unfortunately, we left the city an hour later than we wanted to and then getting lost added quite a bit of time to our journey, so by this time it was dark out. But we still saw it. And really liked it.

And our last stop, Gravity Hill!! I've never been to one of these before, but I've always wanted to go. It's where you stop at the bottom of a hill, put your car in neutral and then roll up-hill. It was pretty cool. We actually got up to 10mph rolling up that little hill. Crazy crazy.

Ahhh, so looking forward to seeing the rest of this crazy country! Stay tuned for a couple more updates from the road!