Our Trip to the Central Coast...

This post has been a long time coming! I started working on it on January 8th but I never gave up on it, especially since we took so many photos. The primary issue with getting this on the web is that all of these photos, along with many others, are on our old eMachine desktop is in Claire's room (XP SP2, Celeron, 356MB RAM, 40 GB...yeah, she's an oldie but a goodie) which makes it difficult to use since she goes to bed early so normally we use the notebook. So, here's the post. You'll notice I started off by trying to do this day by day, like a scrapbook, but once I uploaded all of the photos, I decided to just do captions for the photos after day 1:

The weekend of January 5th found us in San Luis Obispo visiting Sarah's brother Jake and his girlfriend Amy. Sarah's middle brother Rob and his fiance, Laura were visiting there as well. It was a blustery weekend, to say the least, and we experienced everything from hydroplaning on the road to power outages. Despite the adverse weather conditions, we enjoyed ourselves immensely. The following are photos and videos we took while visiting. I wasn't able to take as many photos outside due to the rain and many are a little desaturated due to the fact that is was overcast.

DAY 1
On the first day in San Luis Obispo (SLO) (we had arrive the previous night late) it was windy and there was a veritable downpour of rain. Since Jake and Amy were both working, Rob, Laura and we decided to drive to the local mission which has a small museum. After that we used our new GPS unit to make our way to Morro Bay to take a look at a little (very little) aquarium. This ended up being a lot of fun since the aquarium was laughably small but very romantic and quaint. They have some rescued seals and interesting fish.

Arrowheads found in the area by early settlers (there were multiple cases of these all of which caused me to really contemplate how early people lived here and every where for that matter):
*BTW- don't forget to click on the images for a slighter higher resolution version of the photos.

Old mission furniture:

Creepy & cute

Carter and Claire (he does these "crazy eyes" in photos all the time which can drive us nuts when we're trying to get a nice, normal shot to prove that we're nice, normal people...did I just write that out...ummm...):


Rob and Laura in the courtyard of the mission by the well. Two homeless dudes were using some sort of improvised tool with gum on the end to try to retreive coins from the well which is covered by a metal grate:

Now here's some photos we took at the "quaint" (in lieu of "ghetto") Morro Bay aquarium we found on Day 1. It was actually quite charming:


The highlight of the little aquarium were their seals. One of them was particularly vocal when he wanted more food as the video below amply illustrates:

Rob and Laura by the seals.


Claire, naturally, had no idea what was going on but she sure looked cute anyway.


Inside the aquarium things took a turn for the surreal. Check out this moray eel (they're a lot more intimidating when you're snorkeling or scuba diving and they're sticking their heads out of the rocks with their mouths wide open.

I don't know what's up with this expression, but he looks like some sort of sea creature.


I thought the upper corner of the room in which all of these tanks were in was quite amazing and hazardous. I had to play around in Photoshop to get this to show.

Of course you gotta have one of those penny stamping machines.

I love old-fashioned machines and wanted a pic with Carter in front of it.


There were some strange little creatures in the various display cases:

Hey, piranhas are freshwater fish! Oh well, anything goes here!


Later that day we navigated our way to the Morro Bay Seaside cafe, a quaint little eatery that served very delicious yet healthy fare. This photo doesn't do the weather justice, but if you look closely you can sort of tell how rainy and windy it was.


The ceiling of the cafe was funny (and kind of creepy, click on the image to enlarge and check out the baby's face...I guess there was A LOT of mercury in her fish):

After eating, the day was still young and so are we, so we decided to head over to the Morro Bay Natural History Museum which the folks at the Morro Bay aquarium told us about (they were sweet, although they really wanted to sell us home made "country clutter"). Here are photos from the Morro Bay N.H.M. which was quite nice:




A view from within of Morro Bay rock.




What kind of animal do you think this skeleton belongs to?

Nope....a dolphin!



Now, I'd like to introduce you to the strangest character I've ever seen as a spokesperson, "Mr. Poop." Ok, so he's not really supposed to be a fictitious piece of feces, but every time I looked at this little rock guy--I think his name is Rocky--I couldn't help but think of him as a little poop. Enjoy the following photos dedicated to the fun we had with Mr. Poop, I mean Rocky:

Later that night we met up with Jake and Amy and went out to eat. The next day we traveled around the area. I am not going to try to organize the rest of the photos because it's just too time consuming, but I will throw in some commentary to make sense of them.

So much for floating Claire out into the ocean on th


After eating at the Seaside Cafe it was time for some exercise. Although it was a hazy, overcast day, it was still very beautiful.


On the last day we ate at "Tanner Jacks." I had tri-tip which is famous in this area because it was "invented" there. I guess that portion of the cow is often discarded in other areas of the U.S.




I took this photo of Sarah existing Kaiser in Ventura. On the way home, we stopped and had Claire checked out since she had developed a fever and vomited that morning. She was fine but we did have to get her some medication since the gunk had gotten deep into her lungs (excuse the technical terms).



One of the most charming things about the Seaside cafe is their little antique/curiosities section.









Rob (aka The Beatle)









We don't have an SLR, but our point and shoot has a macro function which I played around with a bit and, I think, some of the shots turned out pretty well.






Following Jakes' 335i


The breakfast at the cafe was delicious (that's not all butter but is some sort of vanilla sauce)


GPS, a girl's best friend


Jake and Amy






The strangest sea weed I've ever seen








Carter always found the a way to make sure a ton of sand and mud got into the car






What a house!






Click on the photo and then look at the top left (bird)

Sarah made fun of me when I took these at Jake and Amy's place (we had to break out the candles when the power went out) but now even she agrees that they're charming:

Some videos we took on the trip:
Carter's "Hoyt bubble shump-doe jump"








We had a great trip despite the bad weather and we're planning on heading up to visit Jake and Amy soon (they have a new place now which we're excited to see). Best wishes to Rob and Laura who will be married soon.